law in Chicago in 1923 with Donald Richberg. Prominent in labor law, Richberg gave Lilienthal a major role in writing his firm's brief for the appellants in Michaelson v. United States, 266 U.S. 42 (1924), a landmark case in which the Supreme Court upheld the right of striking railroad workers to jury trials in cases in which they were charged with criminal contempt. Richberg also assigned Lilienthal to write major parts of what became the Railway Labor Act of 1926. In 1925, Lilienthal assisted criminal defense lawyers Clarence Darrow and Arthur Garfield Hays in their successful defense of Dr. Ossian Sweet, an African-American physician tried in Detroit for killing a white man who was part of a mob that attacked Sweet's home. Afterward, Lilienthal wrote about the case and issues of self-defense in an article published in The Nation. Lilienthal left Richberg's firm in 1926 to concentrate on public utility law. He represented the city of Chicago in the case of Smith v. Illinois Bell Telephone Co., 282 U.S. 133 (1930), in which a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court resulted in a refund of $20,000,000 to telephone customers who had been overcharged. From 1926 to 1931, Lilienthal also edited a legal information service on public utilities for Commerce Clearing House. In 1931, Wisconsin's reform-minded Republican governor, Philip La Follette, asked him to become a member of the state's reorganized Railroad Commission, renamed that year as the Public Service Commission. As the commission's leading member, Lilienthal expanded its staff and launched aggressive investigations of Wisconsin's gas, electric and telephone utilities. By September 1932, the commission achieved rate reductions totaling more than $3 million affecting over a half-million customers. But, its attempt to force a one-year 12.5 percent rate cut on the Wisconsin Telephone Company, a subsidiary of AT&T, was quashed by the Wisconsin courts. After La Follette's defeat in the 1932 Republican primary election, Lilienthal began putting out feelers for a federal appointment in the newly elected Democratic administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Lilienthal and the Tennessee Valley Authority Lilienthal was one of the first directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). He earned his credentials for the appointment working under labor lawyer Donald Richberg and as an appointed member of the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin under Wisconsin's governor Philip La Follette. His TVA appointment was also aided by the persistent lobbying of his old law professor Frankfurter.