Our Attorneys

Stephen E. Mays

Attorney Stephen E. Mays, as the owner of Mays Law Office, LLC, practices in all areas of criminal and traffic defense throughout the entire State of Wisconsin. Prior to his becoming a defense attorney, Attorney Mays worked in the Dane County District Attorney’s office.

He has won OWI cases at the municipal, circuit, appellate, and Supreme Court levels, and appears regularly before the Federal District Court of Wisconsin and the United States Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit. He is also admitted to practice before the United States Supreme Court.

Attorney Mays is a past president and member of the Dane County Criminal Defense Lawyers’ Association, as well as a sustaining member of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Wisconsin Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and the Bar Association for the Western and Eastern Districts of Wisconsin. He is a member of the James E. Doyle Inns of Court, as well as an active member of the national college for DUI Defense and Drunk Driving Roundtable – an association of attorneys dedicated to the tenacious defense of citizens accused of drunk driving.

He was selected to be a member of the Department of Transportation’s Technical Committee, and has testified before various committees regarding proposed motor vehicle legislation, most recently convincing a sub-committee not to extend the territorial boundaries for OWI enforcement. He is a frequent lecturer throughout the state on the defense of intoxicated driving, which includes an annual presentation in the “Strategies in Handling OWI Cases in Wisconsin” series, a seminar touted as a "must attend” for Wisconsin lawyers defending OWI cases. Attorney Mays has been named one of Madison's Top Lawyers in the area of drunk driving and traffic violations by his peers in a Madison Magazine survey of top lawyers. He has also been named a 2007 Wisconsin Rising Star, a list featuring the top 2.5 percent of lawyers under 40 in the State of Wisconsin in the field of Criminal Defense: DUI/DWI.

Several of Attorney Mays’ cases have attracted substantial media attention, including the successful defense of an individual charged with killing his twin infant daughters while allegedly driving drunk. Attorney Mays has had a number of his cases published in the Wisconsin Reports, thereby establishing precedent that all future cases must follow.

Attorney Mays’ cross examination techniques have gained him statewide recognition as one which has police officers persuading prosecutors to amend charges so as to not have to subject themselves to his cross-examination again.

Lisa Pierobon Mays

Ms. Mays is deeply committed to making sure that injured worker are treated fairly and get the full compensation to which they are entitled for workplace injuries. She is very focused on representing injured workers, as well as people injured because of the negligence of others. She stresses that many people receiving workers’ compensation are not getting full benefits. Even if you are receiving benefits, her experience and thorough knowledge of the workers’ compensation often results in clients getting all the benefits that they deserve.

John C. Orth

Attorney John C. Orth practices in criminal and traffic defense throughout the entire State of Wisconsin. He joined Mays Law Office, LLC in April 2004, prior to which he served as an Intern in the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Attorney Orth attended the University of Wisconsin Madison, where he earned his JD and a B.A.A. in Finance. While attending law school, he was a distinguished student.

J. Steven House

J. Steven House graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Illinois College of Law in 1999 and worked as a criminal defense attorney for the next six years for the Knox County Public Defender’s Community Law Office in Knoxville, Tennessee. As an assistant public defender, he worked in the Misdemeanor, Felony, DUI and Trial divisions as well as handling appeals until leaving to open a private criminal defense practice in Madison, Wisconsin in 2006. He joined Mays Law Office, LLC in 2007 after having worked closely with the firm since starting his practice in Madison.

He is licensed to practice law in the states of Tennessee and Wisconsin (both by bar examination), the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin and the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. He is also a member of the National and Wisconsin Associations of Criminal Defense Lawyers, the Wisconsin and Dane County Bar Associations, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws Legal Committee and the Dane County Criminal Defense Lawyers Bar Association.

He brought about significant changes in the criminal justice system while defending people in Tennessee. In one case, he filed a motion to release a client from custody, arguing that the sheriff’s department was unlawfully denying county inmates their statutorily mandated good time and inmate work credits. That motion changed county policy when all judges assigned to criminal courts joined in signing an order requiring that the sheriff calculate and provide good conduct credits of 25-50% of imposed sentences to all inmates incarcerated in the county jails. He also changed the sessions court judicial policy of entering license revocation orders for all people convicted of driving on suspended license offenses by demonstrating to the courts that the law did not require such orders.

He handled impaired driving cases almost exclusively during the last two years of his practice in Tennessee. Handling hundreds of impaired driving cases over that period allowed him to become intimately familiar with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) Standardized Field Sobriety Tests (SFST’s), how they are administered and scored, and the numerous factors that can lead to false results from those tests. This experience paired with his successful background in securing dismissals in drug crime prosecutions for unlawful searches and seizures allowed him to obtain numerous amendments of drunk driving charges to lower level offenses and numerous dismissals on the basis of insufficient evidence as well as unlawful stops, roadblocks and arrests.

In private practice, he successfully argued a case before the Tennessee Supreme Court to review the appellate court’s decision upholding felony assault and felony reckless endangerment convictions stemming from his client’s attempted “suicide by police officer” with the use of a pellet gun. After oral arguments in the Summer of 2007, the supreme court agreed that the lower courts had misinterpreted the law related to deadly weapons and that the prosecution had failed to provide sufficient evidence to support the jury’s guilty verdicts with respect to the felony offenses. State of Tennessee vs. Thomas Martin McGouey, 229 S.W. 3d 668 (Tenn. 2007).

He has also worked to educate other attorneys on how to utilize federal health records privacy laws in criminal defense. In 2006, gave a presentation at the Wisconsin State Public Defender’s Annual Training Conference on the impact of the federal Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Wisconsin medical records laws on criminal defense issues. He later authored an article published in the August 2007 issue of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers journal, The Champion, on the application of HIPAA in the defense of impaired driving cases. Evaluating the Applicability of HIPAA in a DUI Case, August 2007, The Champion.