The buck stops with you: Nate Willems on the fight for regular Iowans
By: Madi Mills

When Nate Willems talks about his career, he doesn’t frame it in terms of personal ambition. He talks about people. “It’s easy for me to have a passion for helping regular people,” he said. “Because these are the people I grew up with.”

Willems was raised in the small Iowa town of Anamosa, the son of a Main Street lawyer and a public school teacher. His father’s steady hours at the office and his mother’s determination to climb from a sixth-grade classroom to the Iowa Department of Education left an impression. “Watching their example, their consistency in working to improve their skills, was very impactful for me,” Willems said.

After leaving to attend college at Georgetown University, where he studied international politics as an undergrad, Willems knew he would eventually return home. “It became very clear when I was in college that I will want to plant roots in Iowa,” he said. Law school at the University of Iowa followed, with a singular purpose: “I went specifically with the idea that I want to be representing and helping Iowans.”

That focus has defined his nearly two decades as a trial lawyer. Willems has built a practice representing unions and workers, often against much larger forces. He bristles at the notion of trial work as an abstract exercise. “I’m not interested in the process for the sake of process,” he said. “The bottom line is, I’m in this to gain results for my clients.”

Some results have been sweeping. In a case against the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, Willems helped uncover a decades-long practice of late wage payments, ultimately recovering $15 million for 11,000 workers. Other cases have been deeply personal, like his fight for custodians at Rockwell Collins in Cedar Rapids whose middle-class jobs were outsourced to a low-bid contractor. Willems dug through decades of bargaining notes and contract language to win their reinstatement, but in the end, many chose not to return. “They felt so burned and hurt by the experience,” he said. “Being told your career doesn’t matter…that stays with you.”

For Willems, those fights come down to persistence and storytelling. “The fight is in being dogged and not letting things go, because the other side wants you to,” he said. But to him, storytelling is about empowering his clients. “The bigger piece is how do we empower them to see that they really do have a story to tell, and how to tell it so others will get it.”

That sense of responsibility is what Willems says trial law teaches best. “The buck stops with you. You bear the responsibility to offer good advice and make good decisions, because if things go sideways, it’s on you,” he said. It’s also why he values his long-standing membership in the Iowa Association for Justice. “It avoids isolation,” he said. “It’s important to have a community of people who’ve veered off the beaten path to represent regular people.”

Public service has always been a parallel track for Willems, from campaign work as a college student to serving two terms in the Iowa House. Now, as a candidate for attorney general, he sees his campaign as an extension of the same mission. “I’ve been practicing law for 18 years, and I’m running based on the same principles that I serve my clients with. And, in this case, how I will serve more than three million Iowans,” he said.

Still, Willems’ life isn’t all about practicing law and politics. Routine keeps him grounded, balancing office time, travel, and family. Home in Mount Vernon, family often means volleyball. His wife is a successful high school coach, and Willems admits with a grin that he’s invested “more time, money, and emotional energy into volleyball than is probably healthy.”

When asked what he hopes people will say about his career, he doesn’t hesitate. “I hope people will see that I have devoted my professional career to advocating on behalf of Iowa workers, to allow them to live their lives with a decent income and in dignity,” he said. “It’s really about as simple as that.”