Daniel A. Rottier

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Madison attorney Daniel A. Rottier just resolved another tragic case; this one for a severely injured young girl victimized by medical negligence.

The $17.3 million settlement is the 63rd case he has settled or tried for over a million dollars.

Rottier’s first million-dollar-plus case was one where his dairy farm background turned out to be useful. In the state’s first stray voltage case filed in 1981, Rottier used that background to collect $1.4 million for a farm family in Sheboygan.

“For a young lawyer just five years out of law school, it was pretty exciting,” he recalls.

The confidence his law firm, Habush Habush & Rottier S.C., placed in him early in his career was warranted. For the last 10 years, he has served as chief operating officer of the firm and its 13 offices.

Not bad for someone who wasn’t intending to practice, but ended up in the courtroom primarily out of necessity.

“I didn’t really care for law school and ended up taking the only job offered. It involved trying a lot of cases. Suddenly, I was trying eight or nine cases a year, and discovered that I really enjoyed it,” he says. After three years’ general trial practice, he joined the Habush firm in 1979.

Rottier argued a case before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1991 — a rare opportunity for most tort law attorneys. In Molzof v. U.S., he represented the family of a veteran who’d been a victim of medical malpractice at a military hospital. The issue was whether the Federal Tort Claims Act allowed him to recover for future care and seek treatment outside the veterans’ system. It was a somewhat arcane issue, but it was important to the client, who prevailed after a seven-year process.

Another aspect of the case that made it memorable was that it was Justice Clarence Thomas’ first day on the high-court bench, notes Rottier, so the audience for oral argument was probably much larger than it would’ve otherwise been. (Thomas asked the same number of questions he always asks — zero — and wrote the opinion.)

Rottier prefers plaintiff’s work to the other side.

“It allows for the use of one’s intellectual curiosity and imagination; the focus is often on non-legal issues like medicine and engineering. The defense is often forced into the role of responding, not developing theories.”