Potawatomi attorney Puzz follows clear path

Listen to this article

Dennis Puzz Jr., a member of the Yurok tribe of Northern California, had a very specific reason for going to law school.

“Practicing law for a tribe, whether as outside counsel or in-house counsel, was truly the sole reason I went to law school,” he said. “I’ve been very lucky to have a lot of very meaningful opportunities early in my career.”

Puzz started working at Minneapolis law firm Best & Flanagan LLP shortly after earning his law degree from the University of Minnesota Law School in 2004. The Potawatomi tribe was a client of the firm, and Puzz worked as its tribal prosecutor in child welfare and child support cases.

In 2005, he moved to northern California to serve as executive director of his own tribe for a year and a half, before returning to Best & Flanagan. During his time with the firm, he served on a working group that drafted Wisconsin’s version of the Indian Child Welfare Act. The work is a career highlight to date, he said.

“That was a multiple-year project,” Puzz said, “negotiating with the state Department of Children and Families and then lobbying the bill through the legislature and getting it passed in 2009.”

Puzz then joined the Corporate Commission of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe Indians in Onamia, Minn., where he was named general counsel and secretary of the board.

In January 2012, he returned to Wisconsin to work in-house for the Forest County Potawatomi Community. In his role as staff attorney for the tribe, Puzz practices in a wide variety of areas: gaming, contracts, corporate law, intellectual property, tax and construction law.

He is helping the tribe pursue two “very visible, large projects,” he said: the construction of a hotel adjacent to its casino in the Menomonee Valley and the redevelopment of the historic Concordia campus on the near west side of Milwaukee.

The work is as rewarding as he’d hoped it would be when he entered law school, Puzz said.

“Unlike practicing in other commercial areas,” he said, “it is a great source of pride for me that the efforts I make to maximize revenue on behalf of tribal enterprises goes directly to funding child welfare programs, elderly assistance programs, to funding the tribal government and protecting the future for tribal nations and their members.”