Rembolt Ludtke LLP

Focus and practice areas

Rembolt Ludtke handles work across twenty listed practice areas, and the range is wide by any measure. The firm covers agriculture, banking and creditors' rights, business formation and succession, real estate, tax, and estate planning and administration. It also takes domestic relations matters, employment and labor work, environmental and water law, and telecommunications and utilities.

The firm states that it handles all types of matters except criminal cases. That single carve-out tells a reader more than a long list of specialties would. A Nebraska business owner with a contract dispute, a property question and a succession plan can bring all three to the same building.

Litigation sits alongside mediation and arbitration in the practice list. The firm also names catastrophic injury and wrongful death as an area, which puts serious plaintiff-side personal injury work under the same roof as corporate counsel and municipal advice. In my opinion, that combination is what "full-service" ought to mean in a state the size of Nebraska.

Who the firm represents

The client list runs to individuals, businesses, organizations, public entities and governmental bodies. Public entity work is its own discipline. Cities, counties, school districts and utility boards operate under open meetings laws, competitive bidding rules and statutory notice requirements that private clients never encounter.

Government relations and lobbying appears as a separate practice area. In Nebraska that means the Unicameral, a single-chamber legislature with no house-senate conference process. Bills move through committee hearings and three rounds of floor debate, so the timing of a client's position matters as much as its substance.

Nonprofit and tax exempt organizations

This area covers formation documents, board governance and the federal exemption application. Groups seeking 501(c)(3) status file Form 1023 with the IRS and then keep the exemption through annual Form 990 reporting. State-level charitable registration and property tax exemption run on separate tracks.

The attorneys and where they practice

The firm lists 31 attorneys. Nebraska licensure is the common thread, and some attorneys hold admissions in Iowa, Colorado, South Dakota and Texas as well. Those four states share borders or business ties with Nebraska, so the pattern matches where clients' matters travel.

Timothy R. Engler graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Law in 1979. His practice covers business and personal disputes resolved through litigation, arbitration and mediation, including commercial disputes, personal injury and employment law. A lawyer with that span of years has watched Nebraska's civil procedure rules change more than once.

Mark A. Fahleson earned a Bachelor of Science from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1989 and his law degree from the same university's College of Law in 1992. He handles employment and labor matters, employment and business litigation, government relations, and civil litigation and appellate work. Employment cases in Nebraska often begin at the Equal Opportunity Commission or the EEOC, where a charge must be filed before a discrimination suit reaches court.

Business, tax and estate work

Tim Clare is a partner at the firm. He holds a BS from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln plus an MBA and a JD from Creighton University. His practice includes estate and business planning, estate administration, entity formation and telecommunications, and he works with individuals, families and closely held businesses on succession matters.

Anthony Aerts practices administrative and regulatory law, business organizations including LLCs and partnerships, corporate law, tax law, and trusts and estates. Kurth A. Brashear graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Law in 1998. He works on nonprofit organizations, state, local and municipal matters, business and corporate law, and estate planning and probate.

Spencer Hartman handles corporate law, real estate law and trusts and estates. Mark Hunzeker's practice focuses on real estate law. Nebraska real estate matters run through county register of deeds offices, and title work, easements and zoning appeals each follow their own local procedure.

Litigation and appeals

Sheila Bentzen graduated from The University of Iowa College of Law in 2012. Her practice focuses on business litigation, appellate matters, and estate and trust litigation, and she also handles commercial and real estate litigation. Appellate work in Nebraska goes to the Court of Appeals, with the Supreme Court taking cases by petition for further review or by direct assignment.

Sam Colwell's listed practice area is personal injury. Nebraska applies a four-year statute of limitations to most personal injury claims and uses a modified comparative negligence rule, so a plaintiff more than half at fault recovers nothing. Those two rules shape early case assessment in every injury file.

Reach across the state

Rembolt Ludtke keeps offices in Lincoln and Seward. Lincoln is the state capital and home to the Unicameral, the Nebraska Supreme Court and the agencies that regulate utilities, insurance and the environment. Lancaster County District Court sits there too.

Seward is a county seat about twenty-five miles west, and the office there is on the town square. County seat practice looks different from capital practice. Agricultural land transfers, estate probates and county board matters make up a larger share of the docket.

Having both locations lets the firm take work in Lincoln's regulatory and appellate world while staying present in Seward County. Agriculture appears on the practice list, and farm succession planning, water rights and grain contract disputes all live closer to Seward than to Lincoln Mall. As a reviewer, I read the two-office structure as a deliberate match to how Nebraska legal work is distributed.

What the record shows

The firm says it has served clients for over 50 years. Its own site does not name a founding year, so the half-century figure is the firm's own account of its history. Chambers and Partners has published a review of Rembolt Ludtke LLP, and the legal name appears in that review as well as in the firm's own FAQ.

Environmental, water and natural resources is a named practice area. Nebraska divides groundwater management among twenty-three Natural Resources Districts, each with an elected board and its own rules on well permits and irrigated acres. Surface water runs through a separate permitting system at the Department of Natural Resources.

Intellectual property and technology, mergers and acquisitions, and employment benefits round out the list. In my opinion, the useful signal in a firm this size is the depth of the roster relative to the market. Thirty-one attorneys covering nineteen civil practice areas across two Nebraska offices gives most clients an internal referral rather than an outside one.

Each attorney carries a firm email address on the same domain, and the attorney listing gives names and practice areas without titles. Readers looking for partnership status or bar admission dates will find those on individual attorney pages. The firm's public materials describe a Nebraska practice, and the licensure pattern in four neighboring and connected states supports that description.