Simpson & Deardorff, S.C.

Focus and practice areas

The work here is civil litigation on the defense side of insurance disputes. Simpson & Deardorff, based in Milwaukee, represents insurance companies and businesses in coverage questions and insurance defense matters. That focus decides the kind of files it opens and the courtrooms its lawyers stand in.

Insurance coverage is a primary area of the work. A coverage case asks whether a policy responds to a particular claim, and the answer often turns on policy wording read against the facts of a loss. Two questions run through much of this work: whether an insurer has a duty to defend its policyholder, and whether it must pay, or indemnify, once liability is settled. The firm also handles bad faith matters, where a policyholder argues that a carrier mishandled or wrongly denied a claim.

The practice list reaches past coverage. It names commercial trucking, construction litigation, premises liability, personal injury defense, business litigation, appellate litigation, subrogation, and property damage. The firm also lists pre-litigation investigation and alternative dispute resolution. Pre-litigation investigation is the fact-gathering a defense team does before a suit is filed, while alternative dispute resolution covers mediation and arbitration, the paths a claim can take short of a trial.

What the defense work involves

Commercial trucking cases put the firm on the side of motor carriers and their insurers. A collision involving a tractor-trailer can raise claims about driver conduct, vehicle maintenance, and federal carrier rules in the same file. Defense counsel in these matters usually works through the carrier's records, the driver's hours-of-service logs, and accident reconstruction well before a jury hears anything.

Construction litigation at the firm covers claims about defective or negligent design and construction defects. Disputes like these often pull in several parties at once: the owner, the general contractor, subcontractors, and the design professionals who drew the plans. As a reviewer, I read the placement of this area next to the firm's insurance work as a sign that many of these files arrive through a carrier defending an insured contractor.

Personal injury defense and business litigation fill out the rest of the courtroom work. On the injury side, the firm defends the party a claimant has sued, which often means an insured driver, employer, or property owner. Business litigation covers disputes between companies over contracts and commercial dealings. Both draw on the same trial skills the insurance files demand, and both can move through the pre-litigation investigation the firm lists as its own step.

Claims tied to property and recovery

Subrogation and property damage make up the property side of the firm's work. Subrogation lets an insurer that has already paid a claim step into its policyholder's shoes and pursue the party responsible for the loss. Property damage claims deal with harm to buildings and other physical assets, and they frequently sit alongside the coverage question of who pays. Premises liability defense, another listed area, covers claims that someone was hurt on a property the client owns or controls.

How the firm began

The firm traces its roots to 1992. Arthur Simpson and Stuart Deardorff litigated cases then as in-house counsel for a regional insurance company. They formed an independent firm in 2000, and the site marks 1992 as the year its service began.

What started as three attorneys has grown into a larger group backed by legal and administrative staff. That path says something useful about the firm: it was built by lawyers who learned insurance litigation from inside a carrier before they opened their own doors. In my opinion, that history helps explain the steady focus on coverage and defense that runs through every practice area the firm names.

How the team is built

The firm lists ten attorneys. Five hold shareholder titles and five are associates, and all ten work in litigation. An even split between owners and associates is common at a firm this size and points to a structure where senior lawyers run cases and associates carry the supporting work.

The shareholder attorneys are Christine M. Rice, Brittany L. Mirabella, Joseph M. Mirabella, Nicole R. Radler, and Maria B. Krause. The associate attorneys are Jennifer M. Burns, Nicholas S. Harkness, Michelle D. Johnson, Jackson T. Thiel, and Daniel H. Yeh. The site groups each of them under litigation, which lines up with the courtroom emphasis across the firm's practice areas.

Where the firm practices

Simpson & Deardorff works from one Milwaukee office and serves clients across Wisconsin. Those clients include regional and national insurers along with businesses and individuals. The firm handles matters at both the state and federal level, and that reach fits the work, because coverage disputes often land in federal court.

Appellate litigation sits on the practice list as well, which means the firm can carry a case past the trial court when a client wants a ruling reviewed. The record on the site is a defined set of practice areas and a named roster of ten litigators. Both point the same way: insurance coverage, insurance defense, and the disputes that grow out of them, handled by a firm whose founders started inside a carrier in 1992.