Richard A. DeWitt

Dick DeWitt is a member of Croker Huck and has practiced law in Omaha, Nebraska since 1975. His practice was focused on estate planning and taxation for many years. While Dick continues to practice extensively in those areas, he currently devotes the majority of his professional time to counseling business owners and boards of directors regarding major transactions such as buying and selling businesses, raising debt and equity capital, executive employment contracts and compensation, licensing of intellectual property, forming business entities, business succession planning and litigation. He has been recognized by his peers for publication in The Great Plains Super Lawyers for business litigation.  Dick has worked with ESOP owned companies in acquisition transactions, both as corporate counsel and as counsel for the independent ESOP transaction trustee.

In a departure from representing business clients, Dick was an active member of the legal team for the citizen plaintiffs who successfully sued under the Clean Water Act to require a lead smelter located on the banks of the Missouri River adjacent to downtown Omaha to stop discharging untreated process wastewater into the Missouri River and to pretreat the wastewater to remove most of the heavy metals before sending it to the public water treatment facility. Dick also worked extensively with the legal team that brought a class action lawsuit against the owner of the lead smelter on behalf of residents of northeast Omaha seeking damages for lead contamination of their soil. Although the court declined to certify the case as a class action and no damages were recovered, the thorough testing of soil samples in the affected area disclosed widespread serious contamination and was a major catalyst leading to a massive cleanup project by the EPA and the recovery of hundreds of millions of dollars by the EPA from the polluter. Children in northeast Omaha today have reduced exposure to lead poisoning as a direct result of the cleanup. In addition, the owner of the lead smelter closed the facility, paving the way for the revitalization of Omaha's riverfront and the dramatic transformation of downtown Omaha.