Habush Habush & Rottier S.C. plans to move its Waukesha office to a larger space and shift 18 employees there from its downtown Milwaukee headquarters. Four lawyers and 14 administrative staff workers will be moved from downtown to Waukesha. The firm represents clients who have been injured in accidents, including automobile crashes, workplace accidents, product liability cases and medical malpractice cases.
Habush opened the Waukesha office in 1992 at N14 W23755 Stone Ridge Drive, an office building owned by several of the firm’s partners. The firm currently has two lawyers and four other employees, for a total of six employees, working at the Waukesha office.
By Nov. 1, the firm plans to move from the 2,200-square-foot space in the Stone Ridge Drive building into a 10,800-square-foot space in the same building to provide room for the additional staff.
After the employees move from downtown Milwaukee to Waukesha, Habush will have six lawyers and 18 other staff members, a total of 24 employees, working in the Waukesha office. The non-lawyer employees moving to Waukesha include accounting staff and information technology (IT) workers.
Habush plans to maintain its headquarters in downtown Milwaukee. The downtown office, located in the U.S. Bank building at 777 E. Wisconsin Ave., Milwaukee, currently has 14 lawyers and 35 other staff members, for a total of 49 employees.
“Milwaukee is where the firm started 76 years ago,” said Michael Jassak, a shareholder at the law firm and the manager of the firm’s Waukesha and Lake Geneva offices. “It will always be our headquarters. We want to continue to serve our Milwaukee clientele.”
The Waukesha office is in a highly visible location, just south of Interstate 94. Thousands of motorists see the Habush Hubush & Rottier sign on the Waukesha building each day.
“For years, many people, I think, have been under the impression that we moved our headquarters here,” Jassak said.
The firm wants to keep the headquarters in downtown Milwaukee, but also wants to increase its presence in rapidly growing Waukesh County, Jassak said.
“The rationale (of shifting employees to Waukesha) is to better serve our clients and make it more convenient for them,” he said. “There are issues with traffic and parking in Milwaukee.”
Habush Habush & Rottier is not the only downtown Milwaukee-based law firm expanding its presence in growing Waukesha County. Reinhart Boerner Van Deuren, a full-service business law firm, plans to purchase the 40,000-square-foot Buffalo Building at N16 W23250 Stone Ridge Drive in the City of Pewaukee and will move its Waukesha County office there in October 2007. The firm currently leases about 15,000 square feet of space in the Ruekert-Mielke building at W233 N2080 Ridgeview Parkway, which is about two blocks from the Buffalo Building.
Reinhart will occupy about 21,000 square feet in the Buffalo Building. The firm has plans to expand its Waukesha County presence, said Timothy Nettesheim, managing shareholder for Reinhart’s Waukesha office. The firm opened its Waukesha County office about three years ago and now has about 15 lawyers working there. In seven years, the firm plans to have 35 lawyers in that office, Nettesheim said.
Meanwhile, Habush Habush & Rottier continues to look for places to open other new offices, Jassak said.
“We’re always looking,” he said. “(But) I don’t think there’s anything on the drawing board. We’ve attempted to place our offices in areas where there has been population and economic growth, where the people are. Our satellite offices have been very successful.”
In addition to Milwaukee and Waukesha, Habush’s other offices are in Appleton, Green Bay, Racine, Kenosha, Madison, Lake Geneva, Wausau, Rhinelander, Stevens Point and Sheboygan. The firm’s newest offices are the Sheboygan office, which opened in 2004, and the Kenosha office, which opened in 2002.
