William Dittrick is a son of the Plains. The Baird Holm attorney was born, raised and educated in Nebraska. He planted roots for his family in Omaha and has been loyal to a single law firm. And he wouldn't have it any other way. "The city has clean open sky, changing seasons and 'center of the nation locality,'" he says. "We are blessed."
Those hometown ties paid off early in his career. In his first trial, he appealed the case of a Spanish-American man accused of damaging motor vehicle property. He took the case pro bono before a judge who happened to be a good friend of Dittrick's family. The defendant, who had limited English skills, had previously represented himself and lost his argument. "In the end, [the judge] sort of banged his gavel and said, 'This ain't fair. Overruled,'" recalls Dittrick. "It was a little bit of prairie justice."
Before starting law school in 1971, Dittrick ventured far from Omaha and traveled with the Peace Corps to Tehran, Iran, a city he chose for "its Persian history and then-intense friendship with the U.S." With a newly minted bachelor's degree in business, he served as an economic adviser to the country's national tourist organization, deciding where to build roads, hotels and resorts. "My job was really a socialization type job. It was a matter of getting Americans to know Iranians in a professional setting of some type," he says. "I got to travel a lot, meet a lot of people and have a great time. ... They were a proud and respectful people."
Two years later, it was back to the Midwest, where he began law school and discovered a love of trial work. As a civil commercial attorney, he primarily handles business and contract disputes, but he occasionally represents financial institutions in regulatory disputes and takes on white-collar crime cases-the latter of which tie his stomach in knots. "In most commercial litigation you're pushing piles of money around," he says. "But when you start pushing around 10 to 15 years of someone's life behind bars, now you're playing a poker game."
In one memorable case, the poker game turned into a game of words, with the verdict resting on a double negative. Dittrick was representing a bank officer facing felony charges for lying to a bank regulator. The regulator had asked the officer, "Are you telling me you don't have this document?" The officer had replied, "No." But the officer did have the document. Dittrick's wife, an English teacher, pointed out that the officer had then, in fact, given the truthful answer. "I tried that defense out on all of my partners and they laughed at me, saying it would never work," he says. "But we went to trial and tried it in court and got an acquittal on that basis."
When not in trial, Dittrick devotes time to learning languages, specifically Farsi. "I keep thinking America, at some point in time, is going to develop better relations with Iran, and I would really like to go back."
Until then, you'll find Dittrick in a courtroom, somewhere on the Great Plains, advocating for prairie justice.
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