Whyte Hirschboeck Dudek S.C.’s Real Estate & Eminent Domain Litigation Team represents businesses, individual landowners, developers, landlords, investors and governmental entities when real estate is at the core of the dispute. The team’s attorneys are not only experienced trial lawyers, they are also familiar with dispute resolution and work closely with WHD’s transactional real estate professionals to achieve client success without litigation whenever possible.

Our team handles disputes involving a wide range of substantive areas, including:

• Project financing
• Purchase and sale contracts
• Title defects
• Title insurance coverage disputes
• Disputes under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act
• Priority of secured parties disputes
• Zoning and other land use restrictions
• Partition
• Eminent domain
• Foreclosures
• Evictions
• Lease workouts
• HUD-related litigation and compliance
• Commercial landlord/tenant disputes
• Riparian rights 

Our attorneys understand the intricacies of real property law on both a technical and practical level. This, in turn, helps our clients achieve their objectives in the most efficient manner possible.

Our Approach

Our team works closely with the client to understand their business and individual needs and structure a dispute resolution strategy to meet those needs. Members of the team collaborate with other WHD teams, such as the Environmental Law, Taxation, Commercial Real Estate, and Construction Services teams, to ensure that each client has access to the comprehensive, technical services necessary to handle any real estate dispute. This wide range of experience is crucial for our real estate litigation clients who oftentimes face one or more legal issues simultaneously.

Representative Engagements

• Successfully handle complex, commercial foreclosure actions for major financial institutions.
• Litigate disputes over the enforcement of residential and commercial real estate deed restrictions, including the defense of a national restaurant chain against claim by neighboring landowner that it was operating in violation of a restrictive covenant.
• Obtained a seven-figure jury verdict on behalf of a commercial tenant in a lease dispute.
• Assist energy and utility clients to acquire property rights necessary for their major energy projects utilizing state and federal condemnation law, including trying eminent domain cases before multiple Condemnation Commissions and numerous state and federal courts.
• Represented an interstate transportation pipeline company in a series of declaratory judgment and preliminary injunction actions in multiple Wisconsin counties resulting in gaining access to all properties needed for construction of a project.
• Represent various commercial landowners in successful negotiations with the State of Wisconsin Department of Transportation where highway projects impacted commercial properties.
• Represented riparian owners in declaratory judgment actions against non-riparian easement holders.
• Represented tenant in common owners against other co-owners involving the partition of farmland with multiple zoning classifications.
• Represented tenant in common owners against other co-owners in the partition of multi-unit residential apartment and commercial buildings.