Todd L. Bice was born and raised in the farming community of Winner, S.D. The town was named Winner because it won a contest to have the railroad pass through town, he said.

Bice went to the University of South Dakota before completing law school at the University of Nebraska. After law school he moved to Las Vegas and began working. Today he is co-founding partner in the law firm of Pisanelli Bice in downtown Las Vegas.

Q. It appears most of your practice is dedicated to commercial, land and zoning, mergers and acquisitions, and gaming. What drew you to focus your career and your practice to these areas?

Our firm is principally and almost exclusively a litigation firm. All those other subject matters that your referencing, we get involved, our firm gets involved in those types of matters when there’s some sort of a contested dispute, whether in court, arbitration, something like that. So that is our exclusive area of practice: litigation or dispute resolution. I ended up in those areas of practice when I moved here (as a young lawyer). I worked for Frank Schreck for nearly 20 years. Frank is probably one of the pre-eminent gaming lawyers in the world. And as a consequence … that’s the sort of work that you just naturally gravitate into because that was the type of work that Frank was bringing to the firm, and bringing to me and others, as young lawyers. So that’s the practice we’d develop and the expertise that we’d develop. So it’s really a byproduct of working for Frank for 20 years.

Q. What does it mean to you to have your firm receive five Tier 1 rankings in the U.S. News-Best Lawyers “Best Law Firms” 2015?

I think its evidence of the type of work that we do and the type of people that we have here. You don’t get those sorts of accomplishments by not doing good work for clients because those (rankings) … are largely a product of client interviews and client assessments. We take a great deal of pride in the fact that our clients think highly of the services that we provide.