Rich Ruohonen

Rich A. Ruohonen is a personal injury trial lawyer and partner at TSR Injury Law in Bloomington, Minnesota. Over nearly three decades on the plaintiff side, he has tried roughly 90 cases and secured some of the largest results in Minnesota history, including multiple seven- and eight-figure verdicts and settlements. He is widely known for representing children injured or abused at daycares, as well as for auto, trucking, premises, and product liability cases.

Ruohonen grew up being told never to give in and to win every argument, and by high school, after a taste of mock trial, he was drawn to the courtroom. He initially imagined a career in business or contracts, even a path toward becoming a sports agent, but his first business law class in law school convinced him that behind-the-scenes work was not for him. An outgoing person who wanted to help people directly, he took a clerking job at a Minnesota personal injury firm and spent two and a half years there before beginning his career as a lawyer. He earned his Juris Doctor from Hamline University School of Law in 1996.

He joined Pritzker and Associates in November 1996, became a partner, and remained there for roughly 13 years. Encouraged early on by a mentor who simply told him to go try cases, he took every opportunity he could, at one point trying 13 cases in about 19 months, an almost unheard-of pace for a young lawyer. In 2009 he moved to the firm then known as Terry and Slane, which became Terry, Slane and Ruohonen and is now TSR Injury Law, where he has practiced ever since as a senior partner.

Ruohonen handles primarily personal injury matters, along with product liability, trucking, and premises cases, and he has become one of Minnesota’s best-known lawyers for daycare abuse and injury cases. The case that shaped his career most involved a three-year-old boy who was beaten and raped at a daycare where he was left unwatched for over an hour. After years of litigation and dozens of depositions, a jury returned a 13 million dollar verdict; when the trial court set the verdict aside, Ruohonen tried the case a second time and again secured a multimillion-dollar result. The child, now a young adult, is thriving, an outcome Ruohonen counts among the most meaningful of his life. The experience led him to reduce his fees in cases involving children and to testify before the Minnesota Legislature in support of stronger daycare safety laws.

His results rest on relentless preparation. At TSR he instituted an exercise the firm calls Fight Club, in which a lawyer must deliver an opening statement in front of roughly 20 colleagues who offer only criticism, then revise and deliver it again and again; before one of his biggest cases, he rehearsed his opening more than ten times. He is a close student of jury psychology and the framing of language, and he is known for a willingness to try arguments no one else has attempted.

Ruohonen is also a nationally ranked curler who has competed at world championships and multiple Olympic trials over a career spanning decades. In 2026, filling in for a young team he had been mentoring, he competed at the Winter Olympic Games and became the oldest U.S. Winter Olympian in history. He draws a direct line between elite athletics and trial work: the strategy of thinking several moves ahead, the mental endurance of long days, and the discipline of practice. A six-time recipient of Minnesota Lawyer’s Attorney of the Year award and a past president of the Minnesota Association for Justice, he attributes his record of more than 25 consecutive trial wins to hard work, preparation, and a conviction that the work makes a real difference in people’s lives.