Profile: Jeffrey Steinback

By Maria Kantzavelos

Days after former newspaper tycoon Conrad Black was convicted in a highly publicized criminal fraud trial that drew hundreds of U.S. and international reporters to the federal courthouse in Chicago, attorney Jeffrey Steinback and the British baron known as Lord Black of Crossharbour were lunching on sandwiches one afternoon in a downtown hotel.

There, Steinback recalled recently, the two talked for hours — on topics other than the case in which Black was convicted of participating in a scheme to defraud Hollinger International of $6.1 million when he was chief executive officer of the media empire that once owned the Chicago Sun-Times.

They covered a lot of ground on that summer afternoon in 2007, Steinback said, engaging in ”fascinating” conversation about Black’s youth and upbringing, his interests, his personal goals, his views on life, his experiences in business, and his passions for history and writing.

The get-together was the first of many sessions Steinback convened thereafter with Black, in order to get to know the man he would eventually paint a portrait of for U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve, as part of his quest for leniency for his client, who had hired him to handle the sentencing phase of his case.

”Everyone had said that Conrad Black was arrogant, defiant, unlikable, and was going to get absolutely the biggest sentence the court could provide,” Steinback said. ”I thought, let me get to know Conrad. Let me get to try to understand him.”

The man Steinback came to know, he said, was ”nothing like the image that had been portrayed of him in the media.” Rather, Steinback saw a man who was candid and self-effacing, with a great sense of humor and an inquisitive mind.

”He’s a brilliant man — an immense amount of philosophy, extraordinarily well-read and well-bred. People mistook the breeding for arrogance,” Steinback said. ”He carries himself with a great air of dignity, which often can be misconstrued as arrogance, and it’s not — it’s just him.”

”He could no more sound like he was from the Bronx than someone from the Bronx could sound like him,” Steinback continued. ”You are how you’re raised. He was sent to boarding schools. He was born of a certain level of, if not aristocracy, at least extraordinarily well-to-do. That was how he was raised, and to be anything other than that would be phony.”

For Steinback — a veteran criminal defense attorney who is considered one of Chicago’s leading experts on federal sentencing guidelines, as well as a master plea bargainer whose practice focuses largely on resolving white-collar criminal matters short of trial — it is the whole person, rather than a mere description contained within the four corners of an indictment, that is at the heart of his work.

And, although Steinback stresses that he did not set out on a path to carve out the niche practice he has come to be known for, the specialty has long been the right fit for the former college gymnast who competed on the still rings in the early 1970s for the University of Iowa, where he majored in psychology.

”It’s important for me to understand what makes my clients tick,” Steinback said. ”I learned a long time ago that you can’t expect your opposition to care more about your client than you do. You can’t really expect judges to do the same thing. … You need to give them reasons to care and to be concerned about your client for it to make a difference to them what happens.

”I work hard — and it’s not hard for me to do — to find those qualities in people that are likeable. I look for them,” Steinback said. ”I first seek to find what’s good, understanding that in the context of that, something bad happened.”

‘One of a kind’

Winston & Strawn chairman Dan K. Webb, a former U.S. attorney and a high-profile litigator who handles cases around the country, called Steinback a ”fixture” in the city’s white-collar criminal defense bar, where he is widely known for his expertise in negotiating plea deals with prosecutors in complex criminal cases.

”He’s one of a kind,” Webb said. ”He’s got what we call a niche practice that I don’t know of another lawyer in America has in any other city. There’s nobody that competes against him; there’s no one else that has this kind of practice. And, I would say every single white-collar defense lawyer in Chicago, if they have a case that needs special attention in getting a deal done with the U.S. attorney’s office, they at least think about contacting Jeff.

”He has built up this reputation that he can get a deal done better than anybody else,” Webb said. ”The bottom line is, I think there’s a general perception and reality that, because of the trust and confidence prosecutors have in him, he’s able to ultimately get terms that are more favorable than others might get in his negotiating.”

For the better half of his 32-year-long law career, Steinback, 57, has focused his practice on three areas: negotiating plea deals, almost exclusively for clients charged with federal crimes; working to secure the lightest possible sentence for clients charged with or convicted of such crimes; and aiming to convince prosecuting authorities not to indict a client who has become the target of a federal probe, or to bring lesser charges.

Simply put, he said, ”Mostly, what I do is, I get involved at various stages and try to minimize the consequences of the predicament.”

Although Steinback has tried numerous cases in his career, the vast majority of the sole practitioner’s clients today come to him to resolve criminal matters short of trial. Others, like Black — who, months after that first meeting with Steinback was sentenced to six and one-half years in prison, significantly lower than the sentence prosecutors had originally sought — turn to Steinback post-conviction.

”I have, I suppose, a luxury. I’m not trying to prove my client innocent, or disprove his guilt, or force the government to prove my client’s guilt,” Steinback said, from his modest Loop office in the historic Monadnock building. ”We have a common set of facts that we oftentimes can agree to. … The battle you’re fighting is the one to minimize the consequences of the operative impact of those facts.”

Whether those minimized consequences might translate to a lighter sentence, a lesser charge, or a decision not to charge, Steinback said his work toward that end takes a great deal of preparation and patience, and a good dose of intuition.

”Each case, no matter how many years it seems I’ve done this, brings its own uniqueness. There’s always something different about the individual, or a ripple or two in the facts that are different, which cause you to take a different angle in how you want to try to, essentially, solve the problem,” he said. ”Sometimes, solutions don’t come obviously. You see something for what you think it is, and when you dig more deeply you find there really is a different direction you have to take. It’s all a function of so many different factors. It isn’t cookie-cutter. You don’t see a certain case, go into a certain mode, resolve it in a certain way and then present it the same way each time.”

For Steinback, who sometimes hesitates when he hears the word ”niche” in relation to his practice (”It sounds rather commercial to me,” he said), the focus of his practice evolved out of necessity, years after veteran criminal defense lawyer Edward Genson gave him his first job out of law school in 1976.

The seed was planted around the time when Steinback found himself serving as ‘’second in command” while Genson, who had become ill, underwent several surgeries that kept him away from work for months.

”There were a lot of cases that needed to be evaluated. I didn’t want Eddie coming back to a hundred trials. How was he ever going to manage all of that work? He was a very busy lawyer before he had gotten sick,” Steinback recalled. ”So, I started to look at these cases, particularly the federal cases … to see if some of these cases could be resolved by way of plea agreements. And I started to negotiate some of them, and began to work out some reasonably favorable deals. … I started to do that and, evidently, got reasonably good at it. Not because I was intentionally pursuing that niche, just because it was necessary.

”Somehow, over a period of time, other people would come in because they knew that I specialized in that, which really wasn’t something I had set out to do. Lawyers would call and say, ‘I’ve got this case, Genson. I know you’ve got this young associate who does this kind of work.”’

‘A Jeff Steinback experience’

”Virtually every veteran prosecutor has had a Jeff Steinback experience,” said Perkins Coie partner Patrick Collins, a former star assistant U.S. attorney in Chicago. ”He has a very good negotiating way about him that is not overbearing. It’s firm, but it’s also polite and diplomatic. He would be a great diplomat in the UN. Good negotiators can find common ground. I think he’s expert at finding the common ground.”

Zachery Fardon, a litigation partner at Latham & Watkins, recalled having several dealings with Steinback from his years as a federal prosecutor in Chicago.

”Jeff is a very humane guy. He’s a very humble man, and he is somebody who, as a result of a combination of his intellect, his modesty and his humaneness, has complete credibility with prosecutors and with judges alike,” Fardon said. ”There are not very many lawyers in this game that you can say that about.”

Steinback is also praised for his expertise in navigating the federal sentencing guidelines, a complex system formed when Congress created the U.S. Sentencing Commission to see that similar crimes receive similar punishments. The guidelines were considered mandatory for years until 2005, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in U.S. v. Booker that they were merely advisory, and that certain sentencing enhancements were unconstitutional.

”The guidelines are such a maze, and Jeff has a brilliant mind and an uncanny ability to exploit every nuance and loop. He knows the book like the back of his hand. He does that, and that’s impressive unto itself,” Fardon said.

All things human

When the federal sentencing guidelines were adopted in 1987, Steinback immersed himself in the technicalities of the new system and was left with the same impression he had before delving into the details.

”This was the worst thing to possibly come about, because it deprived judges of their ability to exercise reasonable discretion, and left most of the decision-making in the hands of the prosecution,” Steinback said. ”And, it attempted to quantify human behavior on a two-axis grid, which just simply can’t be done. There are too many ad hoc factors that come into play.”

He offered the following scenario:

Say, for example, two women of around the same age and of similar backgrounds embezzle about $1 million from their employers. One of the women, he said, is ”buying townhomes on the Riviera” and ”gorging” herself on caviar. The other, who is battling cancer and using the money to help her friends and family (a real-life client of Steinback’s several years ago), is ”taking care of the hopeless and the needy, based on a desperate circumstance in which she thought she was going to die at any moment.”

”Those are not like offenders, and they are not, in my judgment, necessarily entitled to the exact, same sentence — give or take a few months,” he said.

Although he noted that the 2005 Booker decision ”didn’t go far enough,” he was pleased about the finding of unconstitutionality. And, although the guidelines were, in a sense, ”demoted” when they became advisory, Steinback said, ”Now, they essentially are one among many factors that are considered in another statute, which, happily, considers things like the history and characteristics of the offender as the mandatory consideration, as opposed to something that was deemed virtually irrelevant under the guidelines.

”The guidelines said things like age, health, familial ties, community involvement, and all of those kinds of very human things were irrelevant in determining what the guideline range should be,” Steinback continued. ”Everything human was mandated out of existence, and judges were handcuffed. It is a far better system that we have now — far closer to the one that I began to work in, in which there was discretion.”

Beyond Steinback’s expertise in federal sentencing guidelines, Fardon said, ”what distinguishes Jeff is that he often delivers the soft stuff with complete resonance and ability.”

”Once you’ve done the math, then you’ve got the need to humanize your client to the judge and make the judge understand all the very human and mitigating considerations on why a judge should be lenient,” Fardon said. ”Jeff understands that, and he’s masterful in his ability to send that message to the court.”

Collins echoed that sentiment, recalling his own Steinback experiences.

”I don’t think anyone presents the humanity about a defendant better than Jeff,” Collins said. ”He had the unparalleled ability in the sentencing hearing to present the humanity of a defendant in a way that never called into question whether the defendant was accepting responsibility for his criminal conduct. I think Jeff was very good at keeping that the focus: ‘I did it. I knew better. And, here’s who I am as a person.”’

Empathy and compassion, and ”obligations of one person to another” come with the territory in Steinback’s line of work.

”When somebody comes to you and asks you to help them, they’re really, truly asking you to represent them in the truest sense of that word: ‘Care about me, be concerned with what happens to me, and use your expertise to do the best you can for me,”’ he said.

That sense of empathy and compassion for people in a bind is a lesson he took away from his parents, he said, while growing up as the eldest of three brothers in Northbrook at a time when the northwest suburb of Chicago was ”populated largely by starter homes and blue-collar workers, scratching and clawing to put together a down payment, so they could buy their first house.”

For Steinback, the son of an electrical engineer who ‘’scratched and cobbled together $500 to put a down payment on an $18,000 home in 1954,” athletics has always been his outlet.

”I spent countless hours in gyms, long before they were fashionable places,” he said.

Whether it was high school football, college gymnastics, or rugby, which he took up in law school at Iowa, ”I always had this ability to play any game I played with absolute, utter reckless abandonment. I was usually a more quiet, reserved kid on the outside, but when it came to these games, I basically just opened up.”

By the time he was an established criminal defense lawyer, working with Genson on such high-profile cases as those resulting from the Operation Greylord probe of judicial corruption in the early 1980s, Steinback had taken up amateur boxing, competing in Chicago Golden Gloves tournaments and other local club fights.

Today, Steinback, the father of one son and two daughters, who lives with his wife, Patti, in an area north of Rockford, has taken a break from coaching varsity soccer at Glenbrook North High School. But he plans to return to his alma mater in spring, after adding hip replacement surgery to the host of surgeries he’s undergone for sports-related injuries.

The pending surgery, however, hasn’t slowed him down. He recently took up canoe racing, a sport that allows him to spend time with his son, Judson, a triathlete who needed a partner for a leg of his competitions.

With Steinback serving as the bowman, the father-son team has finished first in several races, including an 8-miler in early October on the Kickapoo River, in southwestern Wisconsin.

”Canoeing winds up being perfect, because I can get in that boat and start hammering that water, listening to my son’s commands to switch, and I don’t stop until the race is over,” Steinback said. ”That’s another place to find some refuge from the rigors of this demanding profession.”

He credits a passionate high school business-law teacher and an uncle who worked as in-house counsel for an insurance company who took a 10-year-old Steinback to see movies such as ”To Kill a Mockingbird,” with influencing his decision to pursue the study of law.

And, his role in the dismissal of a burglary case brought by a police officer who seemed like he was ”looking to put a charge on this guy” — a tough steel worker whom Steinback came to know while serving as an intern during law school with the county attorney’s office in Mason City, Iowa, helped him realize that he was better suited for defense work than prosecution.

He had sent out a number of resumes in pursuit of job opportunities in criminal defense, when he received a callback from Genson, who hired Steinback out of law school ”for about $10,000 a year, $200 a week — flat,” Steinback said.

”While I was at the bottom rung of that totem pole — I even did the filing at different courthouses for secretaries, carried briefcases — I also did the appeal work, and the motion practice, continuances, and then second-chairs …,” Steinback said.

After several years, Steinback and Genson became partners and the two remained in practice together for nearly 20 years.

”It was scary how good he was at sentencings,” Genson said. ”We used to marvel at the number of judges that used to get off the bench and reconsider. Judges generally come out with an idea as to what they’re going to do, and Jeff convinced the people to rethink it. He’d start arguing and the judge would take a few minutes before he ruled because he’d try to digest what he’d said.

”He’s smart, he’s eloquent. And, he believes. When he argues, he argues what he believes.”

Cindy Giacchetti, a Chicago criminal defense attorney who first met Steinback when she served as a federal prosecutor in Chicago in the late 1970s, said she has seen firsthand the impact of Steinback’s approach to his craft.

”I’ve seen him in a courtroom at a sentencing literally turn a judge around, in terms of how a judge viewed his client. That’s a hard thing to do at sentencing, and he does it masterfully,” Giacchetti said. ”I’ve seen a judge come out, absolutely livid at what this particular defendant had done and by the end of the sentencing understanding and, frankly, giving what clearly is a lower sentence.”

Steinback has handled the cases of numerous high-profile clients, including former Chicago city clerk James Laski, who was sentenced to two years in prison after admitting he took bribes in the city’s Hired Truck Program; former Gov. George Ryan’s campaign manager, Scott Fawell, in a plea deal calling for his cooperation as a witness in Ryan’s public corruption trial, in exchange for the government’s urging of a lenient sentence in a related case against Fawell’s fiance; and political insider Stuart Levine, in a plea deal, Steinback said, that calls for a sentence of about five years in prison, rather than the 30-year to life-sentence he potentially faced, in exchange for his extensive cooperation in a number of ongoing public corruption investigations.

However, it could be said that Steinback’s greatest successes are those never seen or heard about. And that, he said, is fine by him.

”An investigation can be stopped before it ever turns into a charge, and no one is going to know about it. My client will be all the better for it, and will go on,” he said.

Much of Steinback’s time is spent on cases that have not yet been indicted. There, he said, the focus is on convincing the prosecution either not to indict or to indict with lesser charges. Along the way, he said, a certain amount of plea-bargaining can come into play.

His clients come to him from a variety of avenues, many of them from trial attorneys like Genson.

”If I don’t see a trial, or if I go to trial and lose, he comes in,” Genson said. ”I send him some of my clients. If I think it’s a case that he can help me with, a case where I feel his presence will help the client, I bring him in.”

There are also the clients who come to Steinback in a state of high anxiety and despair.

”You come in and you sit down and you say, ‘I have been living with my guilt for the last three years. I embezzled from my employer. I found this way to do it — probably $1 million over time. I work for this giant corporation. I know, eventually, they’re going to catch me, and I just can’t live with this anymore. I want to go in and I want to get it over with. I cannot go to sleep one more night living with this guilt and this fear and this anxiety.”’

Getting to the reasons why a client committed a particular crime, he said, is always an important part of his work.

”You do try to stand in their shoes — understand what makes them tick. Not just what they did, but why did they do it? How did they get into that situation? So you can come up with a better solution for them,” Steinback said. ”If you’re a judge and you see this misconduct out of what seems to be an otherwise decent individual, don’t you ask yourself, why? Why did you take a perfectly good life and throw it away? It’s one of the most important parts.”

Finding an ”explanation, not an excuse” was key to a ”career-type case” for Steinback in 2001, when sentencing guidelines were mandatory. His client — a woman who admitted to embezzling about $250,000 from her employer — avoided a possible prison sentence and was sentenced to probation after Steinback argued that his client had an out-of-control shopping compulsion stemming from severe mental and emotional disorders.

Another of his high-profile clients, former Illinois Treasurer Jerry Cosentino was sentenced to five years on probation and nine months of home confinement for bank fraud, after pleading guilty to a check-kiting scheme. In that case, Steinback said he argued against incarceration, citing the ”extraordinarily personable” and ”proud” man’s severe health issues and the costs of medicines required to keep him alive.

”As serious as his misconduct was deemed, it certainly didn’t warrant, essentially, a death sentence,” Steinback recalled. ”I would not say my advocacy caused the outcome, but a judge who understood the realities of that individual’s circumstances and was able to balance the competing considerations in a lenient way.”

But for the vast majority of the cases that come to Steinback, probation is not a likely outcome.

”I don’t envy what Jeff does, because you don’t walk away with happy customers,” said Marc W. Martin, a criminal defense lawyer who turns to Steinback when his clients are in need of plea negotiations or representation as cooperating witnesses in federal cases. ”He, very rarely, is going to have a case where the result is freedom.”

That reality of his practice can be a difficult one to swallow.

”I’m generally saddened when any client has to spend time in prison,” Steinback said from his 14th-floor office, where the window view features the nearby Metropolitan Correctional Center.

Sometimes, he said, ”The question is, will a person do 30 years or will he do 10? If your negotiations can make a difference, or your advice to your client can make a difference, then 10 years, which can be a terribly long sentence, is nonetheless one that has some light at the end of the tunnel, whereas, 30 years would be forever.

”If you walk away from a case with that outcome, you’ve given some hope and some life back to your client and his family,” he said, ”although, you can’t feel good about that outcome, because it’s still prison time, and substantial prison time.”

That said, Steinback offered a bit of advice to others who might be considering a similar route in the criminal defense arena.

”Do this work if you have a passion for it, if it gives you some satisfaction in helping people in this fashion,” Steinback said. ”If not, don’t get into this work. It is demanding, extraordinarily difficult, you are almost always trudging upstream, and no matter how, relatively speaking, how good the outcome, you always feel like you could have or should have done better.”

Those challenges that go hand-in-hand with his practice seem to give Steinback all the more reason to press on.

”All I can say is that, when it stops hurting and when what happens to my clients stops really making a difference to me … if I ever get to that point, that’s when it’s time to get out,” Steinback said. ”When you’re going through the motions, you’re just simply riding out your reputation, and you’re not really putting your heart and soul into it — that’s when you’re no longer really going to be as effective as you should be.”

GPS law gives abusers little latitude

By Maria Kantzavelos

The same sort of technology known for helping lost motorists find their way is at the heart of legislation set to take effect Jan. 1 in Illinois, which has joined a growing number of states in adopting a measure that allows judges to order satellite tracking of people who violate orders of protection.

Advocates for victims of domestic violence and prosecutors say the use of GPS technology to monitor abusers under the Cindy Bischof Law — named for a 43-year-old real estate broker from Arlington Heights who was gunned down in March by an ex-boyfriend who at least twice violated her protective orders from a Cook County judge that prohibited him from contacting her — could help to add teeth to restraining orders and to possibly prevent future violence.

”It’s another tool in the toolbox,” said Mary S. Trew, executive director of the Domestic Violence Legal Clinic in the Cook County Circuit Court’s central Domestic Violence Courthouse on Harrison Street in the West Loop. ”You can do the orders of protection and say, ‘Stay away.’ But this has a means where you can monitor that, and actually warn people It’s like a missile shield, or a radar shield, where you have time to take cover because you’ve got incoming fire. I guess it’s analogous to a defense system for a country — just another weapon in the arsenal.”

The law calls for the use of ”the best available” technology to track order violators — technology capable of immediately notifying law enforcement authorities, or others monitoring the movements of a person fitted with a GPS satellite device, when the person comes near a court-determined exclusion area, such as the potential victim’s home or workplace.

The law also calls for the technology to allow monitors to speak to the alleged offender through a cell phone implanted in a GPS bracelet device, and to activate an alarm that would warn the alleged victim when a court-imposed boundary is breached.

Under the law, judges will have the option to order GPS tracking of a person charged with violating a protective order, as a condition of bail, and of offenders sentenced to probation for such violations. The law requires GPS monitoring as a condition of parole in certain cases sent to the Illinois Department of Corrections.

Cook County Chief Judge Timothy C. Evans — who recently formed a committee to examine the workings of the county’s main Domestic Violence Court, as well as its satellite courts in suburban districts, to see where improvements can be made to the system — said he supports the new law.

”We enter orders of protection every day, but as you and I know, the victims sometimes get hurt even with the order of protection in their hand,” Evans said. ”And, sometimes these perpetrators don’t care if they’re going to be caught. They sometimes kill themselves even after they kill the victim.”

Such was the case with Bischof, who died at the hands of her ex-boyfriend, Michael Giroux, who then turned the gun on himself, said Bischof’s brother.

Michael Bischof said his sister, who had taken numerous steps to try to protect herself, had inquired about using GPS technology before she was killed months after her ex-boyfriend was released from a mental hospital for violating a protective order by trying to hang himself in the woman’s backyard.

”My sister was a very creative, articulate, outside-the-box thinker, and this was her idea,” said Bischof, who spearheaded the Illinois initiative that led to the legislation’s passage in August.

”I felt like this was the baton that was handed to me: ‘Take this and see to it that others don’t suffer the same fear I did.”’

Bischof said GPS monitoring could have made a difference in the case of his sister, who was shot as she was leaving her Elmhurst office.

”This is a woman who lived in fear for nine months of having to look behind her back everywhere she went,” he said. ”If she were warned that he were within a certain distance of her work the alert would have gone off and, certainly, no one is going to go out to the car if this is the case.”

Ketki Steffen, a Cook County prosecutor in Rolling Meadows who serves in the Domestic Violence Unit of the state’s attorney’s office, handled Bischof’s case.

”There are a handful of cases which make your hair stand up as a prosecutor,” Steffen said. ”There’s a handful of cases where, before this legislation was passed, you could not do much more than issue that piece of paper or put the defendant in jail for a limited amount of time.”

Steffen called the law a ”gift to prosecutors.”

The GPS data, Steffen said, ”will provide me with direct evidence. If there is a violation, I can prove that the person with the bracelet was at this location at this time.”

”It helps keep my victim safe, by giving her an alert when the defendant is in her vicinity,” Steffen continued. ”And, I think there’s a psychological deterrent on the defendant when he knows there’s an eye in the sky watching him at all times.”

Steffen speculated that she would likely pursue an order calling for GPS tracking of defendants about once a month in certain cases.

”If the defendant has a criminal background for violating an order of protection in the past, if there is a history of mental illness, or alcohol or drug abuse, those to me would be red flags that this type of use of GPS would be appropriate,” Steffen said. ”I would ask the judge to consider that, and the defense attorney would have a chance to object, to ask that the use of the device would be limited. The judge would decide what is a fair and equitable use of the device, based on the facts of the case.”

Ironing out the details

With only a few months remaining until the measure hits the books, however, officials in early October said some of the logistics for how the law would be implemented in Cook County and throughout the state remained unclear.

”The GPS system, I think, will be an added means by which the court and individuals administering the system can protect victims from domestic violence,” Evans said. ”But, there are a couple of issues.”

For starters, Evans and other officials said, there’s the issue of cost.

The law imposes a new fine of at least $200 on every person who is convicted of violating an order of protection, and creates the Domestic Violence Surveillance Fund.

However, much of the costs associated with a GPS tracking program will likely fall on county probation offices, said Jesus Reyes, acting chief probation officer for Cook County.

The law calls for Illinois’ Division of Probation Services to develop uniform standards for the implementation of the program through county probation departments.

”The law, as passed, is not very clear in terms of how this is to be paid for. It calls for a fine of $200. Beyond that, it is silent on how individual departments throughout the state will accrue that money,” said Reyes, who estimated the cost of equipment, alone, to range from $6 to $12 per day, per person, depending on its capabilities.

Reyes said, in October, that his department was gathering information from providers of GPS systems in order to put together requests for proposals.

”There are two big challenges as I see it. One of them is obtaining the equipment the law requires,” Reyes said. ”The other major challenge I see is that the law calls for this to be monitored 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. From all of the providers that we have seen once their system detects a violation of an exclusionary zone, their system triggers — on an automated basis — notification to us. It can be done by e-mail, a text message, through a cell phone. Once we get this signal, then we take it from there, and that will necessitate a couple of things.

‘It’s going to take coordination by several players in the system to be sure that this works as it’s supposed to work.”

Another concern, Reyes said, is dealing with the limitations of GPS technology.

”We all know, from using our cell phones, that we could be talking to someone and get into an area where we lose a signal,” he said. ”We would not want there to be a false sense of security to be conveyed as a result of this being in place.”

Reyes estimated that more than 500 defendants at a time are found to have violated an order of protection in Cook County.

”That is a number we are focusing on,” Reyes said. ”That tells me we need to be prepared, if a judge orders it.”

But others stressed that the GPS tool is not likely to be used in the cases of every offender who violates an order of protection.

”Depending on the assessments of these offenders, those that are deemed to be high-risk will be those we hope to be mandated by the judges to be required to wear these bracelets,” Michael Bischof said.

”There are probably far fewer people that’ll be on this than just looking at the numbers of X violations per year and X number of bracelets.”

In Illinois, GPS monitoring is used to track certain paroled sex offenders who are considered sexual predators. Under the Cindy Bischof Law, a person convicted of violating an order of protection, as a condition of parole or early release, ‘’shall” be ordered to wear a GPS device.

In recent months, there were nearly 300 paroled sex offenders on GPS monitoring at a daily cost of around $9.30 each, said Illinois Department of Corrections spokesman Derek Schnapp.

”We think it serves as a good deterrent for the parolee on what they can and can’t do,” Schnapp said.

Schnapp said the IDOC has a contract with Boulder, Colo.-based Behavior Interventions Inc., which subcontracts with a center in Aurora, which monitors the GPS tracking of parolees 24 hours a day. If a parolee on GPS monitoring enters a forbidden area, the center contacts parole agents, who ”determine the plan of action from there,” Schnapp said.

Dawn Dalton, executive director of the Chicago Metropolitan Battered Women’s Network, said the organization has been part of an ad hoc team of policymakers that have come together to try to figure out the best way to implement the GPS program as it relates to domestic violence cases in Illinois.

”Some of the things that we’ve identified that need to occur, first and foremost, is training and educating those impacted by the legislation — from judges to the state’s attorney’s office, law enforcement officials, victim advocacy groups, and survivors, themselves,” Dalton said. ”That’s a big piece of it, because this is really reforming and changing the way that the systems are responding to violations of orders of protection. This is a new remedy.”

For example, Dalton pointed out, the law requires judges to order a person charged with a violation of an order of protection to undergo a risk assessment evaluation at an Illinois Department of Human Services protocol-approved partner abuse intervention program. Based on the results of that assessment and other circumstances of the alleged violation, the law says, a judge may order that the person, as a condition of bail, be placed under electronic surveillance.

”Any person who’s charged with [violating an order of protection] has to have this risk assessment done,” Dalton said. ”One of the challenges with that is, out of the 102 counties in Illinois, 62 of them do not have a partner abuse program. The judge is supposed to take the results of this risk assessment into consideration when figuring out the conditions of bail. It’s implied that there is a short turnaround time from the time the defendant is taken into custody and the bail is granted, that this risk assessment needs to occur.”

Assessing the danger

The Cindy Bischof Law is similar to legislation adopted last year in Massachusetts, which is among the first states to begin using GPS monitoring in domestic violence cases.

”The technology is so well-matched to containing a domestic violence offender, even better than with sex offenders, because we know who the intended victim is in domestic violence cases,” said Harvard Law School lecturer Diane L. Rosenfeld, who proposed the idea for the bill that passed in Massachusetts and also took part in the legislative initiative in Illinois.

For the program to work, Rosenfeld stressed, people who are placed on GPS monitoring should be those who are considered ”dangerous” based on assessments that screen domestic violence cases for ”lethality” indicators to identify which offenders present a high risk to their victims.

”A critical thing about GPS technology is that it, on its own, is not the answer. It has to be part of a comprehensive response to domestic violence, where you’re constantly assessing the danger of the situation,” Rosenfeld said. ”Not everybody who’s subject to orders of protection needs to be on GPS. A judge should really look at every individual case and take into account the information given to her by a high-risk team, and manage it accordingly.

”We have 25 years of sound research on domestic violence homicides that we apply to the danger assessment evaluation,” Rosenfeld continued. ”It turns out these cases are really predictable. Law enforcement has to take them seriously.”

In Bischof’s case, Rosenfeld said, ”one indication is the victim’s level of fear. Then he had all these mental health issues. Suicide is a lethality indicator because these guys don’t like to go alone.”

The Jeanne Geiger Crisis Center in Amesbury, Mass., has been tracking the local success of GPS monitoring. The women’s shelter in 2006 began piloting a GPS program in Newburyport, a city north of Boston. The center’s High Risk Case Response Team, which works to identify ”dangerous” domestic violence cases in the community and provides interventions aimed at interrupting the cycle of escalating violence, has been following 54 such cases in the last three and a half years in the greater Newburyport area, said Kelly Dunne, the center’s associate director. A judge ordered GPS monitoring in about 10 of those cases, Dunne said. And, of those 10 cases, she noted, there were no repeat violations.

”It suggests, to me, that when perpetrators know that they’re being monitored and they know restraining orders will be enforced that they are able to change their behavior,” Dunne said.

So-called exclusion zones — geographic areas where an offender is forbidden entry — are set up as part of the GPS monitoring of offenders.

”You can literally create an exclusion zone around the town a victim lives in,” Dunne said. ”There is real-time monitoring, meaning there is literally someone who could watch that person walk down a street.

”When the behavior patterns are dangerous, where you have things like strangulation, forced sex, threats to kill, I think it makes sense to put some extra containment around those offenders,” Dunne said.

In early October in Massachusetts, where the state’s own probation staff members handle the monitoring of offenders on GPS systems from three centers, 17 people were being monitored in domestic cases, said Paul Lucci, deputy commissioner of the Massachusetts Probation Service.

Currently, Lucci said, GPS technology is more widely used to track the whereabouts of sex offenders in the state.

Offenders are outfitted with an ankle bracelet, which transmits a signal to a cell phone and GPS tracker on a belt, Lucci said. The devices send information on the offenders’ whereabouts every five minutes to a monitoring center.

”The built-in policies and procedures are, upon a person entering an exclusion zone, we call the police immediately,” Lucci said.

”The best part about this is the information is archived forever. We could archive those tracks from the day [an offender] stepped into a program to the present time,” Lucci said. ”If there was a situation where somebody said, ‘He was standing in front of a supermarket and wouldn’t let me in,’ I could put him right there. Say it was not a supermarket and a random site. She said, ‘I saw him, he was on the highway, he was making aggressive moves.’ I could even tell you how fast he was driving. It gives you a location, time, and speed.”

Meanwhile, in Illinois, lawyers and others who work in the domestic violence arena are waiting to see how the GPS legislation will play out.

”At this point, there’s no overseer to make sure that everyone is in the same step. We are certainly working with all the agencies that would be affected by this law to try and make the best use of this law,” said Karin Dooley, supervisor of the Cook County assistant state’s attorney’s Domestic Violence Unit, a division of specially trained prosecutors who handle both misdemeanor and felony domestic-related cases. ”Everyone is for protecting the women, and if this is something that would, that’s great. Let’s see if we can make it work.”

The importance of trust

By Olivia Clarke

When attorney Kathleen Zellner represented Kevin Fox, who was incarcerated for eight months for the murder and sexual assault of his 3-year-old daughter Riley, she was with him every step of the way.
She visited him in jail every Sunday, spending hours with him during each visit. She got to know his family, meeting with Fox’s brother every day and his wife and son regularly. His son even asked Zellner if he could have his seventh birthday at her office, and she hosted a petting zoo for him outside the firm’s office.

Zellner represented Fox in his criminal trial, and persuaded the Will County state’s attorney’s office to allow a private lab to test the DNA samples found on Riley’s body. Those DNA samples exonerated Fox. She also successfully represented him in a civil rights case that awarded Fox and his wife $15.5 million.

”They were just in the most horrible situation you can imagine,” said Zellner, a civil rights lawyer who often handles criminal defense. ”I just felt I could give them hope. I knew he was innocent, and I just believed I was going to get him out.”

Like Zellner, many local lawyers who handle criminal defense say the relationship they form with their clients is crucial. By creating that relationship, clients feel they can trust their lawyers enough to share pertinent information. Without that relationship, even the most astute criminal defense legal minds will face difficulties in reaching success.

”Somebody should not dabble in this,” said Zellner, of Kathleen T. Zellner & Associates. ”You don’t dabble in the outcome of other people’s lives. You’ve got to be in it, and completely committed to it, otherwise you are doing a complete disservice. It is about as serious as it gets when you have somebody’s life in your hands.”

Building that relationship

When Elliot Zinger meets with his clients, he doesn’t paint them a rosy picture that leads them to believe that everything will work out.

Instead, Zinger tells them both the good and bad sides of what could happen. He said his candor shows his clients that he will be honest with them.

”They might not be the most educated, but they have the street smarts to know if someone is being straight with them,” said Zinger, of Elliot R. Zinger & Associates.

When he meets a new client he tells them about his background, and some of the cases he’s worked on, so the client knows he’s the right person to take up the cause.

He needs his clients to tell him the truth, but they don’t always do that. For example, he represented a client accused of murder who kept telling him he was innocent. As he listened to his client’s denials he read the police report, which described the same shirt the client was wearing.

His client eventually told him the truth, and it helped his case because Zinger struck a deal with the state’s attorney’s office for a lesser sentence than what his client could have received if he’d gone to trial.

”I don’t really charge cheap fees, but I think it’s worth it, because I’m in it for the long haul,” Zinger said. ”We had this one guy we were working for, for the last few years, and we were out in the trenches. I kept visiting him in jail and kept reporting to him every week. It was almost like we were taking part in the investigation together, and he was in jail. Most people don’t build that sort of trust.”

Attorney Steven R. Hunter tries explaining to his clients at all times what’s happening. He listens to them, and tries to return calls promptly. When his clients see him with a trial book all tabbed out, and when they hear from him consistently, they know to trust him.

Criminal defense cases require that the relationship exist at an even higher level than other legal cases because clients are being asked to tell their lawyers information that may be embarrassing or they may be afraid to admit, Hunter said.

”It’s absolutely essential to have a relationship based on trust and candor,” he said. ”Not having an honest relationship is similar to a doctor whose patient won’t tell him what’s wrong.”

Rick Halprin, who primarily represents defendants in federal cases, said he spends an extraordinary amount of time with clients during the week and on weekends because they may know information they didn’t think they knew. The more time he spends, the more information he comprehends.

Those accused of white-collar crimes are typically not professional criminals, and have never considered conviction and incarceration, he said. He must often deliver news that’s not optimistic, and then provide options and consequences for each option.

And while it is a client’s decision what move he or she makes, the client relies on his or her lawyer’s advice, he said.

”Nothing is more important than that relationship in terms of confidence and trust — the confidence your client has and the trust the client has in your ability to analyze the situation and provide advice that’s in their best interest,” Halprin said.

By the time they get to trial, he said he’s developed the kind of relationship where he can comfortably brief his clients on the type of behavior he expects in the courtroom.

”You have to tell the client, ‘we don’t smile, and we don’t laugh unless the jury laughs,”’ he said. ”’We don’t grimace, and for God’s sake don’t pass me any Goddamn notes in front of the jury; wait until I sit down and talk to co-counsel. Don’t make any gestures.’

”Jurors have nothing to look at besides the judge, the lawyers, and the defendant. When someone is pointing a finger at the defendant, someone on that jury is watching the body language.”

Extra hurdles

As a public defender, Jamie Carey often faced challenges when building his clients’ trust.

A presumption existed among many of his clients that public defenders are simply part of the system designed to put them in jail, said Carey, now a criminal law professor and director of the Center for Advocacy at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. They don’t appreciate the nature of the attorney-client relationship when the lawyer is foisted on them.

”I had to impress them immediately with capability,” Carey said. ”And that just means by the way you talk about the case, and their situation; and by displaying your knowledge of the discovery materials, and communicating your ideas. You let them know that you know what you are doing.”

There was also a racial angle because most of Carey’s clients were black, and he is white — another dynamic that increased skepticism, he said.

Sometimes those accused of crimes are quite sharp, shrewd, and manipulative, he said. They may try to take advantage of the system, and their lawyer.

”You had to be alert to that fact,” he said. ”You couldn’t afford to be naive. Gradually you learn that there is that reality, which creates an added dimension to how you would relate to those people in that situation.”

Public defenders face the challenge of cultivating a relationship with their clients in a short amount of time, while juggling a heavy caseload, said Arthur Lurigio, a psychology and criminal justice professor at Loyola.

”Clients have to be able to fully trust their public defenders,” he said. ”They literally put their lives in the public defender’s hands. It undermines the justice system, in part, if we don’t give all clients the chance to forge working relationships with lawyers.”

Lurigio, who has observed court operations over the years, said poor defendants often find themselves at the mercy of the court because they may not like or trust the public defender assigned to them, but they can’t fire them.

”Think about the people who are confined in jail,” Lurigio said. ”They’ve probably been involved in a large system their entire lives, and have felt sort of like deadwood in the ocean blowing around. It’s a terrible place to be in. Most of them are uneducated, so they don’t have a sophisticated knowledge about the law and how it operates. They could gain that knowledge if they have sufficient time with an attorney.”

At the same time, public defenders devote themselves to ensuring that justice is achieved, despite fewer resources and smaller paychecks, he said. They maintain a very important job of not only defending individuals, but also defending constitutional principles.

Many clients initially think their public defenders cannot help them or their interests won’t be served by these lawyers because they didn’t hire them, said Amy Thompson, a Cook County assistant public defender.

”I think with clients you have to be adaptable,” she said. ”We get the clients as they are. You have to be the one those clients go to because they really are stuck with you.”

Thompson’s current level of experience, she said, has made it ”easier for me to recognize when somebody doesn’t want to trust me. I think it’s also easy for me to be more relaxed, and let the relationship have time to get better.

”Before, when I was younger, if I had a resistant client I went over the top to create a relationship that just made them feel stressed. Now I know that I have time for them to see the kind of work I can do for them. It’s easier for me to relax and let the relationship build instead of forcing it.”

Thompson had a client last year charged with murdering her estranged husband. Getting to know her client helped her better understand the aggressive relationship that existed between her client and her husband. That relationship also made it easier for her client and her client’s family to share information and introduce her to witnesses.

Thompson said it’s important to ”make it clear that you are not trying to be them or like them or from the areas or situations they are from. You are letting them know that you appreciate those relationships and neighborhoods that caused the kind of stress and fear they’re living with.”

The relationship must be part ego, part fear, and part trust, said Marijane Placek, a Cook County assistant public defender in the Homicide Task Force.

”They must trust you or they must fear you enough so they do exactly what you want them to do,” Placek said.

”People tend to underestimate what clients can and cannot understand. I don’t think clients want to be loved. They want to win. They want to be victors. They don’t want a lawyer that loves them. They don’t want a lawyer that necessarily understands them. They want a lawyer that will win for them.”

The biggest challenge she faces involves convincing her clients that when she takes on their case, it becomes her case, Placek said. A lawyer must be in command, and must champion her client’s cause.

”I will say to them right before they testify, ‘don’t you dare screw up my case,”’ she said. ”They actually look at me sort of happy as to the investment I have in it.”

What they need

Zellner wants to know and understand her client’s entire life history.

When she meets with a client she tries to determine if her personality will mesh well with her client’s personality. If she feels a clash will occur, then she will not represent them.

”I don’t take a case unless I’m completely 100 percent committed to it,” she said. ”I’m not walking them through the system, getting their money, and then going on my way. In my practice there are very few client problems because of that. I am a very intense person, and very direct. I find that it works.”

A relationship works if lawyers can put themselves in somebody else’s shoes, she said.

”Also, it’s not being naive and thinking everybody who comes in is a victim; everybody who comes in is innocent,” Zellner said. ”It’s about being able to listen, and being able to understand the situation.”

The details a lawyer learns when building that relationship make a difference, she said.

”I think the attorney is the storyteller,” she said. ”Your job with a jury is to tell somebody’s life story as close as you can to the way they would tell it if they could stand there.”

A good relationship can exist if clients appreciate their lawyer, appreciate the lawyer’s experience, and appreciate what the lawyer can do for the client, said Michael Monico, a white-collar criminal defense lawyer at Monico, Pavich & Spevack.

These relationships are so important in criminal defense cases because so much is at stake, Monico said. The client is often the best source for information about this case.

”Since you are dealing with situations in which a client may feel that telling you something may expose him or expose conduct that could arguably be deemed criminal there is a greater need for trust,” he said. ”You have to earn the clients’ trust by being attentive, by being knowledgeable, and caring about what happens to him or her. Sometimes, it’s helped by having a reputation, and very often two or three people refer [a client] to me. It helps if they come to you with some sort of understanding of your background, but it has to be earned.”

Juries pay attention to the way a criminal defense lawyer communicates with his client during a trial, and the way he includes that client in decisions in front of the jury, said Edward Genson, with Genson & Gillespie. ”If a jury sees the relationship you have with the person you’re representing, it helps both of your credibility,” Genson said. ”The way you relate to them in a courtroom, the way you talk about them, hopefully shows the jury that the person is a good person.”

Attorney Cindy Giacchetti likes having a series of shorter conversations with her client. She also encourages them to take their time when considering hiring her because she wants them to feel comfortable with her.

”It’s important for them to see you thinking about their case, and working on that case,” Giacchetti said. ”You may have a very good relationship with a client, but the first time they see you in court they’re surprised by your opening statement. The client is very pleased because they thought I was doing a good job, but they are actually seeing me do a good job.”

Clients want someone they can rely on — someone who exudes strength, she said.

”When they walk out of the office, hopefully they feel at least somewhat better,” she said. ”Some of their concern or stress has basically been moved to me. I think that’s what the lawyer does.”

The challenges

Some misconceptions exist among the clients, lawyers, and the court system that can make forming a good attorney-client relationship more complicated.

A poor attorney-client relationship can mean either party leaves the relationship feeling like the criminal justice process didn’t work, said Randolph Stone, clinical law professor at the University of Chicago Law School. They lose faith and confidence in the system, and bad decisions get made.

Cultural competency relates to the ability of the lawyer to interact with people from other cultures, Stone said. If a lawyer cannot do that, it can negatively affect the relationship.

Sometimes a lawyer gets a client who does not trust him, Genson said. These people are constantly questioning their lawyer’s decisions, and forming conspiracy theories.

”If you lose there’s going to be some reason in their mind that you lost,” he said, ”other than the fact that the facts were against them.”

Some clients turn out to be snobs who believe their lawyer is lucky to represent them, he said. Entering this type of relationship can also be very trying.

”If the people are going to believe the system works, the first thing they have to know or believe is that the lawyers are there for them, and working for them to the best of his or her ability,” he said. ”They have to be able to trust the lawyer’s judgment. In order to have those two things happen, they have to have a very close relationship.”

If a client makes a decision that runs counter to what Giacchetti advises, she respects his or her choice and will work hard to carry out her client’s wishes.

”I certainly will give them my opinion, but I would never force a client to do what they don’t want to do,” she said. ”And I would work just as hard. Ultimately I treat the client as an adult and provide him or her with as much information as possible. Together we make the decision, but in the end they make the final decision because it’s their life.”

As lawyers and clients develop a relationship, clients sometimes hold information back, thinking their lawyer will make judgments about their character, Halprin said.

He said he often tells his clients, ”’I know you are not a criminal. You are a guy with a problem that needs a solution, but you are not a criminal. There are consequences and results for your actions. I am not here to make a judgment, but I will make a judgment about how to assist you.”’

Hunter said he’s learned the hard way that the last question he always asks his clients during an interview is: ”’Is there anything I did not ask you about that is important?”’

If he doesn’t ask that question an important fact may come up later. When he asks his client why he didn’t share that information, he will say he didn’t get asked.

”I always encourage people to tell me absolutely everything, and when you tell me, tell me in detail,” Hunter said. ”I’ve learned that they can’t tell what’s important or not because they are not the lawyer. When you have a client telling a narrative story, don’t interrupt, even if you have questions. Write those questions down. If you keep jumping in with questions they are going to forget something.”

If a good relationship does not exist, then a lawyer cannot provide valuable advice, he said. A client, for example, may say police did not find any drugs on him, but what he doesn’t tell his lawyer is that drugs were found in his car, which is valuable information to the case.

”There are many, many times where the client leads you down the primrose path where you think you have a good case, but he’s holding damaging information back,” Hunter said. ”You can’t defend a case effectively if you don’t know what’s going on. You can’t evaluate a case unless you know the facts, and third, you can’t prepare for damaging evidence unless you know the damaging evidence is out there.”

Zinger believes criminal defense lawyers never know for sure if their client is telling the truth. At the same time, clients may not trust their lawyers no matter what they do because they possess preconceived notions about the system.

”The whole system is built upon the premise that if one innocent person gets free then it’s worth defending all 100 of them,” he said. ”Some clients, you are not going to like them. What if you’ve got a guy with five serious convictions? You might not find a personal quality in the guy, but that doesn’t mean he’s not innocent and that doesn’t mean he doesn’t deserve a defense even if he is guilty.”

A Creative Firm Leader with a Unique Practice

By Olivia Clarke

It’s not unusual for Bruce R. Meckler to be in his office talking on a conference call about one subject; while at the same time requesting his legal assistant find an unrelated document for another issue; and not missing a beat as he tends to a third separate matter.

Meckler admits that he moves quickly from one activity to the next — even claiming that some think he should be diagnosed with ADD. But he said he’s really just obsessive about the things he does, and 100 percent impatient.

He likes being busy, which works out fine because he helps lead Meckler Bulger Tilson Marick & Pearson as a founder and co-chair. And he has a unique attorney fees practice, and is vice chairman of the board for the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority.

Last year the Cook County Circuit Court appointed him as special assistant Illinois attorney general to represent the governor and assist in a now-closed investigation brought by the attorney general’s office involving the governor’s office.

The people around Meckler describe him as having a lot of energy, and some say he can initially be intimidating because of his 6-foot-2-inch height, his booming voice, and his no-nonsense demeanor. But after getting to know him, they say his kindness, friendly nature, and love for the profession stick out most.

”You have to be a mind-reader with him,” joked Gia Ferro, Meckler’s legal assistant. ”You always have to know what he’s talking about, [and] what he wants when he needs something.”

But Ferro said he’s honest, caring, and hardworking — which is why she’s worked for him for nine years.

”I think everybody respects him,” Ferro said. ”They know that when you work with him, he is on his game … They know they can go to him if they have a problem.

”He wants everybody treated equally. He supports the staff and attorneys. He doesn’t believe in people being talked down to, and treated badly … He loses a lot of respect for somebody who is not honest. No matter how bad the situation, he wants you to tell the truth.”

Many friends and family members say they can count on him.

When Meckler’s longtime friend and mentor Dick Devine was deciding whether to leave his position as Cook County state’s attorney, he called Meckler to discuss it.

”I think he has a loyalty to friends and a commitment to the law, which go hand-in-hand,” Devine said. ”When you’re his friend or his client, he is going to go to bat for you 110 percent.”

Meckler’s son, David, a professional hockey player who recently signed with the Los Angeles Kings, described how an intense blizzard last year in Canada slowed his team’s arrival to a game. The team bus even needed to pull over because the driver couldn’t see the road.

Around that time, David’s cell phone rang. His father, who somehow got to the rink despite the blizzard, was calling because he wanted to know where the team was.

”He’s been there every step of the way,” said David, 21. ”I can count on one hand the number of games he’s missed. And I have 80 games a season. He’s been there by plane, train, and automobile. He’s shown up at every game, and been my biggest fan and biggest supporter … He’s been my best friend my whole life.”

The commitment

Meckler said being a lawyer is the best profession in the world.

But when asked what advice he has for new lawyers, he said they should understand that the level of commitment is substantial.

”To me being a lawyer, what I do for a living, is not a job, it is a life,” said 53-year-old Meckler. ”The biggest misconception I think young lawyers have is that they think this is a job where they can go and work 9 to 5. That’s the furthest thing from the truth … It’s a 24/7, lifetime commitment because a client’s problems never go away.

”Clients’ problems don’t go away on an evening during the week. Clients’ problems don’t go away on Saturdays and Sundays. Clients’ problems don’t go away when you are on vacation. And you need to understand that.”

Meckler joked that once he learned at age 10 that he couldn’t play professional basketball someday, he needed to consider other careers.

Growing up in Washington, D.C., as the middle child, he was argumentative and liked to debate issues. And he never accepted an answer, especially the wrong answer.

He graduated from Bradley University in Peoria and worked for former Chicago Mayor Michael Bilandic’s office for two years as an administrative assistant.

”I just wanted to see the world a little bit, see what it’s like to work, which is great,” he said. ”It got me serious about school … Working for the city for two years, I got to see what was going on in politics.”

After graduating from The John Marshall Law School he became a Cook County assistant state’s attorney, and worked there from 1981 to 1984. He handled civil litigation, and some special criminal litigation.

”It was the best experience of my life because it got me in court immediately,” Meckler said. ”I tried my first lawsuit three weeks after I was in the office. I got to try a substantial number of cases, and I handled significant appeals on my own.”

During his time there he probably tried between 25 and 30 cases, and argued between 10 and 12 appeals, including two in the Illinois Supreme Court.

As a prosecutor, he didn’t have paralegals, clerks, and secretaries to help him so he learned how to practice law without a big staff around. The office, he said, forces lawyers to learn how to try a case.

Devine met Meckler when they worked together in the state’s attorney’s office. Devine, who was first assistant state’s attorney at the time, said he could see that Meckler was already a thoughtful lawyer — even at a young age. Meckler demonstrates a creative side that allows him to see a case’s big picture, he said.

One of the first times Devine saw how creative Meckler could be was when they were handling a utility issue, and Meckler came up with a theory that there was a possible RICO violation.

”It was very creative,” Devine said. ”It had justification to it. It was really the first time I sat up and took notice [of Meckler].”

The connections

After the state’s attorney’s office, Meckler worked at Pope, Ballard, Shepard & Fowle, where he met Joe Tilson and Brian Bulger, who were both young labor lawyers. Little did he know that those friendships would later influence his career path.

Devine left the state’s attorney’s office and went to Phelan, Pope & John, and asked Meckler to join him at the firm. At the time, the firm was one of the fastest-growing litigation firms in the country, Meckler said. He worked there from 1986 to 1994.

He and another lawyer, Bob Bates, then made the decision to start their own firm with Tilson and Bulger. Their firm opened its doors in 1994.

Starting a firm was a very scary, nerve-wracking decision, Meckler said, but they wanted to be ”masters of our own destiny.”

”We had a great thing going at Phelan, Pope & John,” he said. ”You wonder if things are going to work out, if clients are going to follow. You sign your life away with the banks.”

They started small, with 16 lawyers, and planned to be a boutique firm. With the exception of Bates leaving the firm in 1999, Meckler said it’s pretty much stayed the same.

Except, it didn’t stay small. The firm now has close to 100 lawyers, and offices in Chicago, Dallas, and Phoenix. This year it added two partners to its name.

”It is a little surreal when you look and see what we’ve grown into,” he said. ”But it just happened, and we really never grew to grow. We always grew to deal with our clients, and service our clients better.”

Joe Tilson, co-chair of the firm, said he knew Meckler would be the perfect person to start a firm with because he is positive and enthusiastic about what he does, and for that reason he is the type of person who attracts clients.

”Bruce is a very high-energy, hard-charging, aggressive lawyer and also the type of lawyer who has different speeds,” Tilson said. ”Some lawyers are basically just aggressive all the time. He knows how to be tough when necessary, but at the same time he’s able to establish good relationships with people on both sides, and establish a rapport with opposing counsel that often serves his client’s interests.”

Walter Roth met Meckler in 1993 when the four lawyers were considering opening a law firm. Roth, who comes from a financial and business background, was brought on board to help start the firm and today he’s executive director.

Meckler has always been the one to stand up and take charge, Roth said. He possesses a mesh of business and lawyering skills — something that not all lawyers have.

He has a knack for determining the skills of a person and helping them maximize those skills. He knows how to delegate, and put trust in other people, he said.

”He is patient, but probably more persistent than patient,” Roth said. ”As much as you might think he’s not paying attention, that is when he is going to come back two months later and quote you. He has a very great memory.”

Steve Pearson, a name partner and a member of the firm’s executive and management committees, met Meckler at Phelan, Pope & John as an associate who wanted to learn from Meckler. He was one of the original 16 lawyers who helped start the firm.

Pearson said Meckler is among the very top echelon of lawyers who know how to combine legal strategy with sound business advice to help clients find solutions.

He knows when to try a case, and when to settle.

”He is one of the most outstanding lawyers I’ve ever had the privilege to work with, both for his ability to strategize, and out-strategize his opponents on a regular basis,” Pearson said. ”Much like a good quarterback, he can see the whole field.”

A unique practice

As a prosecutor Meckler handled quite a bit of litigation involving attorney fees, and has continued to include those types of cases in his practice.

Over the last 10 years he and partner Mari Leigh have built an internal group of about 20 lawyers and non-lawyers who do nothing but analyze other firms’ attorney fees, and handle audits and attorney fee litigation.

He frequently serves as an attorneys’ fee expert and has testified before numerous state and federal tribunals. He has conducted or supervised more than 150 legal bill review audits involving over $2 billion in legal fees, and has testified in depositions and trials on more than a dozen occasions.

”It has not been a great way to make friends in the bar,” Meckler said. ”I’ve had to take positions with respect to major law firms and their billing practices that have been very unpopular.”

”If I see things that need to be remedied or need to be addressed, that’s my job,” he said. ”I guess it’s fair to say it’s an area that I think my clients very much appreciate that I represent them and I’m able to do what I do for them. But my opponents, often times, aren’t thrilled with what we are doing.”

The major issue he deals with are clients who believe law firms have seriously over-billed them. His job entails reviewing the bills, and reviewing the work done by a law firm or law firms to see whether fees were in fact unreasonable.

If he and his team find that over-billing occurred, they try to determine if it involved inadvertency or disregard, or whether it involved intentional conduct like fraud.

But he said very few cases actually involve fraud.

Typically the lawyers or law firm didn’t pay attention to how they staffed the case, and the case has run amok, he said. These are often very large cases, such as mass tort or product liability cases.

”Not enough time is spent by the law firms in dealing with efficiency,” he said. ”Typically what I like to do is go back to the law firm and in some fashion present my findings. Let them know the concerns and find some sensible resolution. When that doesn’t happen we are forced to litigate …”

Over the years Meckler’s seen law firms improve their billing practices, and understand why clients have a right to be billed only reasonable rates, and a right to get appropriate detail about the work done, he said.

”In the past, clients didn’t spend as much time managing their outside legal expenses, either they were too large or too busy or making too much money where they didn’t really focus on the importance of how much they pay their lawyers every year,” he said. ”That’s changed. That’s changed dramatically.”

Clients now want to control legal fees, and like guidelines and budgets, he said. They must answer to shareholders, officers, and directors about how they spend money. And public companies must face federal regulations like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

”The world has changed in corporate America where keeping control of attorney fees has become a priority,” Meckler said. ”And that just segues right into my practice. The practice is as good as I’ve seen it. Our services are very much in demand. I’m unaware of any law firm nationwide that does what we do.”

Prior to Meckler’s pioneering this field, legal fee experts did little more than financial audits, with no real litigation experience in the type of large, complex cases they were auditing, Pearson said.

Meckler brings the perspective of a trial lawyer who has actually managed and tried large, complex cases, he said.

”He was one of the first lawyers that was really willing to take on the large silk-stocking firms in the Chicago area, and quickly established a big name for himself,” Tilson said.

The enjoyment

Meckler’s perspective on practicing law has changed since he’s become a firm leader.

He must now pay more attention to the moving pieces that go into a law firm, and can no longer handle every case that comes across his desk.

He said he doesn’t always like being an administrator. Dealing with employee issues, evaluations, and staff problems do not always appeal to him.

”The people issues are the toughest part,” he said. ”The easiest part is practicing law. That’s just fun.”

He tries to blow off steam by playing lunchtime basketball with some friends — a tradition he’s kept for the past 25 years.

”He is atrocious in calling fouls and has no judgment,” Devine joked about their basketball games. ”For years and years, 25 or 26 years, we’ve been playing basketball three times a week, full-court basketball. It’s a bunch of lawyers who spend more time arguing than playing basketball.”

Meckler also enjoys riding his Harley, and spending time with his children.

His daughter, Barisa Meckler, said her father has always taught her the importance of enjoying whatever career she chooses.

And she’s taken that advice seriously as the Illinois state scheduler for Sen. Barack Obama, working out of Obama’s Chicago senate office.

”I know that he loves what he does,” said 25-year-old Barisa about her father. ”I know even to this day he’s enjoying every minute of his job. And that’s something that he taught me. Whatever I do in life I really have to love it and enjoy what I’m doing.

”In high school I went out to intern in D.C. He gave me the confidence that I could do it, and I could do anything.”

As vice chairman of the board for the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, Meckler said he tries to help Navy Pier and McCormick Place thrive. The board handles various current and projected construction development projects, and he anticipates the board will be heavily involved in the Olympics if Chicago gets selected.

”We’re the caretakers and operators of one of the largest convention centers in America,” he said. ”Conventions are so important to the city because they bring in revenues. It’s a great job. It’s a challenging job with Las Vegas and Orlando always out there being number one and two, and we’re number three.”

Juan Ochoa, chief executive officer of the authority, said he relies heavily on Meckler’s leadership, and his ability to bring people together, and be the voice of reason.

”He makes tough decisions, and he’s always really good whenever a controversy occurs at the board level,” Ochoa said. ”Our board is a volunteer board and he spends a significant amount of time. For us as a public agency, it’s great to have an attorney of such a high-caliber give of his time for the greater good.

”He’s essentially the kind of guy you would want to have a beer with. He’s funny, interesting and he knows a little bit about everything. Despite being a very accomplished attorney, he’s very approachable. He comes across as your everyday guy, which I think is unique about him.”

Netting the future

By Maria Kantzavelos

For two weeks in mid-August, a spacious lounge on the fourth floor of the building that houses Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management served as the”command center” for Elizabeth Mooney and fellow law students looking ahead to next summer.

There, amid the buzz on one early afternoon, some of the couple dozen Northwestern University School of Law students in dark suits paced near windows with cell phones cupped to an ear, while others lounged on plush, mint-green chairs, worked on laptops, skimmed through notes, or passed the time with some chit-chat about the Olympics events they had watched the night before.

Nearby, outside several small, closed-door offices, law students clutching leather portfolios stood on deck, waiting for their turn.

The offices were among 40 rooms, situated on three floors of Northwestern’s Wieboldt Hall, that were said to be almost always occupied with a law firm attorney and a law student from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. each day for two weeks, as part of on-campus interviewing — the recruiting process that sends law firms to schools across the country for brief, first meetings with applicants for employment starting the following summer or fall.

”People are coming in and out all day. It’s a beehive of activity. These rooms are constantly going,” said Mooney, who participated in on-campus interviewing at Northwestern, in the weeks before the start of her first semester as a second-year law student there.

Interview season at many of the nations law schools kicked off in August, when hundreds of law firms descended on campuses to mark the start of an annual ritual that has long been the model followed by most large firms in the hiring of entry-level lawyers.

For the students being wooed this year, the process offers a chance to land a job as a summer associate in 2009. If all goes well during that summer — when the paychecks of summer associates at top firms between their second and third year of law school could exceed $3,000 a week - the firms extend offers for full-time employment upon graduation

For many of the law firms, on-campus interviewing — commonly referred to as OCI — is a first step in a recruiting effort that can last several months into fall with the goal of netting top law school talent and a future labor pool.

”OCI has two aspects,” said George Pearce, a partner in the Chicago office of Holland & Knight who oversees the firm’s hiring of entry-level lawyers. ”It allows you to try and get good attorneys two years later, but it also allows the firm to sell itself in terms of marketing and letting people know we have a great law firm they’re going to be dealing with. We give out promotional materials and little gifts, but I think the marketing is actually from the standpoint of the interviewer. You not only assess the candidate, but you sell the firm.

”My goal is, if I’m interviewing 20 people, I want every one of them to want an offer from Holland & Knight. You have to sell the firm when you’re doing that.”

While some observers have likened the on-campus interviewing process to a speed-dating game, of sorts, Jacob M. Mihm, a partner in Ungaretti & Harris who supervises the firm’s summer associate program, used another analogy to describe the season.

”I wasn’t in a fraternity, but it’s like rush week. But it’s rush fall,” he said.

The process, Mihm added, comes with an element of competition for both the interviewer and the interviewee.

”From the law firm perspective, we need to differentiate ourselves from the other law firms that are, literally, in the offices next to you trying to recruit the same people that we are,” Mihm said. ”The quagmire of the law student is: ‘How do I differentiate myself from not only the other 20 candidates this attorney is going to interview throughout the day, but the thousands that will be interviewed throughout the fall in other OCIs?”’

At Northwestern law school, about 270 2Ls and 80 3Ls took part in on-campus interviewing, in August and September, with approximately 600 offices of, mostly, top law firms and some government agencies, said Bill Chamberlain, the law school’s assistant dean for career strategy and advancement. In just two weeks in August, he said, students went through approximately 6,400 interviews.

A sluggish economy is making for a less than certain legal job market this year, Chamberlain acknowledged. But in more typical years, he said, by the time the fall recruiting process ends, more than 90 percent of the Northwestern law students who participated in interviews will have landed jobs for the next summer or fall.

‘You have to be on‘

For many of the nation’s law students who participate in on-campus interviews with law firms, the recruiting process has them making decisions about where they want to launch their careers, with as little as one year of law school under their belts.

For those students, much is riding on that first interview, where the aim is to convey — oftentimes in a matter of 20-minute bursts — that they are worthy of a second look.

”Really, your goal is just to try and get that callback,” said Kevin King, a Northwestern 2L who participated in more than 25 on-campus interviews.

Toward the tail end of that August on-campus interviewing process, King, 28, offered some insight into his approach to the 20-minute interview.

”I try and leave them with a very compact message about the practice I want to do and why that connects with what they do. That’s the most important thing for me,” he said. ”But I also want to ask them some questions, and take advantage of that opportunity — to get a sense of the type of people that work at these firms and what matters to them, and why they’re there.

”You get very few opportunities to really look under the hood of these firms, and this is one of them.”

Mooney, who completed 23 on-campus interviews in the two-week period, echoed that sentiment.”For those 20 minutes, you have to be on,” she said. ”The whole process, I think it can certainly be overwhelming and draining. But, it is what you make of it. If you’re excited about the opportunity and the chance to speak with these people, your energy level would remain higher than if you regard it as a chore.”

For Mooney, who said she was looking primarily for East Coast offices of firms that offer a wide variety of practice areas and a ”personality” that would make for the right fit for her, the process hardly seemed like a chore.

”I’ve enjoyed the whole process,” she said.

While still in the midst of OCI, Mooney and other students had already received green lights from several firms to proceed with the next phase of the recruiting process: invitations to visit a firm for more rounds of interviewing and lunching with associates and partners there.

”I like having conversations with people,” Mooney said. ”These are really interesting people who are coming to interview us. They’re really high-powered attorneys who have done amazing work — a lot of interesting people who have clerked for various judges, or have been editors of various law reviews, or have argued a prominent case. And you can ask them about that, and that’s pretty cool to get to speak to people about that.”

The number of on-campus interviews with various firms in a day varied for students like Mooney.

”I had a day where I had five in one day; on my last day of interviews I had one. One day I didnt have any; the next day I had four,” she said.

For the interviewers, who could range from a recent alumnus who is now working as an associate, to a managing partner, the process on a campus visit typically consists of seeing about 20 students a day in back-to-back interviews with few breaks in between, said James V. Garvey, a shareholder in the Chicago office of Vedder Price, where he chairs the firm’s associate hiring committee.

During this OCI season, Garvey said, his firm was planning to visit 25 law schools, mostly in the Midwest.

”The goal is to determine, based on that short period of time you spend with someone, whether you think they have the intellectual capabilities that we think would be a good fit for our different practice groups,” Garvey said. ”Do they appear to be a person who can take on responsibility at an early stage? Do they exhibit confidence in themselves? Are they articulate? Are they enthusiastic? Do they appear to be the go-getter types who will be able to operate independently when they need to, but at the same time are not afraid to ask questions?”

For the most part, Garvey said, initial decisions about a candidate are based on a gut read.

”The old saying that first impressions are very important holds true in what’s a pretty intense 20-minute process,” Garvey said. ”You can get a pretty good sense of who would be a good fit or not for our firm based upon the first five minutes of the interview and, I suspect, the same holds true for the law student.”

The bidding process

While actual interviewing on campuses generally starts in August, the process begins in spring, when law schools set their calendars for the fall recruiting period, Garvey said.

Schools take varying approaches to determining interviewing schedules. Many of them kick off the OCI season with a bidding process that has students signing up for interview slots with law firms, and ranking the firms in the order of their preference.

The computerized bidding process involves some strategizing on the students’ part.

”It’s a very complicated mash-up of factors that results in what results you actually get for your bidding,” Northwestern’s Mooney said. ”You have to think about city, size of the firm, popularity, and how many slots they have — If the firm has 80 slots, then there’s more of a chance you’re going to get that firm.”

At some schools, firms are allowed to prescreen for applicants they would like to interview, based on students’ resumes or grades. Or, firms may be matched with students based on the criteria set by the firm.

However, at many top-tier schools, such as Northwestern, interviewers are presented with a stream of students based on a lottery system in which grades or class rankings are not a factor, Chamberlain said. It is only after a student gets a foot in the door of a first interview with a law firm that grade point averages and similar information about a candidate become known.

”Even people with not-so-great GPAs get to make their pitch to a firm,” said Chamberlain, referring to the lottery scheduling system at Northwestern. ”The students bid, and then the computer spits out schedules for the employers, and the employers have to interview everybody on that schedule.

”At schools that don’t have a lottery, it could be the same 20, 30, 40, 50 students that get all the interviews because theyre going for the students who are in the top of the class,” Chamberlain said. ”It’s just very few schools at the top of the U.S. News rankings that are fortunate enough to have a lottery system. The firms are willing to see, basically, any student who signs up for them.”

Preparation, efficiency is key

On-campus interviewing can be an arduous process for law students who are new to the recruiting scene, but that’s where advisers with career services offices at the law schools come into play.

”We start with mandatory programs in April for these students,” Chamberlain said. ”We have weekly newsletters over the summer. Then, we’re always available for one-on-one sessions to discuss their bidding strategies, interviewing tips, going over some of the rules.

”A lot of the skills they need to prepare for OCI, they need for any job. It’s standard job-searching stuff.”

That preparation, students said, includes researching the firms, as well as the backgrounds of the lawyers who are scheduled to meet with them for a first interview.

For many students, the preparation work for the fall OCI season starts well before April.

”In November, you start talking with your career counselor about what you want for this past summer, but you also start mapping out the bigger picture about what you want out of OCI,” said King, the Northwestern 2L. ”Then, in spring there are these receptions — You sort of mingle and mix and interact with a lot of the firms, and you learn a little bit about them, and then you start honing initial ideas of ‘Okay — I like firm X, but firm Y’s people really are strange. I probably won’t bid on them in OCI.’

”Then the pace picks up in March and April, where we have all-class meetings with career office folks to talk directly about OCI and to talk about your 1L summer and how to use that productively,” King continued. ”And then over the summer you’re doing electronic research on the firms and employers, you’re talking with your individual career counselor, you’re developing [ideas about] who youre going to bid on.”

Students said they also sought advice from rising 3Ls and others who went through the process before them.

”I’ve spoken to people who are interviewing in the market I’m interested in — even down to, ‘How do you figure out your callback [schedule] so as not to miss classes?”’ Mooney said.

On that day in mid-August at Northwestern, King — with 25 on-campus interviews already under his belt — checked the schedule posted on a wall at the ”command center” to confirm the meeting room location and name of the interviewer he would see next.

He reached his destination on the buildings second floor and settled into a seat outside a closed-door chamber. From there, a fellow law student could be seen through a window, wrapping up his session.

”You always have a little anxiety that you’re going to go in there and stink it up,” King acknowledged. ”But that preparation over the summer is why I feel comfortable entering into this interview.”

Students who are up next for a given interview are instructed to knock on the door at their scheduled interview time, King said.

”I try to give them a minute or two over,” he said, moments before offering three knocks. ”You don’t want to stop somebody from having a really good interview.

”Efficiency [during the 20-minute session] is key,” King said. ”Because, when that knock comes, if you have not gotten your message across, there is that sinking feeling.”

But that didn’t seem to be the result for King, who had worked this past summer in a law firm in Cincinnati.

”They asked me, ‘What was the most rewarding project you worked on over the summer?”’ he said, following the interview with two lawyers from the East Coast office of a large, Chicago-based firm. ”It’s pretty easy to talk about. Having been through 20-odd interviews, I’ve told that story a number of times before and I’ve kind of got it together on how to tell it quickly and effectively. Practice makes perfect.”

Questions run the gamut

Generally, King said, an interview for him started out by handing over some paperwork, which typically included a resume, a copy of his law school transcript, a list of references, and a writing sample.

From there, the topics covered in those 20 minutes with various lawyers could run the gamut.

”Yesterday, I spoke about skiing in Whistler Blackcomb, British Columbia, for 15 or 20 minutes in one of my interviews — it was fun,” King said.

For Mooney, there were the more formal interview questions, such as: ”’What was the difficulty you faced at your last job and how did you overcome it?”’ she said.

And, there were the interviews that took on a more casual, conversational tone.

”I had a discussion about the best way to make a flank steak salad, because cooking is one of the interests on my resume,” Mooney said.

”Some interviewers want to go through your resume and ask you about each thing on it, and some will pick up on one thing, and it could be something you have in common, and then they’ll run with that,” she continued. ”It’s totally the personality of the interviewer and what they’re looking for.”

But it could also be about what the prospective summer associate wants to glean from the interviewer.

”It’s sort of where they [interviewers] want to take it, and also where you want to take it in terms of the questions you ask,” Mooney said. ”I always am interested in why they chose the firm and why it’s been the right place for them.”

Michael Roth, an associate in the real estate department of Bell, Boyd & Lloyd, was among the interviewers on campus at Northwestern.

”You’re certainly looking for people who have good grades, are near the top of the class, and have done well in law school. But then, for me, it’s [about] personality. How did they handle themselves? And then, it’s just the conversation,” Roth said. ”You get to select people you think would do well in callback interviews — The thing you’re looking for is, at the end of the day, when I walk out of the room, who are the people I remember?

”What I was really looking for is, is this someone I’d want to work with every day? — Is there something interesting about them? What types of things do they like outside of legal work, and what types of questions did they ask that are a little bit off the beaten path?”

‘A worthwhile endeavor’

For the firms offering summer associate programs, on-campus recruiting can amount to a big investment, law firm leaders said, considering the fees firms are required to pay to participate in a law school’s OCI program, the costs associated with candidates’ transportation, and room and board during the callback interviewing process, and the hours spent by firm attorneys involved in recruiting and selecting candidates.

Still, said Ungaretti & Harris’ Mihm, ”it is a worthwhile endeavor.”

”Having a summer program gives both the law student and the law firm a chance to take a look at each other before the law student becomes a first-year associate,” Mihm said. ”The alternative is not knowing what you’re buying, so to speak.”

A challenge each fall, for many law firms, Mihm said, is projecting entry-level hiring needs so far in advance.

”We end up with having to, literally, do a little bit of looking into the crystal ball to figure out how many offers to give out, and how many will be accepted,” Mihm said. ”Trying to handicap that each fall is a nail-biting exercise. The danger is, we don’t want to end up with more ’summers’ than we believe we can give offers [of first-year associate positions] to.”

While OCI is a popular hiring model for the big firms, most law school graduates nationwide do not obtain jobs through that process, said James G. Leipold, executive director of the National Association for Legal Career Professionals (NALP), the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit group that tracks legal employment.

According to data collected by NALP, Leipold said, only 22.6 percent of jobs for the nations law school graduates of 2007 were obtained through the fall OCI process, about the same number that were obtained through self-initiated contacts, such as a letter or phone call.

The OCI process has worked well in yielding high employment rates at Northwestern, where ”we have more firms coming here than we have students to give them,” said David E. Van Zandt, dean of the law school. However, Van Zandt stressed, the recruiting system that has been followed by law firms for years — from the on-campus interviews, to the callbacks and final summer or fall employment offers — comes with its share of flaws.

”It’s very inefficient for the firms, and it’s not particularly good for the students, because there’s a two-week period where they run through these interviews and they don’t have, really, a good way of understanding how the firms differ, and what might be a better fit for them,” Van Zandt said.

The dean said a main problem with the commonly held approach to hiring new law graduates is that most firms, while focusing largely on grades, appear to be lacking a competency framework for what they are seeking in a candidate.

”Some firms are ahead, in terms of coming up with what they’re looking for — basic skill sets. But I don’t see many law firms doing that yet, where the interviewer is told to go in and rate people on a scale of these different attributes,” Van Zandt said. ”What tends to happen now is, go in, have a nice conversation and determine whether you like them. That’s wonderful, but not a good way to find future employees.”

The dean said he is advocating for a more structured recruitment effort, similar to the approaches taken by accounting or consulting firms. ”If you look at the way consulting firms hire people,” he said, ”consulting firms, in particular, want people to invest by, maybe, preparing a problem or a case analysis — There are a lot of recruitment processes out there that law firms just don’t follow.

”[Law firms] are devoting a lot of lawyer time to traveling all over the country to do these interviews. They’re seeing lots of people that either, at the end of the day, theyre not going to want or, they have a low chance of getting them,” Van Zandt said. ”A student will get interview offers from a bunch of law firms and doesn’t really know if it will be a good fit for him or, they’re not particularly invested in a firm. They may have their own pecking order, but it’s certainly not guaranteed to be a good fit.

”If you make the students invest, and you do a better job of selecting, your retention is going to be better.”

Increasingly, NALP’s Leipold said, law firms have been extending offers for callbacks sooner in the process.

”It’s not unusual to get your callback offer the same day [as that first on-campus interview],” he said. ”I think law firms are trying to gain a competitive advantage. If they see somebody they like, they feel it’s to their advantage to respond quickly.”

Competition among firms vying for top law school talent has become fiercer in recent years. But that trend, Leipold pointed out, has been commensurate with the run-up in the legal economy.

”The biggest firms have grown in the last 10 years. So, they hired far more associates than they used to. In that sense, what we’ve seen in the last number of years is an increase in competition,” he said. ”The economy has been good, in general, the need for associates at big firms has grown, and the number of law students has remained flat.”

In the current economic climate, however, Leipold said, ”it’s too soon to say. We may see a backing off from that competition.”

Keeping a litigation scorecard

By Maria Kantzavelos

In his 17 years as editor of the Law Bulletin Publishing Co.’s Jury Verdict Reporter, a group of publications that track civil jury verdicts and negotiated settlements across Illinois, John L. Kirkton has heard some intriguing tidbits of conventional wisdom, perceptions and impressions about the civil litigation arena.

”Leonard Ring, one of the old-time lawyers who was a contemporary of Phil Corboy Sr., had a theory about closing arguments. That they had to be kept short because the jury that sat there and got sore sitting, listening to you, was not going to favor your client or you very much,” Kirkton said. ”I think that was typical of lawyers at one time or another. That they had these theories that maybe didn’t completely prove out in fact, but maybe had some logical component that made them make sense.

”I think that’s where some of these misconceptions or myths about litigation may come from. They may have seen something that supported that theory down the road, but it doesnt necessarily bear out in reality.”

Kirkton, a lawyer who became editor of the Jury Verdict Reporter in 1991, when the Law Bulletin Publishing Co. acquired the group —which dates back to 1959 — oversees an array of newsletters and indexes that report on various aspects of civil litigation across Illinois, mainly for an audience of trial lawyers looking for guidance in valuing their cases.

During his tenure, he has had a hand in tracking information on more than 50,000 jury verdicts, settlements and new lawsuit filings.

Kirkton recently talked with Chicago Lawyer magazine — also a publication of the Law Bulletin Publishing Co. — about his observations of some of these perceptions or rules of thumb, and whether they hold up after crunching the numbers.

He also offered his take on a variety of issues and trends in civil jury verdicts and settlements.

Here are some excerpts from our conversations, where Kirkton digs into a mountain of statistics to share his perspective on those topics, and more.

Chicago Lawyer: Please discuss some of these ”myths” you’ve heard of over the years, and tell us whether your statistics bear them out.

Myth #1: Plaintiff-friendly Cook v. Litigation graveyards of the collar counties

Kirkton: At one time, the attorneys believed that in order for a medical malpractice plaintiff to have a fighting chance at winning a substantial verdict, it had to be venued in Cook County. But, at least over the last five years in the data I’ve reviewed, that’s not the case.

One of the things I had done this past year was a review of medical negligence litigation in Illinois, comparing Cook County and non-Cook County, to see if there was any truth in that belief that you could not win a major medical malpractice verdict unless it was venued in Cook County.

In the study [''Medical Negligence Litigation in Illinois: Facts and Figures,'' published in the Jury Verdict Reporter's May 2008 e-newsletter, Illinois Litigation Highlights], comparing both Cook County and non-Cook County verdicts over the same period of time [September 2002 through August 2007], the plaintiffs prevailed in 32.4 percent of the [approximately 525] Cook County med mal trials during that five-year period.

For the non-Cook County med mal civil jury trials [approximately 200 trials from every Illinois county except Cook], 30.3 percent of the time, the plaintiff won.

There wasn’t that big of a discrepancy between the Cook County and non-Cook County outcomes over that five-year period.

Certainly, there’s going to be variations within the Illinois counties outside Cook.

DuPage County over the five-year period had a 20.5 percent plaintiff win rate; Kane County, 29.2 percent; Lake County, 32 percent. In Winnebago County we reported no plaintiff verdicts at all during that five-year period. On the high end, Will County, 44.4 percent of the time, plaintiffs won medical malpractice trials.

DuPage has only had eight, million-dollar [or above] med mal verdicts in the last 20 years. Five of them have occurred in the last five years. You can win there — it’s not Death Valley.

It’s not easy, if only 20 percent of the time a plaintiff wins, but you can win there, and that’s probably one of the biggest misconceptions among the trial lawyers — that you cannot win there.

I looked over the last five years, both Cook versus non-Cook, at awards of $5 million or more. In Cook County, 6 percent of those med mal cases got an award of $5 million or more. In the non-Cook County cases, 5 percent of them got an award of $5 million or more. Surprisingly close.

I think that’s an interesting stat. Because even if the plaintiff win rate is reasonably close, then there’s probably somebody out there who’s going to say, ‘Yeah, but the jurors outside Cook County give them 150 bucks and say, be on your way.’ But the fact is, I think that statistic shows that there are large awards being given outside of Cook County.

Myth #2: Madison County as ‘Judicial Hellhole‘

Kirkton: This came up in 2004, 2005, during the height of the tort reform movement. The idea, at least what was stated, was that Madison County had runaway juries and frivolous verdicts that were sending doctors scurrying out of the state and leaving patients unattended because there were no doctors left for fear of liability.

That’s a very persuasive argument — if you’re in a rural area, and your one doctor goes, you’re in trouble. The argument was that Madison County was just driving doctors away with their awards.

At least in terms of medical malpractice, I don’t find any basis for treating Madison County as a Judicial Hellhole.

In the last 10 years, Madison County juries have given plaintiffs a 33 percent win rate in medical malpractice cases. That’s hardly extreme, when you look at Cook County at 32.4 percent, Will County at 44 percent, Lake County at 32 percent.

You have to go back to the year 2000 to find a plaintiff medical malpractice verdict in Madison County over $1 million. In the last 10 years, we’ve reported nine Madison County cases with awards of over 5 million bucks. None of those were medical malpractice. Most of them were asbestos-related, product liability actions.

You’ve got relatively small awards, infrequent big awards. I don’t see how it’s a hellhole. I suspect the facts were simply distorted, for either economic or political gain, rather than truly expressing the reality of what was going on down there. I would never call it a Judicial Hellhole — certainly not in the med mal area. There simply is no basis, looking at the med mal outcomes, either in the frequency or the size of the awards, to label them a hellhole.

Myth #3: The Christmas effect

Kirkton: This is one that I’m not sure is supported in reality, but I’ve heard about it forever, and that is that defense attorneys prefer not to schedule a civil trial in December out of concern that the holiday spirit wil