The Road to Becoming an Associate

By Olivia Clarke

Throughout Sean Wieber’s life, the importance of team has been evident - whether as a third-year associate at Winston & Strawn or as a football player at Northwestern University.

“I started playing recreational sports probably from the moment I could walk,” said Wieber, who grew up in Sandusky, Ohio. “I jumped from sport to sport to sport by season, and I think I learned a lot of team-building techniques and coaching styles.”

Law by necessity requires a team mentality, he said.

“You have to ask questions, work well with others, and that is not just internally,” said Wieber, 30. “I have learned a ton through co-counsel and a ton through opposing counsel.”

He said lawyers must play well with others and work together for a common goal. Whether playing sports or practicing law - it doesn’t matter - the fundamentals remain the same.

When asked what lessons he’s learned as an athlete that assist him in his legal career, he said, “The greatest lesson would be adversity. It sounds weird, but whether it’s on a bad play or a bad call, a loss is equivalent to having a judge rule against you on a motion or a oral argument or ultimately the case. Nobody wants to be in a bad situation . but it’s really about what you do when in that position. Do you continue to let things be bad? What can you do to turn it in the right direction?”

Wieber played football at Perkins High School in Sandusky. During his four years there, four different coaches led his team - a team he described as “mediocre at best.” But the team experienced one good season, which put it on the map and allowed him to become a leader.

Northwestern University, as well as several smaller schools, came calling. But he chose Northwestern because he could play in the Big Ten and get a quality education.

“The bottom line was I didn’t need to play a snap, and it would still be the best decision of my life as compared to playing for some of the other schools,” he said. “I never really thought in the back of my mind that I had the skills to play in the NFL. With that in the background, you think, ‘What’s going to set me up for a professional career, which lasts a lot longer?’ You have dreams and goals, but I thought I’d bamboozled them into recruiting me in the first place.”

He went from being a three-sport high school standout athlete to Northwestern, where every recruit had a long list of accomplishments. He would experience that same feeling of trying to live up to the best during his first year at Winston as a lawyer, where every new associate was at the top of their class.

At Northwestern, Wieber became an invited walk-on, which meant he didn’t receive an athletic scholarship. He red-shirted his freshman year and saw his first game action as a safety and on special teams his sophomore year. His junior year he became a starting safety, and that’s the year Northwestern won the Big Ten championship.

But being a college athlete without an athletic scholarship taught him many lessons.

“With every single aspect, you had to be perfect because if you weren’t perfect, there was another person that they had already invested in financially . and they could go out and get another recruit and you would be by the wayside,” he said.

Wieber has carried this underdog mentality into his professional career. He believes in always working hard because there is always someone who can take your place.

“As a walk-on, you are always the hardest worker, smart, you never miss a deadline, and they don’t have to worry about your academics,” he said. “You’re not going to get into trouble.”

At the end of his second year on the team, he earned an athletic scholarship - something his roommate of four years, Bob Barz, earned at the same time.

Barz, now an associate at K&L Gates, said Wieber is very motivated and smart.

“He’s dedicated to what he does, and he’s also at the same time able to be very personable,” Barz said. “People make their own luck and fortune, and I think Sean’s personality of being a dedicated, driven person puts him in the position to succeed.”

Those who played in the safety and cornerback positions would train together. Wieber and three other athletes in the same class became close friends because of that. In that group was Rashidi Ayodele Wheeler.

“He was the opposite of me. I was the walk-on guy just trying to hold on,” Wieber said. “He was a blue-chip recruit.”

In early August 2001, Wheeler and Wieber were among a group of football players getting ready to do their running tests. These tests were very important, because if a player who starts doesn’t meet the criteria, he loses his starting spot.

The night before, a bad rain flooded their normal practice field, so that morning, they moved to another area for the tests. Wheeler had a history of asthma and also had trouble completing the test on time. He asked Wieber to run with him so that he could keep his pace because Wieber did well on these tests.

During the middle of the running test, Wheeler passed out and went into cardiac arrest. EMTs rushed him to Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

“Huddled in a room no bigger than this were 25 guys that had gone over to the hospital,” he said. “I remember the doctor walking in and saying, ‘I’m sorry we lost him.’ Still, just saying it I get tingles down my back.”

About a month later, the Sept. 11 attacks happened. The combination of those two disasters affected Wieber’s life significantly.

“It certainly put football in perspective,” he said. “After seeing a close friend die in my arms, basically. We did have trainers, but I was with him all the time. I was there from the beginning in the locker room to running with him to being with him when he went into resuscitation. . Living through that and seeing that even at a young age puts things in perspective. I knew at that moment that I wasn’t going to come back and play a fifth year. Seeing how fragile life is, I thought, ‘You know, it’s time to go on with something else.’”

Barz said Wieber took the death particularly hard because of his friendship with Wheeler.

“Rashidi was one of the players who he practiced with, and he met with Sean every day,” Barz said. “They played the same position. I think that experience had a deep impact on Sean, as well as everyone on the team.”

While at Northwestern, Wieber met R. Mark McCareins, a partner at Winston & Strawn, who was a big proponent of the university.

Wieber asked if he could help him find a position in his law firm during the summer so that he could be around lawyers. He knew that he wanted to practice law since he was a fifth-grader dressed in a suit participating in a mock land debate.

In the summer of 1999, Wieber worked in Winston’s law library, shelving books, doing interlibrary loans and helping find clippings and research. He would work out from about 5:30 to 7:30 a.m., then work at the firm from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and then work out in the evening or watch game tapes.

McCareins, now a senior partner at Winston, said Wieber has always demonstrated a very good work ethic, and, because of his background in team sports, he’s a real team player.

“I think he understands that when we are working on a team litigation project everyone has their own role,” McCareins said. “The ultimate thing that drives us all is winning for our client. It is not so much about individual glory but about working as a team to achieve a great result for our clients.”

After graduating from Northwestern in 2002, Wieber asked the firm if it had any openings as a project assistant. He wanted to work there while getting ready for the LSAT.

He worked in that position for about two months, when he received a call from Gov. James Thompson, then chairman of the firm. Thompson regularly had an assistant who would drive him to events and be his “bag boy.” He needed a new assistant, and he asked for some names of possible candidates. Wieber’s name was on that list.

But when Thompson called Wieber to his office, Wieber automatically assumed he was in trouble. He didn’t know much about Thompson - as someone who grew up in Ohio, he didn’t even know which party Thompson was a member of.

Thompson asked about Wieber’s background and told him about how many of his assistants went on to stellar careers. He asked him if he would like to be his next assistant.

Thompson told him there was no time for him to finish the work he had started, because they needed to be at a fundraiser in the morning in Bloomington, Ill. He said, “There’s a garage and a firm car,” and flipped Wieber the keys to an Audi. Meanwhile, Wieber was trying to process that there even was a garage and a firm car.

Wieber worked for Thompson for about five years. He helped him with his administrative duties, such as setting up his travel plans. He accompanied him to events and deferred attending Chicago-Kent College of Law for a year because Thompson was appointed to the 9-11 Commission, and he wanted to be there during that historical time.

“He’s like my Chicago father,” Wieber said about Thompson. “He is truly, truly a mentor. He has been a huge influence and opened a lot of doors by being associated with him. I think he’s one of the last few people that treats being a young lawyer as it started, as an apprenticeship.

“You come in and you may have read some books, but you need to learn. And the only way to learn is to do. He trusts me and knows my background and knows who I am as a person. He’s given me some opportunities on cases that even some partners wouldn’t get on. It’s the crack team of Thompson and Wieber. The stuff I work with him on is just me and him. He said he had gotten his start because someone put some trust and belief in him.”

Thompson, senior chairman, describes Wieber as “a comer” and “out of the ordinary.” He has the ability to persuade people in his writing, speaking and analysis, he said.

“He’s just a prodigious worker,” Thompson said. “He’s assigned to some of the biggest cases in the office. … He puts in enormous hours, and he’s very talented and a great writer. He’s a very clear thinker, and we’ve just formed a really good partnership. I wish I could find another case where I could work with him.”

During Wieber’s last semester of law school at Chicago-Kent, he took a legislative advocacy course.

Each student needed to create an initiative that had the potential to become a federal or state law. The professor went by reverse alphabetical order, so Wieber would be the first student to present his project - a situation that would prove important later on.

In the middle of the night, he got the idea that he should do something involving Wheeler, his deceased teammate. Because the team did its running tests in a different practice facility, players didn’t have all the safety equipment they normally had. And while a lot of speculation and blame surrounded Wheeler’s death, which led to his family’s suing the university, one thing that was clear was that Wheeler went into cardiac arrest, Wieber said.

He said if there had been an automated external defibrillator available, it might have increased Wheeler’s chances of survival.

He began looking through Illinois law to see what requirements there were involving defibrillators. A 2005 bill existed requiring indoor gyms to have defibrillators, but nothing was on the books involving outdoor physical fitness facilities.

He put together the Rashidi Ayodele Wheeler, or RAW Initiative. Because he was the first to go in his class, he had the time to create an actual shell bill and filed his bill on the last day that these types of bills could be filed for the spring session.

When he told his class his story about his teammate, he said, “I had classmates crying and the professor crying and they said, ‘You’ve got to do something about this.’ I thought I was just going to get an A on the project. I thought, ‘I’m done and it’s January. What do I have to do the rest of the semester?’ I knew it was going to be a big, full-time project.”

He decided to try to get his initiative turned into a law. Thompson introduced him to state Rep. Dan Burke, who had sponsored the other defibrillator bill, and state Sen. Martin Sandoval, and he got them to sponsor his bill.

“I had to be very proactive,” Wieber said. “I had to keep pushing the agenda. . It was really eye-opening.”

Even though this was a bill that seemingly everyone would support, it was still an unfunded mandate, he said.

He testified before the health committee and told Wheeler’s story. The power of the story got the bill unanimously passed out of the committee, he said.

The House and the Senate passed the bill, but when it reached the governor’s office, he wasn’t pleased with it because of some of the language. He went to Gov. Rod Blagojevich and asked him to do an amendatory veto. But that decision came with risks, because it needed to be passed again by both the House and the Senate.

It became a law in spring 2008 - a year after the process started.

“The first person I called was Rashidi’s mother,” he said. “I would send them articles as the process went on. There were tearful conversations. Here she is out in California and all she’s known of the legal system is that she has felt unfriendly treatment. Yet on the books is House Bill 1279, also known as the RAW Initiative. The next kid or adult has a better chance of survival. It was the first real thing that I think honored her son, and I think that meant a lot.”

Wieber’s talents as a lawyer are already being recognized in the legal community.

This past year, the Illinois State Bar Association named him as “Young Lawyer of the Year 2008-2009.” He was the first associate with less than two years of experience to receive the award, according to the firm. And Chicago-Kent College of Law’s Alumni Board of Directors selected him as its “2009 Chicago-Kent College of Law Young Alumni Award” recipient.

“A lot of my life has been right-place, right-time and taking advantage of the situation,” he said.

In 2008, Illinois Attorney General Lisa M. Madigan appointed Wieber to serve as a special assistant attorney general to defend Blagojevich, who is a defendant in a federal civil rights conspiracy lawsuit. Thompson was appointed in 2007.

Since he started at the firm, Wieber has worked on a big securities matter for Ernst & Young. They begin arbitration this summer.

“They are a great client, a very sophisticated client, and it’s a very big team,” he said. “It’s a complicated case, and it makes you think. Auditing and accounting matters are tough because it’s not in my background. . You are working toward one goal, and we’re working with a client that’s really involved and understands and wants to work with you.”

He also works on pro bono matters and represents The ARK, a social service, non-profit organization in Chicago. He handles some of its complex litigation.

“My balance is, if I’m part of a bigger team, then I like a smaller team,” he said. “Some of the interactions that you don’t get or the opportunities you don’t get on one you get on the other. They are a good balance. You need multiple cases, and you need balance in the types of cases you have and the types of people you interact with.”

He said he has a type A personality - but not to the point where people are laughing behind his back. He’s detail-oriented and wants challenges.

“Everything probably developed from my experience at Northwestern,” he said. “Your reputation in this business is your most cherished thing and the one thing most quickly diminished if something goes wrong. With that in mind, I try to keep in mind that I definitely have to be a team player, but I also have to be a team leader.

“I want folks to be able to lean on me. I also expect the same from my teammates. All those attributes I had as a walk-on [at Northwestern]. Hard-working, diligent, those aren’t choices. I kind of got one gear, either on or off.”

Because of his personality, he must be careful with what he takes on because he doesn’t want to take on too much responsibility to the detriment of his clients, his wife and his family.

“I would love to have a model that has perfect balance,” he said. “In this day and age, with the technology, it really has become a 24/7, 365-day business. I agree to that most of the time. But I definitely need to keep in mind the importance of keeping a balance that will make everybody more efficient in what they do. .

“My personality has trouble letting go in some ways. I need to personally strike a balance and meet my obligations and be seen as getting the job done, but doing it in a way where people say, ‘Man, he’s not super-stressed out.’ I’ve seen it both ways. I try to learn from those around me and those above me and see what personality traits fit into my future.”

Climbing the Ladder: To Try or Not to Try

By Shermin Kruse
Barack, Ferrazzano, Kirschbaum & Nagelberg

If you are an associate at a large firm reading this article, chances are that you have not been involved in a trial and your prospects of being involved in one are slim.

Most likely you have not even seen a real commercial trial.

At the same time, you may have heard the proverbial “they” say that “to be a great litigator, you have to love trying cases.” You’re not quite sure why this is, since the vast majority of cases are resolved before trial (you’ve heard 95 percent, though you do not really know where that figure comes from). Rather difficult, then, for you to accurately assess your ability to succeed as a litigator.

The unbearable heaviness of trials

While it is helpful to love trials, what is more significant is mastering them and, even more importantly, not fearing them.

First, it is important to understand that whether you enjoy trial or not, nearly everything we do as litigators is geared toward ultimate success at trial.

For instance, at the time you are drafting discovery requests and deposition outlines, the first question you ask yourself is, “What do both sides need to prove at trial?” Then draft the requests and outlines in a manner that is most likely to verify your position and damage your opponent’s case.

Though it is easy to lose sight of this, depositions are primarily there to impeach witnesses at trial. Regardless of the damaging testimony you got out of a key witness in a conference room, that testimony can be refined or explained away at trial. We videotape depositions to impeach not with pages from a transcript, but with video clips from the deposition where the exact same question was answered differently.

Even a sophisticated settlement strategy includes a design to maximize your client’s chances of winning in court. If either you or your client are trial-averse, whether it be for lack of experience or fear induced by trial myths and folklore, it will not only cost you at summary judgment time, but it will damage your chances of a favorable settlement.

Knowing and understanding trials is a necessary component of litigating.

Yet this article began with an understanding that most young complex commercial litigators have not had any real trial experience or even any trial exposure. Even if you are exposed to trials, you are too young and your cases too large for you to have a real and meaningful role in the trial.

There are simple and effective solutions to this dilemma: (1) pro bono work; and (2) more pro bono work. That pro bono cases present an opportunity for you to use your law degree to give back to your community is reason enough to engage in them.

Significantly, however, they also provide opportunities for you to learn and grow as a lawyer. Asylum cases, for instance, are a great way to conduct and manage a small but important trial - all on your own. There are opportunities to get involved as a domestic violence advocate or even in complex commercial intellectual property disputes by pro bono representation of artists. Opportunities that expose you to the inside of a courtroom, require you to lead hearings and make presentations are abundant, and the work will fulfill you as well.

Have a little faith in yourself

Perhaps you are the sort of person who, right before a hearing or even for several days before, suffers from tremendous anxiety. Courtrooms, especially when you have had such little experience with them, are intimidating. Your stomach is too full of angst to consume any real food, and your sleep is too interrupted to dream of anything other than the upcoming hearing. This all-consuming nervous energy has the capacity to convince you that you do not like hearings or trials, and that you are better off behind your desk.

Do not let this dissuade you from going out there and trying your best. Know that most, if not all, lawyers are nervous before a big hearing and some of the best trial lawyers, like great actors right before they go on stage, are sick to their stomach before trial. The reason is that many performance-oriented people experience performance anxiety.

Have a little faith in yourself. Give yourself a chance (or several chances) to fail and learn from your mistakes. Judge the actual performance, and not your anxiety leading up to it or the final verdict.

Remember: The cardinal rule of trials is to prepare for the best, prepare for the worst, and prepare for everything in between. Work hard to understand your case, know your documents, learn your case law, and do run-throughs of your outline. Ask your friends and colleagues to serve as mock judges and practice your directs, openings and closings, ask them to grill you as much as possible, and make sure to return the favor. You cannot change the facts of the case, but through preparation and experience, you can significantly change your client’s likelihood of success regardless of the facts.

A bit of experience, significant preparation, and some faith can convert even the most nervous young attorney into a masterful trial lawyer. This, I promise you, will make you a better advocate even when the goal is to avoid trial.

An International Perspective: The Politics of Justice

By Kwabena Appenteng
Greene and Letts

Last summer the world saw the poignant images of American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee being reunited with their families after spending 140 days of a 12-year sentence in a North Korean jail. The severity of the journalists’ sentence connoted a crime much more heinous than illegally crossing the China-North Korea border while investigating a story, evidence to many that the women were being used as political pawns by the North Korean government amid growing tensions over North Korea’s nuclear program. The Obama administration saw the same thing and, after much deliberation, former President Clinton privately traveled to North Korea to negotiate the journalists’ release with North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il.

As American Amanda Knox sits in an Italian jail serving a 26-year sentence for the murder of her British roommate, Meredith Kercher, her family and many observers in the United States, including a U.S. senator, are seeking similar government intervention, calling for the intercession of the U.S. government and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to overturn the verdict reached by the Italian jury.

As a child of a culture that espouses a strict belief in punishing those responsible for committing crimes against society - a belief so ardently held within Ghanaian culture that those caught stealing are frequently violently beaten before being handed over to the police, if they are still alive - the concept of a government intervening on behalf of one of its citizens found guilty of committing a crime abroad baffled my foreign mind. Aside from enabling those who have perpetrated crimes against society to escape the punishment society has deemed appropriate for them, doesn’t government intervention patronize and devalue the judicial processes of other nations? Yet, upon reading about the case of Amanda Knox, even my culturally hardened heart began to question whether the U.S. government should step in.

Accused of murdering her British roommate during a drug- and alcohol-filled orgy gone wrong, Knox’s trial featured allegations that Knox was coerced into signing a false confession, fragmented and flawed DNA forensic evidence, and a chief prosecutor who wavered over Knox’s motive during the trial. As if this were not enough, Knox was also forced to fend off anti-American sentiment and the sotto voce of the Italian media that portrayed Knox as a wild child and a femme fatale, referring to her as the “Foxy Knoxy,” and leaking such confidential information as Knox’s diary and photos of the victim’s body.

The argument that the right of government to intervene in the judicial process is a necessary humanitarian requirement - as stressed by the White House during its attempts to release Lee and Ling - makes complete sense. This axiom was most recently demonstrated in China as the British Foreign Office tried to prevent the execution of Akmal Shaikh, a mentally ill British man who was sentenced to death by the Chinese government after being convicted of drug smuggling.

Despite frantic appeals from the British Foreign Office, amid claims from Shaikh’s family and supporters that he was tricked into carrying the 4kg of heroin with promises of an opportunity to record a song for world peace, Shaikh was still executed by lethal injection last December.

But in cases in which such severe, and arguably inhumane, punishment like that faced by Akmal Shaikh is not at stake, should governments get involved?

Despite the legal irregularities at her trial highlighted by American lawyers and legal analysts, Knox was still found guilty of the crime for which she was tried. Whether these legal irregularities played into the jury’s verdict is over my fragile, second-year removed from law school brain, but in my humble opinion, it isn’t relevant. Knox committed her crime in Italy, a country in which the ban on the publication of police investigative reports, court records or such other information as Knox’s diary or photos of the victim’s body during trial is not strictly upheld. Although a synopsis of Knox’s trial may scream injustice on this side of the Atlantic, who’s to say that the next Italian would not be forced to suffer a similar trial?

This, to me, is the elephant in the room. The alleged injustice that many believe was committed against Amanda Knox was not just her supposedly unfair trial, but the fact that she was tried at the hands of a legal system that does things very differently from the United States. Whether we admit it or not, it is hard to live in a nation as powerful and influential as the United States without developing a warped sense of how things should be done. But the sheer diversity of cultures that exist in our world should remind each of us that every country is going to do things differently, whether we think it’s the right way to do things or not.

There will clearly always be a need for our governments to protect us from unjust punishment when we are unable to protect ourselves or are merely being used as part of a political game.

However, there should never be a need for our governments to needlessly devalue the judicial systems of other nations because they differ from their own, no matter how unfair the punishment may seem.

Basketball: Lawyers Play the Game

By Ted McClelland

One of the longest-running pick-up basketball games in Chicago takes place three days a week, at noon, in the West Loop Athletic Club, a tony Randolph Street gym.

You won’t see the best players in town there, but you will see some of the biggest names. Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan played there before he was drafted by the White House to be education secretary. So did county board member Forrest Claypool, and David Axelrod, President Obama’s campaign strategist and fellow hoops junkie. It may not be the most high-flying game in town - try to imagine the shambling Axelrod throwing down a dunk - but it is the most high-powered.

The game goes back to the 1980s, when two assistant state’s attorneys decided they wanted a little lunchtime basketball to break up the stress of trying criminals. Bruce R. Meckler, now a partner at Meckler Bulger Tilson Marick & Pearson, and Richard A. Devine, who later became state’s attorney himself and now practices at Meckler Bulger, got a game together at the old Illinois Athletic Club.

“Dick and I started this game 25 years ago,” Meckler said. “It was lots of lawyers, business people, judges, some politicians. Now we’ve got people from all walks of life. We’ve got a couple pastors, bankers, a Chicago fireman. We’ve got guys who played Division I basketball at Southern Illinois and Miami of Ohio.”

On a recent Friday afternoon, the players running up and down the court were even more diverse than the cast of the old TV basketball drama “The White Shadow.” All races, heights, ages and points per game averages were represented on the court. The games went to 22, two points at a time, and everyone was matched up against a guy who wouldn’t embarrass him.

Early in the game, Meckler, 54, had a ball stolen from him, but he made up for it later with a basket reminiscent of Michael Jordan’s Last Shot. The entire gym burst into a hand-slapping celebration when the ball swished through the net.

“Yeah!” Meckler shouted. “I was due for one.”

“I think that made Bruce’s week,” a fellow player said.

Nothing could top that flourish, so Meckler sat on the bench, where he talked about how lawyering and basketball go together.

“I was in court all morning,” he said. “This is absolute 100 percent stress reduction. The physicality, the arguments. You see arguments all the time.”

(None of them migrate from the basketball court to a higher court, as on the “L.A. Law” episode in which basketball-playing lawyers threatened to sue one another over an alleged foul.)

There’s a saying that “Basketball is life. The rest is just details.” Is basketball a metaphor for the law, too? Meckler sees parallels.

“The competitiveness, the fire,” he said. “When you do what I do for a living, you fight. You litigate. That’s all we do.

“There’s also the discipline of playing, the teamwork. Every large case I’ve handled, you work as a team. Basketball is like that.”

At 1 p.m., Dick Devine walked onto the court. As a basketball player, he’s not quite as intimidating as he was when he showed up at 26th and California. He’s 5-foot-8, pigeon-toed and white-haired. But Devine, 66, has been into the game since he was a kid in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood, shooting baskets in alleys. In high school, he played on Loyola Academy’s lightweight team, and he’s lost none of his hustle. The ex-prosecutor strapped on a headband and a pair of goggles and scurried up and down the court to warm up. When he got into the game, Devine proved to have a smooth outside shot.

“It’s good for you physically,” he said during a break. “It gets all the junk out of your brain. You forget about prosecution and the press, everything except basketball. When you come back to work, maybe you were throwing things in the morning, but now you’re a little more relaxed.”

Thanks in large part to Obama, an avid baller who has practiced in Chicago and has filled his administration with hoops-playing cronies, basketball is the new power game.

Before leaving town, Obama was a regular at the East Bank Club. Besides Axelrod and Duncan, he played with Assistant Education Secretary Peter Cunningham.

“He’s made it kind of an ‘in’ thing,” Devine said about Obama. “For years, you had to go and golf with people. All my golfing friends were kidding me about basketball.”

Meckler will never forget the sight of Axelrod trying to put aside the presidential campaign by playing a game of basketball.

Axelrod kept two BlackBerries and a headset on the sidelines, and used them all whenever he took a break from the action. (Even now, you can tell you’re at a lawyers’ game because the courtside table is piled with cell phones.)

There’s only one downside to Obama’s love of basketball, Meckler said. By taking so many guys to Washington, he almost broke up the lunchtime basketball game.

When Dennis M. McGuire was running for circuit court judge, he got an endorsement from his old college basketball coach.

“Put Dennis on the bench,” said DePaul’s Ray Meyer. “I did.”

McGuire played at DePaul University from 1977 to 1981. Those were the Blue Demons’ glory years. At times, they were ranked No. 1 in the nation. In 1979, they went to the Final Four, losing to Indiana State.

What does McGuire remember about that game?

“I had a good seat!” he laughed.

McGuire was a star forward at Holy Cross High School in River Grove. In his senior year, he was the MVP of Meyer’s basketball camp. That won him a basketball scholarship to DePaul, the dream of every Catholic League player of that era.

When McGuire arrived at DePaul, though, he found himself stuck on the bench behind Mark Aguirre and Terry Cummings, who went on to long careers in the NBA. In four years, McGuire started one game. He got to play against Western Michigan when Aguirre missed the bus to Kalamazoo. As a result, he developed no illusions about a pro career.

“The writing was on the wall,” he said. “I was talented. These guys were gifted. It was pretty clear to me I’d have to do something else.”

A few months after graduation, McGuire found himself in Reykjavik as the player/coach of the University of Iceland. In Iceland, he was a superstar. The Icelandic basketball players were tall but undisciplined and unschooled in fundamentals. McGuire racked up 20 or 30 points a game as he led his team to victories over rival clubs.

“It was like a paid vacation, but there really wasn’t much to do,” McGuire said.

When he returned to Chicago, after just one season, McGuire was still trying to figure out life after basketball.

Some of his friends were going to law school, so he enrolled, too. After graduation from DePaul University College of Law , he clerked in the state’s attorney’s office. That was his day job. After work, McGuire was a basketball bum, playing in pick-up leagues almost every night of the week. The 6-foot-6 ex-college player was in demand all over town: at Margate Park, Broadway Armory, Warren Park. When he played on a team sponsored by River Shannon, a Lincoln Park tavern, “there were a number of teams that stopped playing against us because we had a bunch of ex-college players.”

McGuire’s basketball skills landed him a role in a Chevrolet commercial starring Michael Jordan. The producers couldn’t find any actors tall enough to play against the Bulls guard, so they recruited real basketball players. At the West Side playground where the ad was filmed, McGuire got into a game of Make It and Take It with Jordan: A player who makes a basket can keep shooting.

“I scored three times, and Jordan was guarding me,” he said. “I was mouthing off. I said, ‘He’s okay, but Aguirre’s better. You saw I scored.’ After that, he smoked me.”

After the shoot, Jordan told McGuire he would have played better in Air Jordans instead of Adidas and gave him a pair.

“I think I used them to mow the lawn,” McGuire said.

McGuire’s basketball days ended in the late 1990s, when he tore his anterior cruciate ligament and his medial collateral ligament while playing in a Lawyers’ League game. He considers the injuries a lucky break.

Basketball was consuming his life. When he was forced to give up the game, McGuire began putting more energy into his legal career. In 2002, he ran for circuit court judge and won. In the world of Chicago politics, which is dominated by Catholic high school graduates, his membership on that great Blue Demons squad proved to be an advantage.

“Playing at DePaul at that time really opened a lot of doors for me,” he said. “When I was running for judge, meeting a lot of politicians, a lot of people remembered me.”

While McGuire went from basketball to a successful legal career, some of his old teammates went in the opposite direction. Teddy Grubbs pleaded guilty to a sex offense. Skip Dillard also got into trouble with the law. In fact, McGuire was once scheduled to hear a case in which Dillard was accused of defaulting on a note. The judge was forced to recuse himself.

Mark E. McNabola never grew as tall as Dennis McGuire or had as much success in basketball, but the durable, 5-foot-9 point guard is still playing. A partner at Cogan & McNabola, he just got an invitation to join an over-50 league.

McNabola grew up around DePaul basketball. His father, Bill, played on the 1945 NIT championship squad and later served as team doctor.

On Saturday nights, the entire family would go to Mass at the college chapel, followed by dinner at White Castle and a Blue Demons game.

At Loyola Academy, McNabola played on a team that went to the Final Four of the state high school basketball tournament. But he wasn’t big enough or quick enough to play on the DePaul team of the late 1970s.

“I thought I was going to be a walk-on at DePaul,” he said. “That was the year they went to the Final Four. I was the last guy cut, and it was probably, in retrospect, the best thing that happened to me, because I’d never been cut from a team.

“It sort of puts you down to size. I wouldn’t have wanted to have been the last guy on the bench anyway.”

McNabola transferred to Northern Arizona, but after a year of riding the bench behind the coach’s son, he came home to DePaul and stayed for law school.

“Freshman year of law school, I’m sittin’ in the library, and some guy says, ‘Excuse me, I hear you can play point guard,’” he said. “He asked me to join a bunch of guys from the law review that were a couple years older than I was, then we won the Lawyers’ League at DePaul, and we won in the next two or three years.”

When McNabola hung out his shingle, he began playing in the Chicago Lawyers’ League at Angel Guardian, the gym where the Bulls practiced before moving to the Berto Center in Deerfield. The league met every Sunday morning until it folded in the mid-1990s.

“These guys were rough and tough,” McNabola said. “I was always looking for free lay-ups, but these guys were hacking.”

McNabola also played at the East Bank Club, on a team with Craig Robinson, Obama’s brother-in-law. One afternoon, they played against then-state Sen. Obama.

“You can tell that he’s a nice guy,” McNabola said about Obama. “You can tell a lot about a person’s character. He’s not an explosive player, someone that’s really good. He’s above average. A 6-foot-1 guy, unless you’re a lightning-fast point guard, you’re a dime a dozen. And he went left all the time.

“He does a little rocker step up and down. He doesn’t really shoot much, but he’s after it. He gets after it.”

Obama had a strong mid-range jumper, knew his limitations as a player and “didn’t make mistakes.”

But knowing Obama’s leftist tendencies allowed McNabola to get the better of the future president. When Obama tried to come across the middle, McNabola stole the ball and raced down court. He looked over his shoulder to see Obama was nowhere near him, and went in for a lay-up.

McNabola, who used to play three or four days a week, was recently forced to take a break as a result of a knee injury he suffered while snowboarding. But he still coaches youth basketball for fourth- through eighth-graders.

The North Side Basketball League meets at Amundsen High School. McNabola, whose son is an eighth-grader at the Francis W. Parker School, was inspired to start the league because he thought school basketball programs weren’t competitive enough and didn’t focus on the fundamentals.

“We teach the kids the right way to play basketball, the right way to be a sportsman, the way to do things with class, and the way to understand that there’s a huge parallelism between basketball and other sports and any aspect of life.”

Including the law, McNabola believes.

“You get a maturation in practicing law that also comes with basketball,” he said.

“You realize that you contribute different things under different circumstances, and it’s not just you, it’s a team game. Some days, you need to completely lock down a guard defensively, that’s where your focus is. Other days you have to shoot the ball, break a press, make free throws. It’s a multifaceted game.”

The downtown law firm of Bartlit Beck Herman Palenchar & Scott, which has its offices in the old Criminal Courts building on Hubbard Street, is just as convinced that basketball is a metaphor for law. So convinced that its conference room, The Forum, doubles as a half court. The carpeted floor is marked with a free-throw lane. A 10-foot basket hangs over the room.

When it’s time for a game, the office staff clears the floor by breaking down the modular meeting-room furniture.

“The symbolism for it is the constant reminder of teamwork,” said partner Jason L. Peltz. “A basketball saying is, ‘Guards play guard, forwards play forward.’ It’s really the same with our trial work. The whole team is critical to achieving success. Everyone has a role, and everyone has to play that role.”

Not surprisingly, most visitors want to shoot a few baskets as soon as they walk into the room. But there’s only been one dunk in the Bartlit Beck office. It happened when former Fenwick High School star Corey Maggette and his representatives used the office for a meeting. Maggette, who was then playing for the Los Angeles Clippers, threw down.

Staff members sometimes play P-I-G or H-O-R-S-E to decide who’ll pay for lunch or shoot baskets to unwind when they’re working late on a case.

Bartlit Beck recently took over the second floor, which means no more worries about a downstairs neighbor who didn’t like the sound of dribbling on the ceiling.

Case assistant Fred Malone, who played at Leo High School, first came to Bartlit Beck on a temp assignment.

He didn’t know the office had a court, but when the receptionist told him, “it made my day.”

Bartlit Beck encourages fitness - there’s a gym on the sixth floor - and a number of its staffers are former athletes. Peltz played basketball at Cranbrook Academy in Michigan.

Attorney Carrie A. Jablonski was on varsity at Harvard.

Office services manager Dan Crosby starred at Westinghouse High School and Northern Iowa and was head basketball coach at Malcolm X.

Basketball, it seems, is a game for a more active generation of attorneys than the ones who did business on the golf course.

“It seems like basketball is the new golf,” Peltz said. “You have it all the way from the president on down.

“You used to think you had to play golf to hang out with the decision makers. It seems like now, the power brokers are getting together over basketball.”

Closing Argument: Don’t Lose Ground

By Nina S. Appel
Loyola University Chicago School of Law

When I was a freshman in law school, there were so few women enrolled that each of us deserved special mention.

We were continually subjected to the question, in one form or another, “What are you doing here, taking up a place which should have gone to a man?” Strange as it must seem today, we did not recognize the inappropriateness of the question, although we certainly sensed its hostility.

The question reflected the tenor of the times, when want ads were divided between “Men” and “Women” and woe to the person (perhaps a woman?) who sought a position in the “wrong” column.

Perhaps because we truly were the silent generation, trained to respect authority, few, if any, of my colleagues sought to challenge the system. When I graduated from Columbia and applied to be a beginning teacher, then called an “associate in law,” the dean who hired me helpfully explained that if I were a man there would be a great opportunity in teaching, but as a woman, that would be impossible. I had no doubt that he was reporting the facts accurately, because I knew that only a few years before, an enormously talented woman, denied an appointment, had left Columbia to accept a rare opportunity at the University of Chicago. I had never had a female professor, not as an undergraduate at Cornell nor, of course, as a law student. So how did I respond to the dean? “Thank you for the opportunity” as I accepted the offer, albeit wondering just what opportunity had actually been offered. I shared an office at the time with four male colleagues, who each went on to a teaching career.

My former classmate, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who transferred to Columbia in her senior year, has a similar memory. In her case, the Harvard Law dean invited the few female freshmen to his home for dinner. Following the cordial meal, he arranged the women in a circle and asked each of them: “Why are you in law school?” On the way home, she reports, not one person wondered why he had quizzed them, rather each woman regretted that she had not added more information. In those unenlightened times, we instinctively understood that women needed to explain and justify their ambition, and that we had the continuing burden of proof to demonstrate that we were as competent as our male colleagues. If we questioned this double standard, we were generally dismissed.

In the early 1970s, opportunities for women seeking a legal education expanded dramatically when the American Bar Association and the Association of American Law Schools adopted non-discrimination standards for admission. The pent-up demand among women resulted in unprecedented numbers of applicants and, eventually, numerically significant freshmen enrollments. Today there are almost as many women in law schools as there are men.

In 1973, I was hired as a full-time faculty member at Loyola University Chicago, where I have remained ever since. In those early years there were few female professors. In fact, when I attended my first Women in the Law conference there were fewer than 50 women in attendance. Professor Herma Hill Kay of Berkeley School of Law was the keynote speaker. As I watched and listened to her, I realized with a shock that this was the very first female professor I had ever seen (except for myself). I should add that Herma did very well indeed and that, happily, the section has grown exponentially over the years. Sometimes it is difficult to realize how the world has changed. I know my students find it incredible that there was a time when women were not welcome in the academic world. If women were hired at all, it was as law librarians and, in some cases, senior assistants to a dean. I often wonder how many brilliant legal voices were silenced - and what our society would be like today if they had been heard.

In my experience, women perform as well (if not better) in law school than their male counterparts. Their presence in the student body is no longer remarked upon, and it seems they are fully accepted as students. While at first, women hesitated to become trial lawyers, that is no longer true, as demonstrated by the many outstanding trial lawyers among our alumnae. Early on, a recent female graduate asked how she might be a “lady” litigator, but that question appears to have been answered! When I graduated from law school, as women we were warned, above all, never to admit that we could type because if we were seen as potential secretaries, we would most certainly be offered a job - albeit not the one we had prepared ourselves for.

All my students now unremittingly hit the keyboards of their computers.

What does the future hold, I wonder, for this year’s graduating class, both male and female? Will women be at a greater disadvantage in our demanding profession? Have we as a society recognized that women still perform the greater part of family care, often necessitating them to carry heavy responsibilities? The current economy is sure to test the assumption that we have achieved full parity in the profession. However, based on my long experience at Loyola, I can attest that women are among our best lawyers. I am hopeful that we will not lose ground in the coming years.

Counsel’s Table: Come South, My Friends

By Michael Philippi
Ungaretti & Harris • Restaurant Critic

They didn’t give this as the “official” reason Chicago got aced out of the Olympics, but I am pretty sure that it is because they canceled the South Side Irish Parade. This 30-year tradition that brought North and South sides together as one is done. Okay, so of the few hundred thousand people who show up, a few get a little tipsy. And some of these tipsy ones behave badly, loudly and obnoxiously.

Big deal. A city like ours has to cancel a tradition like this because a few bad drunks decide that restrooms are wherever they want them to be? Surely this was a problem that could have been solved short of just bagging the whole thing.

But that’s what happened, and that’s why the Olympics aren’t coming. If the prospect of maintaining order in the face of drunken Kiss-me-I’m-Irish-wearing Gen-Xers is too daunting, how on earth would we manage millions of people (some of whom may also behave badly, and in foreign languages at that) in dozens of venues all across the city? Betcha they don’t cancel Carnivale in Rio because of a couple of drunks.

So now that there is no parade all you North Siders need to come south anyway - for the food. And I don’t mean the thin crust pizza - although that’s pretty good. Café 103 is a tiny BYOB bistro in Beverly. Seating 25 or so, with a prime window table for six if you can get it, it is a hidden foodie paradise that we like to keep to ourselves, here in the neighborhood, but since the parade is gone the rest of you need another reason to come south.

It has a smart, minimal interior - warm and comfortable with knowledgeable and friendly servers to help you through the impressive menu. Starters include Prince Edward Island mussels served about a dozen to an order in a light white wine and chorizo sauce. They are fresh, meaty and mild. Don’t do bivalves? How about seared sea scallops with crisp sweet potato pancakes in a truffle vinaigrette? Crispy on the outside and moist and salty in the middle - just like downtown, only better. Vegetarians can try the smoked mozzarella gnocchi. Tender and filled with fresh mozzarella, it’s a big hearty starter because after all, this is the South Side and teeny portions don’t fly like they might on West Fulton Market. They also usually do a braised short rib that is good, not great. It’s pre-shredded, which pushes it to be a little dry, and the parsnip puree makes a nice presentation but doesn’t add much in the flavor department. Normally, salads don’t get too many of my thousand-word allotment, but the romaine, apple and bacon salad warrants an exception. It is plenty big to share and tossed with a creamy cheddar dressing that you will have to remember is a condiment, not a beverage.

Then there are the entrées. Fish options include pecan-crusted sea bass with red pepper fettuccine in a white butter sauce with green beans and fennel - crisp on the outside and flaky and mild - or the barramundi, which is sort of an Australian walleye, served here in a generous filet with tomato, thyme and garlic polenta. But this is the South Side, and that means there better be meat on the menu. How about Beef Wellington? Yep, the real thing: a perfect filet encased in flaky, golden brown puff pastry sitting atop a Madeira reduction served with house-made garlic mashed potatoes and baby carrots. The rack of lamb is as advertised: two double thick-cut chops served over couscous and sautéed spinach. If you are a rack of lamb person, you won’t be disappointed. But you will be disappointed if at least one of you doesn’t order the best pork chop in the city in any restaurant not named after a coach who won a Super Bowl. I didn’t expect this level of pork chop in a foodie joint, but it is seriously worth the ride.

Stay for dessert. The carrot cake is just like carrot cake is supposed to be: a big slab of moist cake with thick cream cheese frosting. The chocolate lava cake will satisfy your chocolate jones, but it could do with a little more lava. All in all, if you like tiny bistros with chefs who aren’t afraid to cook up to the usual crowd, this is a place you should try.

Traveler’s Tip : Since the South Side is more foreign to a lot of lawyers than say, New York, this month’s traveler’s tip is Koda, another bistro in Beverly. Koda has a great bar and a more than decent wine list. Also upscale contemporary in style, try the escargot as an appetizer and good luck not using up all your crusty bread soaking up the garlic butter. Entrées are seasonal, but two tried-and-true ones are sautéed skate, served in a beurre blanc sauce with capers, and the short rib, which will flake off the bone with your spoon.

Lagniappe: Keeping with the theme, check out the Beverly Arts Center. This 400-seat venue will serve you the drink of your choice while you sit back and listen to legendary artists like Dr. John, Dave Mason, Dickey Betts or Roger McQuinn. Come in the summer for the free jazz in the courtyard. Better yet, stop at 103 or Koda for dinner and then catch the show.

Pleadings:
Café 103
1909 W. 103rd St, Chicago
(773) 238-5115

Court costs:
Appetizers: $6-$10
Entrées: $16-$24

Verdict:
Four gavels

Opening Statement: Coward revival good, not great

By Julian Frazin
Michael Best & Friedrich • Entertainment Critic

May it please the court.

Sir Noel Coward was one of the most prolific and successful writers of the 20th century. Author of dozens of prize-winning plays, musical revues and popular songs, he had an equally distinguished career as a stage and film director and actor. All these talents meshed in the 1930 premiere of his “Private Lives.” This sophisticated comedy is about a divorced couple who remarry others and are surprised to learn on their wedding nights that they are all honeymooning in the same hotel — in adjoining suites! In the original production Coward played the role of Elyot, the first husband who entices his former wife, Amanda, played by the legendary Gertrude Lawrence, to rekindle their love-hate, but steamy, relationship. The comedy also featured one of Coward’s most popular songs, “Some Day I’ll Find You.”

Over the years, the play has featured such theatrical notables as Tallulah Bankhead, Brian Bedford, Maggie Smith and, in a 1983 production, the tempestuous Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. It may even have given inspiration to the current film “It’s Complicated.” Now Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier has decided to have a go at it.

I doubt, however, that Sir Noel would have found this production, under the direction of Gary Griffin, the sophisticated and intimate comedy he had envisioned. While the cast, Robert Sella as Elyot, Tracy Michelle Arnold as Amanda, and Chaon Cross as Sybil, the new bride, all were charming, I found the performances — complete with shouts, mugging, and double takes — more suitable to the rough-and-tumble burlesque of French farce than to the reserved and stylish elegance of British comedy. Perhaps they were following Griffin’s broad direction, but only Tim Campbell, who effectively underplayed Victor, the second husband, was on the same page as Coward.

Noel Coward was a man of many, many words, often quoted with such lines as: “extraordinary how potent cheap music is,” or delicious rhymes in “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” like “But Englishmen detest a … siesta.” This production would have been better served had Griffin allowed the author’s words to do the heavy lifting. This was a good production, which the audience seemed to enjoy, but not a great one. Maybe it’s the times. Sorry, Noel.

With spring training just around the corner, Robert Falls, Goodman Theatre’s artistic director, may have had Chicago Cub icon Ernie Banks’ famous quote in mind when he decided “let’s play two” by scheduling a double-header with two one-act plays starring his favorite acting muse Brian Dennehy. Extending the baseball analogy, Dennehy knocks them both out of the park.

The first, “Hughie,” written by Eugene O’Neill and directed by Falls, has Dennehy as Erie Smith, a hard-drinking, compulsive down- on-his-luck gambler who is mourning the death of his “good luck charm,” a late-night clerk at the Broadway transient hotel he calls home. Dennehy is magnificent in the role he has performed many times before, as he spins drunken monologues to Joe Grifasi, the new night clerk who, in his bright red jacket, excels in a very modest - but most essential role.

Dennehy then does a 180-degree turn and puts in a Herculean effort as the sole performer in Samuel Beckett’s classic “Krapp’s Last Tape.” This most difficult play, directed by Jennifer Tarver, is about an aged, weary writer, who for over 50 years on his birthday has recorded his thoughts. After listening to old tapes, he realizes how meaningless his life has been, as he returns time and again to the bottle of whiskey hidden in his backroom. Beckett’s work demands many silent moments, making Dennehy’s task even more arduous and remarkable.

Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis, recently presented “The Year of Magical Thinking,” Joan Didion’s play based on her memoir dealing with the sudden death of her husband of 40 years, author John Gregory Dunne, and the fatal illness of their daughter, Quintana Roo.

It was yet another one-person, bare-boned production set upon a bleached, raked stage, empty but for a table and chair. But, I must say, there was nothing modest about the solo performance of Mary Beth Fisher, who, in the role of Ms. Didion, has every emotion - from bitterness to humor to despair - in her powerful dramatic arsenal, as she brings to life this wrenching story of survival in the face of life’s catastrophes.

I rest my case.

Final verdict:
“Private Lives” — 3 Gavels
“Hughie” “Krapp’s Last Tape” — 4 Gavels
“Krapp’s Last Tape” — 4 Gavels
“The Year of Magical Thinking” — 3½ Gavels

Being a lawyer outside of Cook County

By Sherry Karabin

It is a place where many young lawyers strive to land and keep jobs, but Cook County is far from the only legal game in town. In fact, some longtime attorneys who began their careers at big Chicago law firms left to practice in one of the collar counties and others chose to start and grow their careers outside of Cook County right from the start.

While lawyers in the collar counties handle many of the same matters as those in the Loop, some areas like family law and probate and estate planning are more prevalent and there are fewer attorneys who specialize in matters like intellectual property and patent law.

Firms are smaller too, and there are more general practitioners. Many attorneys who practice in the collar counties say there is greater collegiality among lawyers, which can make negotiations easier and result in the quicker resolution of cases. On the flip side, the volume of work is generally lighter and salaries are not as high as in Cook County.

However, many say the difference in money is worth it because it results in a better quality of life. Chicago Lawyer spoke to attorneys in four of the collar counties - DuPage, Lake, Kane and Will - to better understand the advantages and the challenges.

Kent A. Gaertner, a partner at Springer Brown, began his career in DuPage County, opening his own practice in 1982. These days the Naperville native works out of his firm’s Wheaton office representing debtors and creditors in a variety of bankruptcy matters.

“We are one of the few all-bankruptcy firms in the collar counties,” Gaertner said. “The difference between our bankruptcy firm and the ones in the Loop is that we represent more small businesses as well as individual consumers and they represent large corporations like United Airlines.”

Overall, Gaertner said there are fewer specialty firms in DuPage, especially in areas like intellectual property and employment matters. “The bread and butter for attorneys in the collar counties is family law, probate and estate planning, criminal misdemeanor offenses, small-business corporate matters, general civil litigation and real estate,” he said.

DuPage is far from a small county and neither is its judicial system. According to a special census in 2005, it was the second-most populous county in Illinois after Cook. It is also one of the nation’s wealthiest counties, perhaps helping to explain why probate and estate planning is such an important practice area.

“Most of the attorneys out here either grew up here or decided to leave the city to open their own practice,” Gaertner said. “If a young lawyer is hoping to hang out his shingle, DuPage is a good place to do it, since you can get referrals from family and friends. Starting in downtown, where no one knows who you are, can be a lot tougher.”

Springer Brown has three offices in total, including one in the Loop. Two of the firm’s five partners are also bankruptcy trustees. While some attorneys travel into the Loop to handle bankruptcy court matters, Gaertner pointed out that each of the collar counties is assigned a bankruptcy judge and that judge travels to the local courthouse weekly or biweekly. Therefore, it is not a necessity for suburban bankruptcy lawyers to go to the city when handling Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 cases.

Glenn R. Gaffney, who, with his son, runs Gaffney & Gaffney, an employment law litigation firm in Glendale Heights in DuPage County, said there is a lot of work for attorneys who specialize in business litigation and personal injury. “A lot of businesses operate out of DuPage, including some Fortune 500 companies,” Gaffney said.

“A lot of large corporations also have corporate offices here, and DuPage gets some of that work,” said the former bar association president, who also handles cases in Kane County and makes frequent trips to Chicago’s federal courts. “The environment creates a need for suburban lawyers to provide services ranging from incorporating businesses to maintaining corporate structures and handling employment-related issues.”

According to Lake County Bar Association President Scott Gibson, the largest number of firms in his county specialize in family law.

“There are so many wealthy individuals living in Lake County, and along with significant population growth, divorces and child custody issues are numerous and oftentimes complex,” he said.

Gibson’s firm, Gibson & Associates, has its main office in Waukegan and he is a plaintiffs’ personal-injury lawyer.

“For my practice it’s very beneficial being outside of Cook County. There are relatively few personal-injury firms that specialize in plaintiffs’ law in the county and, in addition, many out-of-county law firms and lawyers refer Lake County cases due to their unfamiliarity with Lake County,” Gibson said. “The flip side is that if you win a major personal-injury or wrongful death case in Cook the value of the damages can sometimes be greater. In many of the counties outside Cook, juries are more conservative and so are the damage awards.”

In addition to family law, Gibson said probate and estate planning is also a popular specialty in Lake and there is a strong criminal bar.

Family law, probate and estate planning, and real estate are also key areas of practice in Kane County, where the population continues to grow rapidly.

Kane County Bar Association President Julie Cibulskis grew up in Kane County and has practiced there her entire professional career. A partner at Speers, Reuland & Cibulskis, she handles a lot of personal-injury and wrongful death cases as well as commercial litigation matters for individuals, and family-owned and local businesses. While the community itself is very diverse with urban, suburban and rural components, Cibulskis said few attorneys make their living in specialties like patent and environmental law.

However, David Camic, a partner at Camic Johnson in Kane County, said as the county gets more crowded, an increased number of attorneys are starting to specialize. Camic handles criminal defense work.

“Traffic-related offenses are common in the county, however, there is more street crime in Aurora and Elgin,” Camic said.

As a result of the economic downturn, Camic said attorneys are beginning to take on cases in areas they normally would not. For example, Camic recently met a real estate lawyer who was attempting “to fumble through a DUI case and asked for some advice.”

The population growth is also changing the legal landscape in Will County, where Sharon Peart, a partner at Chilton Yambert & Porter, said there are more cases and the work is becoming more diverse.

“Family law is increasing, but we have pretty much every realm of practice you would find in the Chicago area. Will County has two primary hospitals, the Braidwood Power Plant, railroad industry, in addition to two casinos and other businesses,” said Peart, who came to Joliet to run the firm’s Will County office after practicing in Chicago for 12 years. In Will County, she handles insurance defense, personal injury and some commercial litigation matters.

Joseph, Lichtenstein & Levinson partner Edward Lichtenstein said the county’s rural base provides a lot of work for attorneys who handle probate and estate planning.

“There are a lot of family farms here, and people want to make sure the next generation that inherits the land doesn’t take on a huge tax obligation or have to liquidate the property to pay off taxes,” said Lichtenstein, who has lived and practiced in Will County since 1985.

While his firm’s main office is in Chicago, one of his goals has been to expand into the county where he lives. Lichtenstein concentrates on civil litigation, with an emphasis on personal injury and workers’ compensation.

On the criminal side, Will County State’s Attorney James Glasgow said efforts to crack down on domestic violence have increased tremendously.

“Over the last few years, we’ve been working more closely with the victims,” Glasgow said. “I started a Victim Independence Program in 1999 to provide them with the necessary support and encouragement to follow through with the prosecution of their abusers. Since then, we have increased the appearance rate by victims to 50 percent, but there is still much more work to do.”

Glasgow said he also deals with a lot of property crimes and gang activity, but driving under the influence cases are the most prevalent.

“A number of attorneys make their living practicing criminal law; some are affiliated with the public defender’s office in a part-time capacity that enables them to maintain a private practice as well,” Glasgow said.

Overall, law firms are smaller in the collar counties and there are more general practitioners.

“In Chicago, everything is specialized,” said solo practitioner H. Case Ellis, who primarily handles civil defense matters, including many in Kane and Lake counties.

“Out here these little firms take on quite a bit. I was used to specialization,” Ellis said. “In the collar counties, I’m often dealing with lawyers whose personal-injury practice could be as little as 10 percent of their total practice, as opposed to Cook County, where most plaintiffs’ attorneys devote their entire practice to personal injury.”

While just about everyone in real estate took a hit as a result of the downturn, Ellis said attorneys and firms involved in real estate in the collar counties felt it even more. “Big firms can make up for the loss by shifting their focus onto profitable areas when real estate is down, but smaller firms don’t have as many options.”

Camic said one reason there are still a lot of general practitioners farther from the city is that the area is geographically large but does not have a large population. “In more metropolitan areas the general practice attorneys are slowly disappearing. Further west and south, however, there is not a large enough volume of cases for lawyers who want to concentrate in a single area.”

However, as these counties get more populated, he expects more attorneys will concentrate on more limited practice areas.

According to Gibson, there are less than a handful of firms in Lake County that have 10 or more lawyers, with the historical trend continuing to favor solo practitioners and two-and-three partner firms. “The mega-firms that operate in Cook that have national and international corporate and business practices don’t have offices in Lake,” Gibson said.

Law firms are not mega-size in DuPage either. According to former DuPage County Bar Association President Jim McCluskey, the bulk are also solo practitioners and two- and three-person offices.

McCluskey’s firm, Momkus McCluskey, on the other hand, has 24 attorneys, including two in their Chicago office. McCluskey, who handled insurance defense cases in Chicago until 1986 and later in the collar counties, said: “It’s no accident that the three most common areas of practice in DuPage and the other collar counties are family law, estate planning and real estate. These areas of practice fit quite well with the practice of a solo or small firm practitioner.”

While firm sizes vary in Will County, Glasgow said, “I doubt any one is bigger than 12 to 15 attorneys, and most are in single digits. Many Chicago firms have satellite offices in Will County that handle civil matters.”

One thing that distinguishes many of the collar counties is the pace at which cases conclude.

McCluskey said the volume of cases that are filed in DuPage County compared to Cook County is much lower, and it takes only about one-third of the time for the case to proceed to trial.

“As a result, once a case is filed, it is very important to hit the ground running in DuPage,” he said.

McCluskey, who handles commercial litigation matters, said the bulk of his cases are litigated in DuPage and Kane counties, but most of the personal-injury cases that are filed are in Cook County “because juries in DuPage are much more conservative than in Cook County. There is a concerted effort by plaintiffs’ attorneys to avoid filing personal-injury cases in DuPage County. Thus, personal-injury practices have a much smaller volume in the collar counties than in Cook County.”

Indeed, Gaffney said discovery disputes are often a lot less formal than in Chicago. “When I litigate with lawyers representing Fortune 500 companies, they think everything has to be in writing. In DuPage you are more likely to sit down over a cup of coffee and discuss what there is and what each side will turn over. It makes for less costly litigation and moves things along quicker.”

“There is a lot less posturing,” said Robert Dewey, former managing partner at Heyl, Royster, Voelker & Allen. “Instead of writing ‘war letters,’ we tend to call the lawyer on the other side and try to narrow the issues in an effort to get the matter resolved in an efficient and expeditious manner.”

Peart too has noticed the difference in Will County. “Because you see the same people on a routine basis, it’s a lot easier to work out potential issues. You also get a better idea of how your opponents operate, for instance whether they are likely to go to trial or settle,” Peart said. “I also practice in front of the same judges regularly, which eliminates that element of unknown when you are trying cases in larger jurisdictions such as Cook County.”

Cibulskis said the quicker pace can make for a hectic work environment. “”Everyone thinks it’s so relaxed and laid-back here, but the truth is attorneys have to work faster since there is less backlog in the courts,” she said.

Ellis spent the first seven years of his career as a litigator at the large Chicago law firm Pretzel & Stouffer.

Although he enjoyed the work, he decided to leave the hectic pace and start a firm in Crystal Lake in McHenry County.

“The legal communities are closely knit,” Ellis said. “I practiced for seven years in Chicago, by which time I was finally feeling like part of the community. Out here I began to feel like I knew many of the lawyers within six months and since you appear before the same judges you get to know them too.”

Ellis, who pointed out that unlike Cook County in Lake and Kane you are assigned a judge when you file the lawsuit, said, “It’s great to be able to tell your clients who the judge will be and what they can expect. It’s even better to appear regularly and know what the judges expect from you.”

Coman & Anderson partner William Cotter decided to leave O’Rourke, Hogan, Fowler & Dwyer in Chicago in 2000 in search of a better quality of life. The DuPage County corporate and estate planning attorney said the type of work he does hasn’t changed much and he still represents the same type of clients. However, it no longer takes him two-and-a-half hours to get to and from work. “I still go to the city to do business, but now I only do it about once a month. With technology, it’s no longer necessary to be located in the heart of the Loop,” Cotter said.

Gibson too once worked in Chicago, but came to Lake County because he got an opportunity to work as a prosecutor. Over the years, he too has come to enjoy the more personal relationships between lawyers in the community. “It’s a smaller venue than Cook so you see the same defense attorneys again and again. People tend to be very collegial and, as a result, even if it is only for self-preservation, Lake County lawyers are careful not to burn many bridges with an opponent over one case,” Gibson said.

Those who work in the collar counties say one of the common myths is that the legal services available are somehow inferior to Cook County, perhaps because the rates are cheaper. “We’re every bit as professional in the collar counties, and our work is of the same quality of those in the city,” Gaertner said. “The difference is, we know the other suburban bankruptcy practitioners well because we tend to have many cases together as the years go by. I also don’t have to burn four hours a day on the commute.”

Although Will County is smaller, Peart said she believes it gives “young lawyers an advantage since they can get more court time and practical experience. There is a perception that people in the collar counties don’t handle larger lawsuits and get exposure to specialty areas like toxic tort for example. That’s simply not accurate.”

While Ellis enjoys the community atmosphere in the collar counties, he said the prevalence of smaller firms and solo practitioners can leave attorneys with few others to bounce ideas or problems off of. “In Cook County if you are not in a large firm you are in an office building with 20 or 30 firms. As a result, there is always someone to talk to. If you work in a two- or three-person firm everyone is busy and they don’t have the same time to go next door and give or seek advice. The first few years I was out here I got a little lonely. I missed talking shop. The state bar and the local bar associations are setting up mentoring programs to address this issue.”

Although hourly rates are generally lower and the volume of work is not as great in the collar counties, Ellis pointed out that neither is the overhead. “When I moved out here people told me I couldn’t compete with Chicago firms and then I realized they couldn’t compete with me, since my overhead is very little.”

Lichtenstein said the reduced volume of work can be a plus. “You don’t have to spread yourself as thin, and you can pay more attention to each case.”

In Will County, some attorneys say one of the main problems is the lack of space in the county courthouse in downtown Joliet, where the bulk of the county’s civil and criminal matters are handled. “It is not unusual for long lines to form at both the east and west entrance to the courthouse,” Lichtenstein said.

While there are two satellite courthouses that handle juvenile and civil matters, attorneys believe a larger, modern facility needs to be built. Officials from the city of Joliet and Will County have been meeting to assess the judiciary’s space needs and to work on a plan to resolve the courthouse space crunch.

“When it was built in [1969], I believe the population was between 200,000 to 250,000,” Glasgow said. “Now the population is greater than 700,000.”

While many attorneys aspire to legal careers in Chicago and the surrounding area, the collar counties offer their own unique set of advantages to those who choose to hang their shingles there. Although a wide variety of matters are handled, practice areas like family law, probate and estate planning and real estate are more prevalent, with fewer firms handling intellectual property and other more specialized matters. Overall, the volume of work and hourly rates are not as high as in Cook County, but many of those who have made their careers and lives in the collar counties say the friendlier atmosphere and improved quality of life are more than worth it.

Following clients to the suburbs

By Robert Loerzel

Throughout Chicago’s history, the city’s most prominent law firms have had offices downtown. That remains true today, but some firms with addresses in the Loop are finding that it also pays to have offices in the suburbs.

“More and more, companies are opening offices in the suburbs, and we thought we should be there, too,” said Byron Myers, chief managing partner of Ice Miller, a law firm based in Indianapolis that opened a Chicago office in 1997, followed by an office in DuPage County in 2004.

After a 2007 expansion, Ice Miller now has 17 lawyers in Lisle, compared with 14 in its downtown Chicago office.

“DuPage County is a business center of exceptional opportunity,” Myers said. “It has a significant population base and a robust business mix of finance, retail, high tech, transportation and manufacturing. These are world-class companies that offer Ice Miller a built-in client base.”

Lawyers at several firms said the best thing about having a suburban office is how convenient it is to spend face-to-face time with suburban clients.

Dean J. Leffelman, a lawyer at Ice Miller’s Lisle office, recalls talking with a new client in DuPage County who had been using a downtown Chicago lawyer.

“What’s he look like?” Leffelman asked.

“We don’t know,” the client responded. “We’ve never seen him.”

As a result, Leffelman said, “I took a nice piece of business away from another law firm that’s downtown.”

Of course, today’s technology makes it possible to communicate instantly and share documents electronically, so lawyers and clients don’t have to sit down together in the same room all the time. But in spite of all those advances, face time is still valuable.

“Technology makes it easier and faster to communicate with our clients,” Myers said. “But we think it’s still very important to meet with our clients.”

Ronald S. Safer, managing partner at Schiff Hardin, agrees.

“Communication is instantaneous wherever you are,” he said. “It’s never been easier to reach out and touch someone. But there will never be something that replaces face-to-face contact.”

With a history going back to 1864, Schiff Hardin has offices in six major cities (Chicago, New York, Washington, Boston, Atlanta and San Francisco) and two offices in locations that don’t seem to match the others - Lake Forest and Wilmette.

The firm opened a small office in Wilmette to handle estate planning and wealth management for North Shore residents.

“For us, it’s all about client service and what is best for the client and most convenient for them,” Safer said.

In 2002, Schiff Hardin added the Lake Forest office, which Jenner & Block originally opened in 1987.

“We could bring to the north suburban area the talents we had developed in the Chicago setting,” said Richard Lee Verkler, a lawyer who’s been at the office ever since Jenner & Block opened it, and is now of counsel at Schiff Hardin.

And clients could get that sort of big-city expertise “without having to traipse downtown,” Verkler said.

He recalled telling his suburban business clients that they could always meet with him at Jenner & Block’s downtown Chicago offices if they wanted to.

“Nobody ever accepted that offer,” Verkler said.

The lawyers at the Lake Forest office left Jenner & Block because they had more business than they could handle, Verkler said. They decided they needed to affiliate with a firm that could help them with more expertise in certain areas of the law, including estate planning and financial services, so they moved over to Schiff Hardin.

“They were a perfect fit for us,” said Verkler, adding that the split with Jenner & Block was amicable.

The Lake Forest lawyers also added depth to Schiff Hardin’s team, bringing their expertise in import-export law, government contracts and complex international business transactions.

For its north suburban clients, Schiff Hardin’s Lake Forest office has all the convenience of a small-town law office.

“It’s closer to the client base,” Safer said. “Everything about it is easier - the traffic, the parking, the logistics.”

But the lawyers in Lake Forest also have a large team of sophisticated attorneys backing them up at offices around the country.

That’s something that a smaller independent law firm in the suburbs can’t provide, said Nicole Finitzo, another lawyer at Schiff Hardin’s Lake Forest office.

“Schiff Hardin can do things that they can’t,” she said.

However, Northwest Suburban Bar Association President Scott Barber said small suburban firms can compete with big Chicago firms.

“We compete with some of these big law firms for bank business,” said Barber, who has a firm, Riffner Barber in Schaumburg, with partner Robert G. Riffner.

Barber has lived and worked in Schaumburg for years, and clients know he’s local, he said.

That’s the sort of hometown aura that the big firms are aiming to acquire when they move into the suburbs, but sometimes clients prefer a local lawyer with a small firm, Barber said. They can be confident that they’ll keep on dealing with the same lawyer for years to come, he said.

“Obviously, there are some cases where a bigger firm would be better able to handle it, because of the manpower,” Barber said. “It’s not a matter of brain power.”

Over five decades, the Northwest Suburban Bar Association has grown from a handful of lawyers to the current roster of 650, although Barber said the number of members has been pretty steady over the past 10 years.

One of the city law firms with a presence in the northwest suburbs is Masuda Funai, which has 45 attorneys in three offices: Chicago, Los Angeles and Schaumburg.

Mary Beth Reuter, Masuda Funai’s director of administration, said the firm expanded into the suburbs with a Rolling Meadows office in 1983, and then moved to a bigger space in nearby Schaumburg five years ago.

Masuda Funai had a simple reason for branching out into the burbs.

“We had a large concentration of clients in the northwest suburbs,” Reuter said. “It’s far more convenient for the clients and for us. It’s a hassle to come downtown.”

Masuda Funai built its practice on representing international companies operating and investing in the United States. In Schaumburg, many of the firm’s clients need legal representation on immigration matters, Reuter said. Some of the clients are companies bringing employees here from other countries. Others are individuals who need help with visas or work permits.

The Schaumburg office of Masuda Funai has eight lawyers, compared with the 30 at the firm’s downtown Chicago office. Nearly every day, lawyers from the Schaumburg office spend some time at the Chicago office, Reuter said. They may need to be downtown for a court appearance, or they may need to meet with someone at the Chicago office.

Lawyers from the Chicago office also stop in frequently at the Schaumburg location, Reuter said.

Those sorts of back-and-forth office visits are typical at law firms with offices in both Chicago and the suburbs.

For Arnstein & Lehr, its municipal business led it to open an office in Hoffman Estates.

The law firm represents several municipalities in the northwest suburbs, including North Barrington, Volo, and Hoffman Estates, so it’s natural to have an office not too far from those village halls, said Arthur L. Janura Jr., chairman of Arnstein & Lehr’s local government group.

“There is great benefit in having some offices close to the people you’re dealing with,” said Janura, who served as a Cook County Circuit Court judge from 1984 to 2007. “Depending on how traffic is, it becomes very difficult to travel back and forth.”

In addition to working out of the Hoffman Estates office, Janura has an office at Hoffman Estates Village Hall, and he is frequently at Arnstein & Lehr’s downtown Chicago offices.

Technology makes it easier for him to take his work with him as he goes from office to office. He can sign into Arnstein & Lehr’s computer network and access the same files - wherever he is. But no matter how easy communication is now, Janura agrees that face time with clients is a key factor in being successful.

“It’s really client-driven: Where are your clients and where is your work?” he said. “A lot of times, clients still want to see you and you want to see them.”

Some Chicago law firms have opened offices in a few suburbs, strategically covering various parts of the Chicago area.

Cassiday Schade, a firm with 80 lawyers in Chicago, now has eight in Naperville, nine in Libertyville and three in Rockford.

“When the firm started in 1979 with the Chicago office, most of the suburbs were very provincial and there wasn’t much in the way of litigation being filed in them,” said Marc F. Benjoya, a member of Cassiday Schade’s executive committee. But that soon began to change.

About half of Cassiday Schade’s clients are physicians and hospitals, and the firm also represents many architects and engineers.

“They migrated from Chicago out to the suburbs,” Benjoya said. “We decided to move with them.”

The first step was opening an office in Wheaton in 1984.

“We picked DuPage County as our test market,” Benjoya said. “That office was an instant success, both with our clients and the judges.”

Before opening that office, Cassiday Schade faced a problem whenever its attorneys did business at the DuPage County courthouse.

“The local lawyers were more familiar with the judges,” Benjoya said. “The judges seemed to respond more favorably to the local lawyers.”

After Cassiday Schade established a presence in Wheaton, its lawyers came to be seen as “locals,” too. The Wheaton office has since moved to Naperville.

The firm also opened an office in Waukegan, later moving it to Libertyville, which was closer to most of Cassiday Schade’s Lake County clients.

Several years ago, Cassiday Schade opened an office in Rockford, giving the firm an even wider reach.

Benjoya said, in his opinion, Rockford has a fairly small number of local lawyers, which gives Cassiday Schade many opportunities to pick up new clients. And the lawyers in the Rockford office also do work in DeKalb, LaSalle and Peoria.

“It gave us a huge circumference,” Benjoya said, making Cassiday Schade more of a regional law firm.

Benjoya, who works out of the Libertyville office, said it’s important to have a regular presence in the courtrooms of the collar counties, since those counties use a system in which the same judges usually stay assigned to a case from the beginning to end.

“It was very important that judges see the same face,” Benjoya said. “And you’re able to establish credibility and standing in the community. It gave our clients the big-firm sophistication, technology and resources that small firms don’t have the resources to provide, with a small-town presence.”

Thomas R. Hill, managing member of Dykema, would agree with Benjoya about the importance of having a local presence in the collar counties.

Lawyers who drive from Chicago out to the courthouses in DuPage and Will counties won’t have the same knowledge as a local lawyer will about the area’s jury pool. It helps a great deal, Hill said, “if you live and work in the community where the pool of juries is drawn from.”

Dykema has nearly 450 attorneys at offices in Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Los Angeles and Washington. Five years ago, the firm merged with Rooks Pitts, acquiring that firm’s office in Lisle. The office has about a dozen lawyers.

Dykema’s Lisle office handles a lot of patent cases, which Hill said is a complex area of the law, and Dykema’s clients benefit from having a big firm’s resources.

“You get that benefit by coming down the street to our office,” Hill said.

Querrey & Harrow has had suburban offices since the 1980s. The firm has 75 attorneys in its Chicago office, four to five in Joliet, four in Wheaton, four in Merrillville, Ind., and one full-time lawyer and one part-time lawyer in Waukegan.

“It might sound hokey, but we really do think it’s good to be part of the community,” said Michael B. Stillman, managing shareholder with Querrey & Harrow. “Clients like it better when they know you’re there and you’re part of the community.”

A major part of Querrey & Harrow’s work for years has been representing State Farm Insurance Co. Whenever those cases come up in the collar counties, it helps that the firm’s lawyers have offices near the courthouses, Stillman said.

“As the growth of the suburbs occurred, and more people moved out there, we had more cases out there,” he said.

“If we were going to do a lot of work in the county and the courthouse there, it’s better to be in the county. There’s not as much windshield time.”

In recent years, Querrey & Harrow has expanded its work beyond insurance defense, taking on clients such as Joliet-area hospitals and Indiana casinos.

“In order to practice in Indiana, you have to have an office in Indiana,” Stillman said, explaining the firm’s decision to open a Merrillville location. “We view ourselves as being a northern Illinois and northwest Indiana regional law firm.”

Querrey & Harrow used to have offices in Crystal Lake and Kane County, but it closed those locations when technology made them seem unnecessary, Stillman said.

Another law firm that’s questioning the need for a brick-and-mortar presence in the suburbs is SmithAmundsen, which spun off from Querrey & Harrow in 1997. Three years ago, SmithAmundsen combined its Geneva and Wheaton offices into a new St. Charles location.

The firm also has offices in Rockford and Woodstock, but it closed a Waukegan office this fall, converting it into a new “virtual” office.

“It’s an experiment,” said Larry A. Schechtman, partner-in-charge at SmithAmundsen’s Chicago office. “We’re finding ways to keep the costs and overhead down.”

Thanks to e-mail and video conferencing, he said, “There’s not as much need for that face-to-face time, which translates into less need for bricks and mortar.”

The three lawyers who used to work at SmithAmundsen’s Waukegan office now work from their homes in Lake County, and they also stop in regularly at the firm’s Chicago and Milwaukee offices. And they can meet with clients at a shared office space that SmithAmundsen has in Deerfield. Their mail goes to the Chicago office, where it’s scanned and e-mailed to the lawyers.

“It’s a cost savings that will be passed onto the clients,” Schechtman said. “We could potentially do this at other offices.”

The key thing for Schechtman is that the lawyers in Lake County will still be close to their clients if they need to meet in person.

“The people will be there,” he said. “We continue to see a need for a local presence in the business community.”

It remains to be seen whether other law firms will follow SmithAmundsen’s lead, using “virtual” offices, or follow the trend of other law firms, opening branches around the suburban area.

With the Daley Center, the Dirksen Federal Building and numerous law offices, downtown Chicago continues to dominate the region’s legal community, but the suburbs are playing an important role, too.

“Obviously, Chicago is the hub,” said Stillman, of Querrey & Harrow. “Chicago is still the center of the legal universe for all firms here, but we do have to have our roots in other places.”

A real-life adventure

By Olivia Clarke

Donald E. Casey, who practices at Springer, Casey & Dienstag, has been a lawyer for 52 years. At age 18 he volunteered for the Aviation Cadet program of the U.S. Army Air Corps in December 1942, and was called for active duty in February 1943. He was a 19-year-old 2nd lieutenant when he was shot down on his 28th bombing mission over Hamburg, Germany, on June 18, 1944.

In his book, “To Fight For My Country, Sir!” he describes what it felt like to be imprisoned at “The Great Escape” prison camp and later removed to possible starvation and death at the Moosburg, Germany, POW camp in Bavaria.

He sat down with Chicago Lawyer to discuss the book and what led him to put those experiences in writing. Here is a portion of that conversation.

Chicago Lawyer: What made you decide to write the book?

Casey: My mother had saved all the letters that I’d written home, in training here in the United States, in combat and then even when I was a prisoner of war, which happened later on. I wrote the book because I had these letters and it was kind of like a diary of my actual thoughts going back to my parents. As I went along I matured. I was 19 flying combat and I was still a kid. I was still very much a kid. I think one of the interesting parts of the book was the letters show the changes going on in my outlook and in my mind as I matured and I had to mature and accept responsibilities. I think those are a fairly remarkable part of the book.

Then I had an idea in writing the book that I read about in The New York Times Book Review. A New York Times book reviewer said way back in ‘94, when I started writing my book, [that] the trouble with books about the war is they don’t tell how it felt. So I made it a point of writing the book and giving you my actual mental impressions as I went along, and there were some frightful missions that we went through. I couldn’t even tell my folks about them except to say I went there, but I left out a lot of the details because they were frightening to me and it would have been to them.

As I neared the end of my tour I happened to get an opportunity instead of flying in the formation with 30 ships or so. I suddenly had thrust upon me the role of the lead navigator due to a mistake. They said, “Get in your plane and fly down about 20 minutes to the south and land there.” We got there and they told us, “Get out of your plane and get in this other plane.” So we got out of the other plane and pretty soon a bombardier came aboard. They had two bombardiers, one for visual bombing and one for through-the-clouds bombing. I’m sitting there waiting for someone to tell me what I’m supposed to do and the next thing I know we’re taking off and the other navigator was just sitting there with his arms folded and I was waiting for him to tell me what I was supposed to do. I suddenly realized I’m the leader. That wasn’t a good idea because actually leaders who were actually directing the course of the direction of the ships were charged with responsibility of keeping track of all the deadlines and I’d never done that. I led the mission and happened to be over the invasion front and I got back to the base we started from.

They called me into the office and said, “We want to talk to you. You weren’t supposed to do that. It was a mistake but since you did that we are going to promote you. We are going to make you deputy leader,” which was the role played by a ship next to the leader up in front and is there to take over if the leader gets shot down. The odds of getting shot down had just doubled. They didn’t tell me that our group had lost three deputies already, no lead ships, just three deputies. I flew two missions as deputy, and then the second one the odds came out and we got shot down.

We flew an incredibly long bomb run, the average bomb run was about eight minutes. If you look at your watch and see how long it takes to get around for one minute, think if you are flying straight and level and the guns on the ground shooting at you. They’re big guns and they have radar too and they can target you.

This time our luck ran out and we were hit in our right wing and the plane caught on fire. The pilot said to us to bail out and we were over Hamburg, Germany, and there were just no questions about do you really mean it. You had to get out. We were 25,000 feet going down to 23,000 feet and I wasn’t the first one out. When I did get to the position where I was bailing out there was a little hatch, which is pictured in the book years later. I knelt down over this hatch and we were so high up and I said to myself, “This is crazy. This is the only way you have of getting back and you are going to jump out in a place we just bombed. That’s crazy.” I had in my mind a sign we had back at the base, which said, “Delay opening your parachute.” And there was good reason for that. First of all, at high altitude if you open your chute immediately you would be possibly suffering from monoxia and pass out. But also by pulling your shoot open at high altitude, the Germans on the ground, your enemy, can see you coming and they can follow you.

The proof in the pudding was one of the fellows who opened his parachute early - I’m just positive about [that] - he was the first one out, he panicked and opened up his parachute, they shot him to death in his parachute from the ground. Also, two more of our men were beaten to death by the German civilians. And the fourth one was killed when the plane exploded. I let myself fall and I was in an awkward position. When you are falling through the air you’re going at 100 or 110 miles per hour. Even from 23,000 feet it’s a fairly short drop. I let myself drop as far as I could stand it and I believe I was under 1,000 feet when I opened my parachute and your life depended on where you landed. You didn’t know where you were going to land and I fell unobserved. I landed in a suburban area across the street from a military hospital. In the hospital, German soldiers with bandages all over them were leaning out and watching me land. The first thing I did was hide my parachute.

Within about three minutes two soldiers drove up in a car and came up to where I was. I put my hands up and stepped out of the bushes and surrendered. And the line that the Germans used for prisoners they captured, particularly aviation prisoners were, “For you the war is over.” And it was. Here we are in Hamburg, which is a good 300 miles from the English Channel, how was I supposed to get out on foot?

I was taken for interrogation and the funny story about the interrogation in Frankfort involved a German officer. There is my navigator’s briefcase from the airplane three days later. He said to me, “Where are you from?” and I think I dropped my guard at that point because we weren’t supposed to tell them anything except name, rank and serial number. I said, “Chicago.” He said. “I was at the World’s Fair in 1933.” Now they knew I was a punk kid and I would know nothing about strategy of the air force. Therefore they didn’t waste much time with me and put me back into my solitary confinement cell, and we were taken later to a train where we traveled east towards Russia, toward Poland, and we arrived at what became known as “The Great Escape” camp.

I was there three months after the great escape. The thing that the great escape accomplished as far as later becoming prisoners was, because they had shot 50 British officers for trying to escape in March of ‘44, it was no longer our idea to try to escape. We were told that by our senior officers. There were 10,000 flying officers in that camp. Think how many planes they had to shoot down to get 10,000 officers.

We were there for about six months and it wasn’t a bad camp actually, Stalag Luft III; it’s the one depicted in the movie.

They said, “Don’t try to escape; you don’t have to try anymore because they will shoot you. But if you want to escape we will let you do so provided you submit a detailed plan and we approve it because we know all the different modes of escape and we can spot the ones that won’t work and tell you.” I was there six months at that camp.

C.L.: Did they talk to you about the escape when you got there?

Casey: Yes. They told us about it. It was a failed attempt clearly when you look at it. And the response of the allied prisoners there was, no more escapes unless you really come up with an ingenious plan that doesn’t involve a tunnel and a lot of effort. You can’t make it, particularly if you are not European. The proof is the only ones who got away were Europeans.

C.L.: Were you scared when you were in there?

Casey: First of all, when you’re shot down you are scared out of your wits because of this feeling that you are jumping out into nowhere. Nobody told us you better look out for the civilians because they’ll kill you if they get their hands on you. We didn’t know what to expect.

I’m just lucky that I landed where I did. I’m lucky that I didn’t open my parachute. One of the things they told us not to do was, don’t carry a gun, because if you land with a gun they can shoot you and say you tried to pull the gun on them.

C.L.: Were you scared as a POW?

Casey: The POW part was pretty good actually in the first six months because we had food, books and musical instruments. We had a comfortable place to live. We were indoors, and we were counted twice a day. And it became kind of a routine.

You could walk around the inside of the camp on the circuit, we called it, and we did to keep our walking strength up. We didn’t know what to expect. When the Battle of the Bulge happened in December of ‘44, we thought, “Oh my God, we were sunk. The Germans are going to push our forces back and we are going to be there another year.” Germans had told us that after the war, “You are going to stay here and help rebuild Germany.” And that was a very good possibility.

C.L.: You said when you started that you were looking for a big adventure. Is this what an adventure looks like?

Casey: Yes, I wanted to grow up. I was tired of being a kid. When the Germans captured me all they wanted to know was how old I was. A lieutenant in the German army had life and death power over his men and they give this to a 19-year-old kid. They couldn’t get over that.

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