Bringing social workers and lawyers to the same table

By Olivia Clarke

Law school didn’t teach Carol Casey how to best communicate with a 4-year-old, or how to reach out to a teen who won’t talk to her.

But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t deal with those types of situations as courtroom supervisor for the Juvenile Division of the Cook County public guardian’s office.

But to best address these issues, she often works with or gets input from non-legal professionals, like social workers, who can see the case from a different perspective.

Casey’s office practices an interdisciplinary approach where lawyers, social workers, a staff nurse, and a psychologist often work together to assess clients’ cases.

”Listening to other people’s points of view, and other people’s insights really helps you approach the cases more holistically,” Casey said. ”A kid is something more than a legal problem or more than a case. You need a rounded view of what’s going on.”

Her office never stops being a law office, she said, but this approach helps them address their clients’ needs more thoroughly. And while every person on the team does not always work on every case, the non-legal professionals are involved as necessary.

Many legal agencies and offices bring social workers and lawyers together to more thoroughly meet clients’ needs. Different models exist concerning how they work together, and whether they operate under the same privileges as lawyers.

But regardless of the model, those who believe in this interdisciplinary approach say that if a client’s social problems are not addressed, they may continue to face the same legal problems — like a cycle that cannot be broken.

”You feel more confidence in the representation you’re providing your clients,” Casey said. ”I’m a decent lawyer. I don’t always think of everything. I need social workers and other professionals to say, ‘That doesn’t make sense,’ or, ‘Have you viewed it from this perspective?’ ”

Not alone

Beginning in 2007, a group of lawyers and social workers started meeting together every two or three months to talk about the interdisciplinary relationships they have in their legal offices, said Andrya Soprych, a social worker working at the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago.

They talk about such topics as identifying the client, locating community resources, and how social and legal issues connect, said Soprych, the meeting’s facilitator. About 10 different organizations have participated, and they do not all handle the social worker-lawyer relationship the same.

”A lot of it is about how having a social worker and an attorney working together can better serve our clients,” she said. ”Hopefully what’s coming out of this is, we are learning how to better do our jobs. And we’re learning from each other, and learning with each other about how to better provide social work and legal services within a legal services organization.”

Organizations use different models to bring social workers and lawyers together, she said.

Sometimes social work and legal services operate in the same building, but they operate as separate programs. Not everyone who receives legal assistance receives social work help, and vice versa, Soprych said.

Other organizations consider providing legal services to be their primary function, but they also employ a social worker, she said. This social worker may provide therapeutic services, and there may be a more formal division between legal and social work.

While other offices have the social worker and lawyer work as a team, she said.

People often have questions about client confidentiality within any of these models, Soprych said.

Lawyers must protect the attorney-client privilege, and social workers are mandated to report child neglect or abuse. But in some models, social workers employed in legal settings have the same privileges as lawyers.

”I think [confidentiality] is an issue. I think it’s the one that people regularly fall back on as the reason why you can’t have social workers and attorneys working together,” she said. ”I would disagree with that though. I don’t think that is a reason why attorneys and social workers can’t work together. I think that can be resolved within individual agencies.”

Casey’s office, for example, considers its non-legal professionals, such as its social workers, to have the same confidentiality duties and ethics as the attorneys in the office because it’s a legal office. But her office hasn’t run into any real problems in this arena.

Soprych said the meetings she facilitates help social workers and lawyers see that they are not alone in forging these partnerships.

”It’s nice to get to know the other people working in other agencies so that when you have questions or things come up you feel comfortable talking to them,” she said. ”It’s about getting the community together, and supporting each other in our jobs.”

Within the agency

Executive Director Robert B. Acton said Cabrini Green Legal Aid (CGLA) aspires to help its clients transform their lives. CGLA tries to address the underlying causes that led their clients to seek legal help, Acton said.

It sees about 5,000 people a year, and it litigated 532 cases last year. CGLA has a full-time social worker, and a full-time client specialist.

Having a social worker assist clients helps the lawyers devote their time to the legal side of clients’ matters, Acton said.

”In so many instances a client’s case is strengthened by addressing life’s challenges,” he said. ”By way of example, our social worker, on any given day, may help a client prepare a resume, look for jobs in the community, and help find affordable daycare. ”

CGLA faced challenges early on in getting the attorneys to fully buy into this interdisciplinary model, he said.

”Attorneys by nature are quite protective of the clients they serve,” he said. ”Frankly, at CGLA it didn’t take long before attorneys became true believers in this model. They realized there were some real gaps that could be filled by a social worker that they were not able to get to.”

Identifying who the client is can be challenging in a social worker-lawyer relationship because it may differ for social workers and lawyers, said Linda Coon, a lawyer and project director of the Families’ and Children’s AIDS Network (FCAN). A social worker may consider a whole family to be a client, while the lawyer may consider one person to be the client.

FCAN helps families with such things as establishing a legal back-up plan for child custody in the event that a family member is incapacitated or dies. But with that comes many social and personal issues, including how to handle death and grief, she said.

When Coon first started working with these plans, she said, ”I frequently saw them falling apart because the social issues were not dealt with upfront. Really, those things need to be assessed upfront and those issues need to be dealt with by the family when making the choice of who should be a caretaker.”

Meeting with a social worker can also help alleviate a family’s fears of the court system, she said. The family may then feel more comfortable with the process.

”The families that we deal with are dealing with a life-threatening illness,” Coon said. ”They are dealing with very profound issues that most people don’t face on a day-to-day basis. Those issues present challenges to families when they are trying to plan for a child’s best interests in the future.”

Deputy Cook County Public Guardian Charles Golbert, who supervises the adult guardianship division, said his office provides guardianship to about 850 adults with disabilities. In his division, about 20 lawyers, and about 20 case managers with clinical and social work backgrounds work together.

”Our responsibilities are very interdisciplinary, so having an interdisciplinary approach with attorneys and social workers and clinical people is critical to providing the best care for our wards,” Golbert said. ”We’ve always done it this way, but I think we were ahead of the curve.

”It’s important to look at the client as a whole person, and to look at their issues harmoniously instead of isolating legal problems in a vacuum.”

Upon getting a client’s case, the office will meet as a team and discuss the immediate issues, as well as the long-term plans. They try to ensure that the legal, clinical, and financial plans are consistent with each other, but team members sometimes disagree.

”I think sometimes lawyers approach the problems with a different emphasis than social workers do,” Golbert said. ”But the team brainstorms all the issues and comes to what is in the best interest of the ward. The supervisor may step in and make a decision. The team comes to a consensus at least 90 percent of the time.”

Under one roof

The Center for Law and Social Work is a non-profit organization that provides legal and social work services jointly on issues related to children and families. It works with individuals, families, practitioners, and agencies.

Genie Miller Gillespie and Dana L. Corman founded the center in 2004, and today it has three full-time social workers, one full-time lawyer, and two part-time lawyers.

They handle such areas as backup planning for older and ill caregivers, which may include short-term guardianship, standby guardianship, or standby adoption plans.

When they started talking about what issues could come out of creating the center, Gillespie said they recognized that they needed to decide who the client is in each case.

Confidentiality hasn’t become an issue yet, but they constantly talk with their clients about the different relationships they will have with their social worker and their lawyer. The center also has clients sign conflict waiver forms so they understand what was explained to them about the difference in confidentiality between the lawyer and the client, and the social worker and the client, she said.

The training that social workers and lawyers receive is very different, Gillespie said.

Lawyers tend to be very analytical, and focused on the immediate problem, whereas social workers may meet with a client about one problem, but then identify other issues that must also be addressed, she said.

”For me, I get to practice law, but I get to sort of keep my hands in the social work world without a degree,” Gillespie said. ”I get to be part of the whole plan, and not just the legal piece of it. I get to see how I make a difference in these people’s lives beyond the small little legal piece I’m doing, which I think is kind of cool.”

The center’s staff often make home visits, which can be a very ‘’social work thing” to do, said Corman, the center’s executive director. And, during a home visit, it is not unusual to bring many family members and friends to the table if they are important to the discussion.

”To me, I was a social worker first, but I always wanted to be a lawyer and I always wanted to set up this center for law and social work because I always felt there was an intersection,” said Corman, who is an attorney and licensed clinical social worker. ”My belief was there was a way to bring the two together and service individuals and families in a joint manner without crossing ethical lines.”

Maria Nanos, a licensed clinical social worker and associate director of the law center, said this collaboration provides more opportunities for helping people. Topics like adoption, guardianship, and advanced planning for death can affect an entire family.

”You couldn’t do it alone,” she said about social workers and lawyers. ”Our connection makes us that much stronger.

”We work together, parallel, side-by-side, versus a hand-off. It’s not a foreign case to Genie by the time it gets handed to her.”

In education

Helen Kim earned an undergraduate degree in social work from Loyola University Chicago. She then earned her master’s degree in social work and her JD at the same time, through a dual-degree program at Loyola.

Kim decided to obtain the dual degree because at the time she saw law and social work as separate, potential career paths that she wanted to keep open. But she today uses that dual degree on a daily basis as a staff attorney for the Federal Defender Program.

She said she sees how social problems are often linked to the crimes her clients are accused of. Recognizing that connection helps her understand, and define her client beyond his or her legal situation. She can see how society and different systems might have affected the client.

Her social work degree helped her develop strong interviewing techniques, and assists her when reaching out to a client’s family, and when collecting data.

”I think there’s plenty of lawyers who don’t have dual degrees, and they have no interest in obtaining the two,” Kim said. ”At the same time, I have found that it’s helped my ability to describe my clients in more human terms, and my ability to do the collection of all the facts.

”I’ve found that most judges are not only open to hearing those things about the client, but some of them are moved enough by it to where I’d like to think it makes a difference in their case or during the sentencing.”

Criminal defendants are often not viewed as people by society, and their human side never gets brought into a case, she said. Kim will do things like provide family photos of the client to show his life beyond the accusations.

Some lawyers do not have the resources, or do not know whom to reach out to for social work support, so they do not make that connection, Kim said. While others are just not inclined to even think of connecting social work and law.

Other lawyers, she said, are more reluctant because they believe ”that it won’t make a difference, and the judges won’t be moved or touched or likely to do something different so they don’t take that risk or hire that social worker or get the training themselves.

”Then, I think there are those people who do see the usefulness, who will often say it makes perfect sense for the lawyer and social worker to go hand-in-hand when working with individuals.”

Anita Weinberg, a clinical professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law who oversees the dual-degree program that Kim participated in, said students can earn their JD and their master’s degree in social work in four years. Both areas overlap so much, and both types of skills benefit each other, she said.

A lawyer with this dual degree learns how to better interact with people, how to interview, and how to develop more insight; and the social worker with this dual degree learns greater critical skills, said Weinberg, who is also director of the ChildLaw Policy Institute.

”Being a lawyer, you don’t necessarily see the bigger picture of what’s going on in people’s lives,” she said. ”Social work places individuals within the bigger setting — whether it’s in their family, whether in the community, whether in society — and does a good job helping [others] understand who that person is, and figuring out many ways to be of assistance beyond fixing a law problem. Fixing that legal problem is helpful to them, but it may not turn their lives around.”

Michelle Geller, a licensed clinical social worker and staff social worker at the University of Chicago Law School’s Mandel Legal Aid Clinic, said there is a growing trend for law school legal clinics to hire social workers to work collaboratively with law students.

”Over time more and more people are seeing the value of having social workers in their settings, and that seems to outweigh the potential conflicts or problems or barriers that there may be,” Geller said. ”So much of it depends not so much on the professions, but on the people who are doing this, the personalities of the people.”

In the law school’s Criminal and Juvenile Justice Project, social workers help tell the client’s story by putting together social histories about the person.

This type of information is usually not uncovered during a regular legal interview, but can be critical to developing a theory in the case, she said.

Social workers are part of the legal team, which means they are covered by the same attorney-client privileges as the lawyers, Geller said.

”I think that as social workers they’re actually very focused on the process,” she said. ”I think lawyers are more focused on the end result. Our ultimate goal is to help clients to reach their broader goals, and to learn to make better judgments so they don’t find themselves in situations where they need to rely on lawyers to help them get out of criminal matters.”

Monica Mahan, assistant clinical professor at Northwestern University School of Law, has spent the last 15 years working with attorneys in the law school’s Bluhm Legal Clinic, and is a supervising social worker.

Mahan and between six to eight social work students work with about 150 law students in the clinic. She helps teach collaboration and the social work-law model.

In general, lawyers and social workers both interview clients, gather information, assess that information, counsel clients, and develop a relationship with those clients, Mahan said. But the focus of the interviewing and counseling can vary, she said.

What often gets missed in a legal case is defining who the client is as a person, she said. While a lawyer will handle a case, she and her social work students can be there to assess what kind of support system the client has in place, and what resources they need to move forward.

”When a social worker is part of the legal team, it really enhances the work,” Mahan said. ”We’d like to see it more and more. With budget cuts, people are looking at what they have to do. I also think, particularly in a teaching setting, it’s really important for lawyers to realize that there are good social workers, and for social workers to realize that there are excellent lawyers.

”Oftentimes our image of the social worker is that of an under-trained person who doesn’t really know what they are doing, or they’re called ‘bleeding heart liberals,”’ she said.

”Conversely of lawyers, [people think] they want to win at all costs. And none of that is true. Lawyers are compassionate about their work, and about their clients, and both [social workers and lawyers] really care about what’s going to happen.”

Editor’s Note

By Robert Yates

Aside from the opportunity to amass extraordinary wealth, the best thing about being a journalist is that you get to follow your curiosity. So, something strikes you as interesting, and you think, hey, I’d like to learn about that, so, I guess I’ll write a story about that. And you can. It’s great fun.

This doesn’t occur in a vacuum of course. There are those people called ”readers” who really give direction to our curiosity, which is why our merry band of journalists here talk to lawyers all the time. If we’re doing our jobs properly, we listen to what interests you and find a kernel that piques our curiosity, and then we start talking to people about that kernel, shaping and re-shaping it until we have something that piques your interest when you read the story.

And so, in pursuit of curiosity, we sit down the Monday after the latest issue has been sent to the printer and figure out what on earth we’re going to do next month. This month in particular, the stories were driven by the writers’ interests in the corners of broad subjects.

Our cover story, which examines how criminal defense attorneys establish a relationship with their clients, came from assistant editor Olivia Clarke’s asking a simple question: How do criminal lawyers get their clients — who, shall we say, may not be predisposed to trust anyone — to trust them? The result, after lengthy, fascinating, and occasionally hilarious interviews with many of the top criminal attorneys in town, is ”The Importance of Trust.” In the process of interviewing academics about the issue, Olivia discovered that this was something that has not been written about much, if at all. I’m hedging the bet there, but you can read it here first.

John Rooney, a longtime Chicago Daily Law Bulletin reporter, takes a look at the priest abuse scandals of recent years, but from a different angle: the emotional and spiritual impact that these cases have on the lawyers — most of whom are practicing Catholics. John’s story is ”Lawyers Negotiate Emotional Minefields.”

Jeffrey Steinback, who represented Conrad Black in the sentencing phase of his trial, seems to pop up at the sentencing phase in a lot of high-profile trials — which brought him to the attention of staff writer Maria Kantzavelos. It turns out that his practice consists exclusively of representing clients before indictment, and at the plea-bargaining or post-verdict sentencing phase — possibly the only lawyer in the country with that practice. Both Maria and Steinback were college gymnasts, so, after comparing injuries and surgical scars, they sat down for a number of interviews, and the result is a really interesting profile of Steinback.

Maria also writes this month about the ”Cindy Bischof Law,” a recently enacted law that will give judges the power to order a potential domestic abuser to wear a GPS tracking device to monitor his whereabouts. The law was pushed by Bischof’s brother, following her murder by her former boyfriend in the parking lot outside her real estate office. If he had been required to wear the GPS device, it’s possible she would have been warned in advance that he was waiting for her. As with any new law, there are questions about its implementation and costs. Maria’s story is ”GPS law gives offenders little latitude.”

In this month’s ”Climbing the Ladder” column, Shermin Kruse, a senior litigation associate at Barack Ferrazzano, talks about working with your assistant as a partner on the team, not as someone a step down in the hierarchy.

It seems that the simplest method for payment of a lawyer’s services is to take your fees in dollars, or maybe euros, but this month we have two columns that discuss more, um, creative approaches to the issue of fees.

David Heilmann, a partner at Clausen Miller, writes about the problems associated with the barter system. The recent case of the Illinois lawyer who took nude dances in his office in exchange for his legal service is, oddly, perhaps a harbinger of things to come in these tough economic times. David did some serious research on other barter methods for his column.

And Tom McGarry and Tom Sukowicz, partners at Hinshaw & Culberston, discuss the ethical issues in taking a deed from a client as a lien for legal fees, in ”Ethics.”

Closing Argument: Virtues of a small firm

By Ronald S. Miller
Miller Shakman & Beem

My 47 years with our small but well-known law firm, Miller Shakman & Beem, has provided me with the opportunity to represent such diverse clients as the Latin School of Chicago, Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, Chicago Board of Education, Playboy Enterprises, and the Chicago Transit Authority.

Early on, and with the encouragement of my then-senior partners Carl Devoe, Milton Shadur, and Abner Mikva, I had the rewarding opportunity to participate in a broad range of legal and assorted pro bono areas. These activities have helped the elderly, the poor, needy legal students, the incarcerated, and persons who have been deprived of equal housing opportunities, civil rights, civil liberties, or international human rights. It has been a great and varied small-firm experience and I think it useful to explain how these opportunities came about.

In 1955 I graduated from the University of Illinois College of Law. Back in Chicago, after two years in the Army, I sought the advice of Rubin Cohn, my former law professor, whose judgment I greatly respected. This outstanding man had also been active in high-profile and bipartisan civic endeavors. He encouraged me to find a relatively small firm, where I would have exposure to a wider variety of matters, but one with a first-class practice and a dedication to pro bono involvement.

He worked closely on civic issues with former Democratic Gov. Adlai Stevenson and with Samuel Witwer, a Republican, who at a later date became president of the 1970 Illinois Constitutional Convention. Letters of recommendation went to Gov. Stevenson and Mr. Witwer, senior partner in the small but prestigious firm of Wilkinson, Witwer & Moran.

Gov. Stevenson told me his small law firm was not then hiring. I had better luck with Samuel Witwer, who, in 1956, had been chairman of Illinois Citizens for Eisenhower. Mr. Witwer knew I was an ardent Democrat, but nevertheless offered me an associate position. I readily accepted.

About two years later, I delivered merger documents to a New York lawyer-entrepreneur who offered me a job in New York City. As an adventurous single person, I took advantage of this opportunity and spent almost three exciting years as a ”twenty-something” Manhattanite, passing the New York bar exam in the process.

My New York career ended unexpectedly in 1960 when my father’s sudden premature death necessitated my return to Chicago. Fortunately, a law school friend was an associate with my present firm, then known as Goldberg, Devoe, Shadur & Mikva. The firm offered me an associate position. Despite several other offers (some at a significantly higher salary), the outstanding lawyers and excellent overall reputation of this small firm impressed me.

Also, the diversity of clients and the firm’s obvious dedication to public interest matched the advice I originally received from my former law professor.

Arthur Goldberg was about to become President Kennedy’s first Secretary of Labor; Abner Mikva, chair of the Illinois House Judiciary Committee, was a highly respected rising star; and the other attorneys were also involved in diverse pro bono areas.

The opportunity to be associated with such role models was irresistible. I readily accepted — a decision I have always treasured.

Now, many years later, I look back at the excellent opportunities our firm has provided. I have served as counsel to many corporations and several hotel chains, been lead counsel for several initial public offerings, and principal counsel for the underwriters of other offerings. I have been developer-counsel in a number of federally subsidized housing developments as well as counsel to the recipient of the Illinois Housing Development Authority’s initial mortgage loan.

In the early days I was a part-time litigator, but found that my interests really did not lie in that area.

This is an anomaly, since the firm is well known for its litigators. Many of my former partners have ascended to the federal judiciary, and today the firm is a highly regarded litigation firm. The attorneys, judges and executive directors of the organizations with whom I have been associated are among the finest people I have ever known.

Our firm remains vibrant and prosperous in an era where many other small firms have succumbed to mergers they might have wished to avoid.

I attribute our success to the outstanding credentials of our attorneys, attracted by our manageable small size, our quality practice, and the encouragement of pro bono involvement.

We have demonstrated that a small, versatile firm with high-quality attorneys dedicated equally to outstanding client service and significant pro bono involvement can prosper and succeed.

This is quite an accomplishment in an era of ever-larger mega-firms. By resisting that trend, our attorneys experience both camaraderie and professional fulfillment. For me, it has been a rewarding adventure.

Diversity in Practice: Shifting Our Thinking

By Arin N. Reeves, J.D., Ph.D.
The Athens Group

Breaking news: The search for work/life balance is over!

No, the search is not over because someone has found the formula for balancing work and life. The search is over because evidence is mounting that there is actually no such thing as work/life balance.

The search for work/life balance began in the late 1960s when employers first encountered waves of women entering pink-collar and white-collar jobs and realized that managing this new category of employees, “working mothers,” required a radical change in traditional workplace infrastructure.

Between the 1960s and 1980s, the federal government contributed to advancing work/ life balance for working mothers through programs, legislation, and benchmarks (the Presidential Conference on Families, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, the Quality of Employment Survey).

In the 1990s, most workplaces had some form of work/life balance programs in place, and there was a feverish proliferation of work/ life balance books, conferences, consultants, and employee assistance programs. By 2000, work/life balance had evolved to include men and individuals who weren’t parents.

If you do a Google search for “work life balance” today, the search will net you roughly six million hits. Many sites and articles explore how difficult it is to achieve this balance; others offer advice on how to better search for this elusive objective. Examples of success are rare.

If you connect the six million dots, a mosaic of generational perspectives, technological changes, and quality of life expectations meld together to suggest that people are no longer trying to seek work/life balance. They see their lives holistically, and they have accepted imbalance on their journeys to integrate their work into their lives.

The paradigm of work/life balance has always been flawed with the presumption that one’s work was separate from one’s life, instead of being a part of one’s life. Work/life balance places an individual on the middle of a constantly teetering seesaw with work and life as the weighted ends that bounce up and down as they compete for the sole attention of the balancer who has to fight to remain standing in that precarious middle.

Work and life as separate and competing aspects of one’s waking hours not only sets up balance as an elusive and exhausting endeavor, but it also paints an inaccurate depiction of how people actually live their lives.

Each of us is given 24 hours every day to work, to play, to rest, to pursue our interests, to tend to our families, to learn, to grow, and to do a myriad of other things that together comprise our individual lives. The search for work/life balance has revealed that it has never been about work vs. life. It has always been about the freedom and flexibility to live our lives in ways that make sense to us.

In order for workplaces to shift from accommodating work/life balance to providing the flexibility for people to integrate work into their lives, they need to fundamentally shift from“work is where you go” to “work is what you do.”

Best Buy is one innovative example of abandoning the search for work/life balance, and initiating the freedom and flexibility to integrate work into life. Best Buy’s radical new approach, ROWE (Results-Only Work Environment), revises the traditional notions of office space,work days, and mandatory meetings, and institutes performance objectives driven by results instead of process. What you accomplish matters. How and when you accomplish it does not matter. Interestingly, when employees fit their work into their lives, they report being busier than ever, yet they are happier, more loyal to the company and more productive.

I can hear the screams of resistance from lawyers as they read this column. “But, that’s not how lawyers work!” “That may work at Best Buy, but my firm doesn’t run like that.” “We are in a service industry. We can’t decide our hours.”

The reality is that many lawyers have already abandoned the search forwork/life balance, and have begun focusing on integrating work into their lives. Parents leave work to attend a soccer game or school play, return to work, then go home to spend time with their families and log back on to complete assignments. People call in to meetings while on vacation or conduct their banking online while they are at work.

The challenge is that our workplaces have not yet caught up with our lives. We are creating part-time policies instead of reducing the need for face time. We are discussing compensation structures for partnership alternatives instead of realigning partnership tracks to correlate with results achieved instead of hours billed. And, we are losing too many talented people that prefer a ROWE to a seesaw.

I am not suggesting that our profession is ready or able to immediately transition to a ROWE, but I do believe that we have to recalibrate our vocabularies and our expectations to our realities.
The search for work/life balance is over. The hard work of shifting our thinking has just begun.

Clifford’s Notes: Don’t jump on the bandwagon

By Robert A. Clifford
Clifford Law Offices

I attended the American Bar Association’s annual meeting this year in New York and I thought I caught most of the highlights — but apparently not.

What created quite a stir is a booth in the exposition area that reportedly was manned by attractive models in short, tight nurses’ outfits and red high heels. And, oh, by the way, there also was an overflowing toilet at the booth.

An offer was made to the first 500 attorneys who signed up for the product to get in on it free. After that, it would cost $1,000 annually. What was it?

A new website called www.WhoCanISue .com, developed by an attorney, Curtis Wolfe, who says that his goal is to match up potential clients with lawyers.

Visit the website and you’ll see a man in a suit carrying a briefcase slipping on a banana peel. He also advises lawyers, ”Stop throwing money down the toilet on other forms of legal marketing.”

Is this for real? Is the profession that desperate? Do attorneys really think that the public is so clueless or just plain dumb that they are unable to find a competent lawyer without visiting a site called ”Who Can I Sue”?

Wolfe, a graduate of the University of Iowa College of Law, apparently decided to leave a partnership at a Miami law firm and serve a different purpose in the profession. He says his website differs from other legal matchmakers because it allows users to instant-message a lawyer or immediately contact those who advertise on the site. He says that it is a useful service because it may discourage ”frivolous lawsuits.” Although I disagree with his premise. What is the price to the profession, not to mention to consumers who might take this seriously?

Wolfe launched the site in September, a new career he publicly attributes to one of his wife’s friends who had difficulty in locating a divorce lawyer. In an interview with Lawyers Weekly USA, Wolfe said, ”If you’re a common person, I don’t know how you ever find an attorney other than by going to the Yellow Pages, looking at someone’s ad, dialing and hoping.”

Although it has garnered quite a bit of publicity — from Time magazine to CNN — it also has had its share of critics. Legal bloggers are having a field day in questioning the founder’s ethics — and rightfully so.

James Grogan, deputy administrator and chief counsel of the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission, said the site is merely another legal directory but it could potentially present ethics issues if there is sharing of legal fees with someone who merely recommends a lawyer’s services. Illinois Supreme Court Rule 7.2(b), which deals with the payment of advertising may come into play.

More importantly, though, Grogan is concerned with potential clients who may reveal confidential information about a potential case and then later find that their attorney-client privilege is waived because they posted it on a website where non-lawyers, including employees managing the website, may have viewed it.

Wolfe undertakes a legal matchmaking service by having consumers answer a series of questions about their grievances. Lawyers who have signed onto this service then bid on ad placements on the website directed at the consumers who are asking the questions. The consumer is then referred to five local attorneys, customers of Wolfe’s, and the higher the attorneys have bid, the more prominent is the placement of their ad on the site.

I ask: What makes these lawyers any more competent than any others if the consumer did find them in a prominent Yellow Pages ad? There is no screening, no credentials; no experience in the practice area is even necessary. Just join and bid.

Frankly, the whole process is not only scary, it is bound to give the public a rancid taste in their mouths about the profession, not to mention the despicable commercials on the website showing people in wheelchairs and neck braces, ambulances with men in briefcases running after them, and a ”lawyer” from ”Dewey Cheatum & Howe” who needs to ”join the revolution.”

Although, as Grogan points out, the rules across the country may be liberal in allowing law firms to market and get their names out in the public, I find that most people find competent lawyers through referrals. Whether it be through a friend, co-worker or a lawyer who might have handled their will or real estate closing, people know how to seek out a lawyer.

And most people certainly know how to search the Internet to readily locate many reputable firms with sophisticated and easily navigable websites that catalog not only their accomplishments and experience, but also the practice areas and curriculum vitae of its attorneys.

I am ashamed for Wolfe and for those who feel they have a need for his services. And even though he may be getting some publicity about his brainstorm, I hope lawyers will make the right decision not to jump on his marketing bandwagon.

Big Deals // Verdicts // Settlements

Big Deals

Mayer Brown is representing the City of Chicago in a $2.52 billion bid to privatize Midway Airport. The lead partners for Mayer Brown are John Schmidt, David Narefsky, and Joseph Seliga; associates Michael A. Serafini and Bobby L. Owens are also working on the deal.

The group seeking to purchase Midway is Midway Investment and Development Company, a consortium of Citi Infrastructure Investors from New York; YVR Airport Services, a Vancouver, Canada, company; and John Hancock Life Insurance Co., from Boston.

Under the terms of the 99-year lease, MIDCo will pay the entire purchase price — $2.521 billion — in upfront rent to the city at closing and will then have the right to operate the airport, subject to the terms of the lease. Both the city and the airlines will have the right to take action for any failure of the operator to meet the standards of the lease. The lease requires MIDCo to assume a 25-year use agreement with the airlines; airline rates and charges are capped at a level below 2008 charges and will remain frozen for six years.

The transaction is enabled by the FAA’s Airport Privatization Pilot Program, which, by statute, allows as many as five airports in the country to be privatized.

The transaction needs the approval of the FAA and the Transportation Security Administration, and is also subject to the approval of the Chicago City Council.

Shefsky & Froelich served as counsel to U.S. Equities Realty in closing the first phase of its $42 million retail and restaurant development, MetraMarket at the Ogilvie Transportation Center. Jack Guthman, Anthony R. Licata, and Paul Kelley worked on the transaction.

Verdicts

Much Shelist announced that the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals confirmed an arbitration award of $20.7 million to a former senior executive of both Enterprise Rent-A-Car and its parent company, the Crawford Group.

William F. Holekamp became an employee of Crawford in 1976, and was named executive vice president of Enterprise in 1992. After retiring at the end of 2000, he served the company as a consultant for five years.

In 1999, Crawford began compensating its senior employees with stock instead of entirely in cash. In 2004, Crawford informed Holekamp that the company intended to repurchase stock that had been given to him. The company tendered payment in the amount of $11.4 million based on a $25.32 share price that was derived from an appraisal utilizing methodology different than that used when the stock was originally given to employees.

In response, Holekamp filed a demand for arbitration, alleging that Crawford’s call and valuation of the stock breached the original stock award and shareholder agreement issued in 2000.

Crawford responded by filing suit in Missouri state court requesting specific performance of the repurchase provisions of the agreement. The court granted Crawford specific performance of the repurchase provisions and, in regard to the share price issue, concluded that the dispute was to be determined by arbitration.

Following a three-day hearing in March 2006, an arbitration panel entered an award based upon the same method of valuation used when the stock was originally issued. This set the purchase price of Holekamp’s stock at $45.90 a share, resulting in an award of $20.7 million — $9.3 million higher than Crawford’s original payment. Crawford then challenged the award, but the district court confirmed it. The 8th Circuit’s decision affirmed the order issued by the district court.

Settlements

The estate for a baby who was not properly treated for jaundice settled his case against the hospital and doctors for $7.75 million.

Luca Vaia was born in July 2000 at Elmhurst Hospital after a normal delivery; two days later, a nurse noted that he was slightly jaundiced, but when he was released to his parents, they were not told of his condition. Two days after his discharge, Luca was not nursing or sleeping well, and his parents brought him to the hospital emergency room, where he was found to be jaundiced and lethargic. He underwent an exchange transfusion at Loyola Hospital, but, according to the plaintiff’s attorneys, the transfusion took place too late to avoid injuries. The child now suffers from delayed development, hearing loss, cerebral palsy, and spastic quadriplegia.

The family was represented by Barry R. Chavetz, Shawn S. Kasserman, and Margaret Power of Corboy & Demetrio. The defendants were represented by Shawn P. Clifford of Hinshaw & Culbertson; David C. Hall of Hall Prangle & Schoonveld; William F. Cunningham of Cunningham, Meyer & Vedrine; and Ruth Enright and Robert Baker of Baker & Enright.

A motorcyclist whose right leg was amputated following a collision with a pickup truck settled his case for $3.75 million.

David Rodriguez, then 46, was driving on his motorcycle on Route 30 in New Lenox, when he was struck by a pickup truck who had pulled out from a stop sign.

The pickup driver said his view of Rodriguez was obstructed by an SUV driving in front of Rodriguez.

Rodriguez suffered tissue damage and fractures to his right leg so severe that his leg was amputated below the knee. He also suffered hip and pelvis fractures.

Rodriguez was represented by Philip Harnett Corboy Jr. and Thomas F. Boleky of Corboy & Demetrio. The defendants were represented by Laura Maul of Chilton Yambert Porter & Young; William P. McElligott of Leahy, Eisenberg & Fraenkel; Margaret E. Daniele and Judith Anne Gleason of Gleason & Schroeder; and Douglas J. Esp of Esp, Kreuzer, Cores & McLaughlin (Wheaton).

A man whose wife and baby died during childbirth has settled his suit against the hospital for $3.25 million.

In September 2004, Tosha Lunford-Mondesit, 29, was admitted to South Suburban Hospital in Hazel Crest for the delivery of a daughter. The next day, her fetal heart rate monitor and vitals began to show significant fetal distress. The obstetrician tried to deliver the baby by vacuum extraction and forceps. The baby was delivered vaginally, and the mother died that day as a result of an amniotic fluid embolism. The baby died several days later.

The husband and father was represented by Donald R. McGarrah of Salvi, Schostok & Pritchard. The hospital was represented by Patricia J. Barker and Jennifer M. Suttle of Barker & Castro.

—Robert Yates

Counsel’s Table: One too many bites

By Russell B. Selman
Katten Muchin Rosenman
Restaurant Critic

As a food reviewer, there are many times where I feel like a scout sent ahead to see if the food is safe to eat. This role is very different from my lawyering role, where the client is generally the one who is sent ahead. In both cases I remain heroically optimistic, but let’s face it, the reason why so many of us lawyers are not food reviewers is that there is a decided preference in our profession for others to taste the grub.

I admit that on occasion my dual roles overlap, and I think that I am the better for the training I have from both roles. When, for example, I recently ate out at a Florida fish house with an elderly aunt, my waiter allowed my baked potato to tumble to the floor just short of our table. The waiter apologized and said he’d bring another. My lawyer training kicked in with me braying, ”Uh-Uh-Uh,” and swaying my neck sideways like Wanda Sykes. ”You leave that potato here and bring me another and then you can take this potato away.” My 89-year-old aunt beamed at me and asked where I learned such peasant wisdom. I winked at her and pointed at my head (at least I think I pointed at my head and not at the potato).

In retrospect, such decision-making was the lawyerly part of my skeptical personality. Of course, I had no specific information that the establishment would re-serve the errant potato but, hey, why take the chance — and, besides, I had an opportunity to display my ”flashy” side to my aunt — a narcisstic double play for a lawyer and therefore impossible to resist.

By contrast, or so I wrongly thought, was my visit to Real Tenochtitlan (RT). While this place along Milwaukee Avenue is very new, the chef has successfully operated other fine establishments for many years that routinely turned out very good Mexican food. Strong flavors, moles that seem to steep and enhance flavors as the week stretches and the separate mole pots mix — a place I like to frequent. A safe reviewer’s choice: same food, new location, and typically festive, OLE! Review is done.

Things did not work out that way, this time. I started with a tamale and ended with an anecdote.

What happened was that the tamale was served cold, not icicle cold, just a ways below room temperature, so the flavors were not forthcoming. I hailed my waiter, who regretted this mistake and agreed to bring me a new, and warm tamale. Hey, it happens, no big deal, was my temperature.

After about 15 minutes, the waiter made another apologetic fuss and presented my new tamale. Now, 15 minutes seemed a long time, but it takes time to make a tamale (I told myself) and it wasn’t like RT just re-heated my old cold tamale. My waiter smiled deeply and stood by to ensure that all was well as I prepared to savor …

Time stopped, a beat or two, as I regarded my tamale, which was missing its top/bottom. ”Hey — what’s going on? My tamale’s been eaten,” I exclaimed with a passion not unlike Dreyfus’ ”J’Accuse!” admittedly uttered under dissimilar circumstances, but just as keenly felt.

My waiter, not a student of Franco-Jewish history, denied any such connection and denied the bite marks presence. ”B-b-b-b-ut, look,” I stammered, ”my twamale has a bite mark!” (When upset, my pronunciations go their own way). Since I had used a fork to cut into TWAMALE #1 (please mark the exhibit) and TWAMALE #2 has a bite (not mine, by the way, and I will call my forensics expert later, your honor) we had a diabolic conspiracy underway. I began to think about merchandizing both international book and film rights (Oliver Stone calling on line 2).

Still, and necessarily perhaps, my waiter refused to see what the whole world could see (and be moved by when I am played by Gael Garcia Bernal). ”Senor, that is not a bite,” he said, and he reminded me of the old joke about a wife catching her husband in bed with another woman with the husband saying, ”Who do you believe — me or your own eyes?”

”OK, then, what is it? Looks like a bite, NO?” Reply — ”Yes it looks like a bite, but that cannot be.” We had a standoff — yes a Mexican standoff. And I began to hear the eerie whistling of a Lee Van Cleef spaghetti Western.

So what can I say? As a food critic I took and reported on the road ahead for the benefit of all. As a lawyer, I say, a potato in hand is worth two twamales in the bush.

Pleadings:
Real Tenochtitlan
2451 N. Milwaukee Ave.
773-227-1050

Court Costs:
Appetizers $8-10
Entrees $20-30

No Rating

Financial Services: CEO’s requirement to supervise reasonably

By James J. Eccleston
Shaheen, Novoselsky, Staat, Fillpowski, & Eccleston

Recently, the Securities and Exchange Commission instituted settled administrative proceedings against Stephen Moynahan (SEC Rel.No. 34-58689). Moynahan was the president and CEO of Dolphin & Bradbury, Inc., formerly a registered broker-dealer.

The SEC found that Moynahan failed reasonably to supervise a fraudulent scheme perpetrated by Robert Bradbury, an investment banker and co-owner of the firm. Without admitting or denying the findings, Moynahan consented to the entry of an order that bars him from supervising, bars him from owning another firm, suspends him for six months, and fines him $140,000. Importantly, the SEC imposed those substantial sanctions despite recognizing that Moynahan had ”no knowledge” of Bradbury’s fraudulent scheme. Let’s examine why.

As background, the SEC found that Bradbury had engaged in a fraudulent scheme to offer and sell, primarily to various Pennsylvania school districts, a series of risky, short-term, tax-exempt notes underwritten by Dolphin & Bradbury to finance a speculative golf course project known as Whitetail (the ”Whitetail Notes”). The Whitetail Notes were unsuitable for the school districts, and also violated state law restrictions on what were permissible investments for public funds. Prior to those sales to the school districts, Bradbury had been unable to find sufficient suitable investors. The SEC also found that neither Bradbury nor the firm disclosed to the school districts the material risks associated with the Whitetail Notes.

Moreover, the SEC determines that, although Bradbury ”developed a practice of buying and selling securities on behalf of the school districts without first discussing the transactions with any school district representatives,” there was no authority to trade in this kind of discretionary manner.

Finally, the SEC found that Bradbury ”repeatedly executed and delivered false and misleading documents,” not only to demonstrate that the purchasers of the Whitetail Notes indeed were sophisticated and/or accredited investors, but also to show that the firm owned some of the Whitetail Notes. Some of these documents were faxed and e-mailed.

Despite his lack of knowledge of Bradbury’s fraudulent scheme, the SEC focused on the fact that Moynahan was ”generally responsible” for firm supervision, with some duties expressly assigned to him.

The SEC determined that Moynahan ”failed to review the firm’s written supervisory procedures, failed to establish, or delegate to anyone else responsibility for establishing, reasonable supervisory procedures with respect to the firm’s underwriting business, failed to adequately comply with many of the provisions of the written supervisory procedures that were in place, and failed to affirmatively delegate to anyone else responsibility for supervising Bradbury.”

The firm had procedures in place to detect unsuitable investments, but the unsuitable Whitetail Note purchases went undetected because of Moynahan’s failure to supervise.

For example, Moynahan was responsible for customer transactions and correspondence, yet failed to adequately review and endorse them by initialing the daily trade blotter and copies of correspondence. Indeed, the SEC found that, despite being required to retain copies of correspondence, ‘’some critical communications concerning the Whitetail Notes were neither retained nor available for review.”

While Moynahan did routinely review the daily trade blotter, he limited his review to learn what kind of business the firm was conducting and at what profit levels. He ”routinely” excluded another part of the daily trade blotter, which flagged investment purchases inconsistent with the customer’s investment objectives. The SEC found that the system worked — it flagged the Whitetail Note purchases as being potentially unsuitable investments for school districts — but Moynahan never saw the warnings!

Most remarkable was Moynahan’s failure to implement any policies or procedures to conduct due diligence investigations of securities that the firm underwrote. The SEC found that Moynahan ”believed it was appropriate for each investment banker at Dolphin & Bradbury, including Bradbury, to operate independently and without supervision!”

Consequently, the SEC stated that neither Moynahan nor anyone else at the firm ”reviewed Bradbury’s due diligence investigations in connection with the underwritings of the Whitetail Notes, including any of the written representations made by Bradbury. —”

In view of all of those significant failures to supervise, Moynahan’s lack of knowledge as to Bradbury’s fraudulent scheme served as no meaningful defense to the substantial sanctions that the SEC has imposed. Supervisors — and lawyers who counsel them and their firms — should understand that the SEC will not tolerate the ”head in the sand” defense.

Ethics: Taking a deed from a client

By Thomas P. McGarry and Thomas P. Sukowicz
Hinshaw & Culbertson

Is it proper for a lawyer to take a deed to a client’s real estate to secure the payment of the lawyer’s legal fees? The answer is, it depends on the circumstances.

Generally, when a lawyer takes a deed to a client’s property at the outset of the attorney-client relationship as part of the retainer agreement, and it is understood that the deed is only being held as a lien, and not intended as a conveyance of title, there is no violation of the rules.

In In re Peters, 91 CH 541 (April 10, 1995) an attorney agreed to represent a client in a pending dissolution of marriage for an hourly rate.

The retainer agreement did not refer to a security interest in the marital residence. The attorney had the client sign a quitclaim deed that conveyed the client’s joint tenancy interest in the property to the attorney’s firm. The deed did not specify that it was intended as security for the payment of legal fees, but the attorney and client orally agreed that its purpose was to create a lien to secure payment of attorney’s fees.

Although the Review Board found the attorney’s conduct ”troubling” because it could lead to a potential conflict of interest between attorney and client, it dismissed the charges because the ethics rules allow a lawyer to acquire a lien granted by law to secure the attorney’s fees or expenses.

Under McGill v. Biggs, 434 N.E.2d 772, 61 Ill.Dec. 417 (1982), a quitclaim deed may be used to secure payment of a debt, and it is the intent of the parties that controls whether a deed will operate as a conveyance or a lien. Because the deed in this case was a lien allowed by law, it did not constitute obtaining an ownership interest in the subject matter of the litigation.

Because taking the quitclaim deed as a lien to secure payment of fees was part of the initial fee arrangement between the lawyer and client at the outset of the relationship, it did not constitute overreaching or an improper business relationship with a client.

In In re Petrich, 07 CH 76, M.R. 22280 (May 19, 2008), an attorney obtained a quitclaim deed to his client’s house for payment of his anticipated legal fees in a federal criminal case.

He was censured for overreaching because he had not sufficiently protected his client’s interest in the property.

The attorney and client agreed that the fee (of an unspecified amount) would be paid from the proceeds of the sale of the client’s house, which was worth between $35,000 and $70,000.

Two months after having been retained, the client signed a quitclaim deed transferring ownership of the house to the attorney.

The attorney never provided any writing to explain and memorialize the client’s continuing interest in the property.

The attorney did not advise the client of the consequences of relinquishing title to his property or of the amount of accrued or anticipated legal fees, did not reach any agreement as to the amount that would be used to pay additional counsel, and did not advise him to seek independent counsel regarding the transaction.

The client was ultimately represented by the federal defender.

The attorney entered his appearance in the federal case, but his appearance was ordered withdrawn after the prosecutor made an oral motion to disqualify him due to his representation of one of the witnesses in the case. The client was convicted.

The facts of this case are distinguishable from those of Peters, in part, because the client signed the deed two months after having retained the attorney; thus, the deed transaction was not part of the initial fee agreement negotiated between the attorney and his potential client.

Sometimes the manner in which the transaction occurs makes an otherwise acceptable agreement unethical. In In re Pantoga, M.R. 12137, 96 CH 27 (1996), an attorney was censured for overreaching — not for taking title to three properties belonging to his client’s sister, but for drafting the fee agreement to allocate to himself the power to unilaterally decide how to apportion the legal fees between himself and the other attorney, without disclosing that fact to the client or his agent, and by refusing to return the proceeds of the sale of two properties in excess of the fee.

If you are considering taking a deed from a client to protect your fees, remember that this is a risky proposition. Be sure to address the concerns expressed in these cases. Consider whether you are seeking to take the deed as part of your initial retainer agreement or are entering into a separate business transaction with a client.

Also, provide the appropriate safeguards so that it is clear that you are holding the deed as a lien and not with the intent to convey title.

Be careful about the other rights you take with respect to any sale of the property and the disbursement of funds.

Profile: Jeffrey Steinback

By Maria Kantzavelos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘One of a kind’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘A Jeff Steinback experience’

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

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

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

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

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

All things human

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

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

He offered the following scenario:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collins echoed that sentiment, recalling his own Steinback experiences.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next Page »