Joe Schomberg, an associate at the Chicago office of Sidley Austin LLP, is winner of first place and $2,000 in the ISBA’s 2020 Lincoln Award Legal Writing Contest. His article, “Major Buzzkill: The Relationship (or Lack Thereof) Between State Legalized Cannabis and the Bankruptcy Code,” will appear in the February issue of the Illinois Bar Journal.

Second place winner is Amy Frantz, a senior associate at Purcell & Wardrope Chtd. in Chicago, who wrote “What’s So Special about Special Interrogatories? A Guide to Special Interrogatories and Navigating the Amended Statute which Governs Them.” Amy won $1,000.

Third place and $500 goes to Alexander F. Berk, an associate at Adelman & Gettleman Ltd. in Chicago, for “Practical Considerations for Commercial/Transactional Representation of  Marijuana Enterprises.”

Thirty-one manuscripts were submitted in the 2020 contest, which was sponsored by the ISBA Young Lawyers Division and open to YLD lawyer members. Contest judges were Justice Thomas M. Harris, Jr., of the 4th District Appellate Court in Lincoln; Hon. Jeanne M. Reynolds, an associate judge of the Circuit Court of Cook County in Skokie; John J. Holevas, the managing partner at WilliamsMcCarthy LLP in Rockford; David J. Robinson, the chief deputy director at the State's Attorneys Appellate Prosecutor's Office in Springfield; and Margherita M. Albarello, with the law firm Di Monte & Lizak LLC in Park Ridge.