Asked and Answered

By John W. Olmstead, MBA, Ph.D, CMC

Q. I am the owner of a general practice firm in Chicago’s west suburbs. My firm has three associate attorneys and three staff members. I am 64 and contemplating my retirement and exit from the practice. I would like to start phasing back over the next three years and be out of the practice by December 31, 2021. There is one associate in the firm to whom I would like to sell the practice and he has expressed an interest as well. What are your thoughts as to how I approach this?

You are invited to represent ISBA alongside the Standing Committee on Marketing & Communications by marching in the 2018 St. Patrick’s Day in Chicago on March 17. An annual tradition for ISBA, walking alongside our mobile billboard is a great opportunity to represent the association and our lawyers to the public.

The parade begins at noon at Balbo and Columbus, and proceeds north on Columbus. Members interested in participating can meet at the ISBA Chicago Regional Office, 20 S. Clark Street, Ste. 900 in the morning to walk to the parade as a group at 11:30 a.m. or meet at the parade site. Interested participants are encouraged to bring family and friends. The ISBA parade number will be released the week of the parade.

Contact Sara Anderson at sanderson@isba.org if you would like to participate or for further information.

All ISBA systems will be down due to electrical work between 7 a.m. and 12 p.m. on Sunday, March 4. During this time the ISBA website will not be available. As a result you will also not be able to log into Fastcase, online CLE, and ISBA Central. Here is what you need to know and steps you can take to ensure continued service.

Online CLE

You will not be able to access online CLE at all during the outage. We urge you to plan your weekend CLE needs around the outage.

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn how to transform an underperforming practice into a well-performing one! Join us via the Internet on March 7, 2018 as Kerry M. Lavelle teaches us the benefits of a well-performing practice to the firm’s partners, staff attorneys, employees, and clients. Learn how to identify an underperforming practice, why a fix is necessary, and the tools needed to transform the firm into a successful one.

The United States Attorney's Office (USAO) for the Southern District of Illinois has one criminal assistant united states attorney (AUSA) position available in the Fairview Heights office. The Criminal Division is divided into three units: Fraud and Corruption, Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement, and Violent Crimes. Over two-thirds of  the criminal case load consists of drug trafficking crimes and crimes of violence, including child exploitation offenses. Approximately 15 percent of our criminal cases are white collar crimes, including official corruption and theft.

The Illinois Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in two cases at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Krannert Center for the Performing Arts on Thursday, March 15, at 10:30 a.m.

The court periodically holds oral arguments at various locations throughout Illinois to better inform the public on the work it does. According to statements made by Illinois Supreme Court Chief Justice Lloyd A. Karmeier in a press release issued by the court, inviting community residents to attend helps demystify the the appellate process, which is often poorly understood — sometimes even by lawyers. He also noted that holding arguments outside of the Illinois Supreme Court Building in Springfield reminds court members that rulings have a direct and real impact on the state's citizens.

Join the Young Lawyers Division on Saturday, May 12, in Springfield for an action-packed bean bag tournament! Teams will compete in this annual event for first place. Registration is now open, and you can sign up as a team or as an individual to be paired with another YLD member. Tickets can be purchased online for $30 per person until May 9, or purchased at the door for $35. One ticket includes one person’s entry into the tournament, light bites, and beer and wine for the duration of the event.

For general question, contact Kimi Jalali. For questions about sponsorship opportunities, contact Blake Howard. 

Naperville business and estate planning attorney Mark C. Metzger regularly gives presentations on mindfulness for lawyers, as he will be doing at the ISBA Solo and Small Firm Practice Institute in Bloomington March 16 (find out more at www.isba.org/cle/2018/03/16/momentum). And he regularly encounters a couple of misconceptions, the first of which is that mindfulness and meditation are one and the same, when in fact the latter is a technique commonly used to achieve the former.

Chicagoan Jake Crabbs, a law clerk for the Circuit Court of Cook County, is winner of first place and $2,000 in the ISBA’s 2018 Lincoln Award Legal Writing Contest. His article, “Who Can Receive Service for a Corporate Defendant?,” appears in the February issue of the Illinois Bar Journal.

Second place winner is Daniel Ritter of Swanson, Martin & Bell, LLP in St. Louis, who wrote “Limiting Personal Jurisdiction: The Impact of Tyrrell, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Aspen American,” which also appears in the February IBJ. Daniel won $1,000.

Third place and $500 goes to John Zimmerman, Springfield, for “People v. Kent: The New Standard for Authenticating Social Media Evidence.

Thirty manuscripts were submitted in the 2018 contest, which was sponsored by the ISBA Young Lawyers Division and open to YLD members. Judges were Justice David K. Overstreet of the Illinois Appellate Court, Fifth District; Judge Diane M. Shelley of Circuit Court of Cook County; Isaac Colunga, a partner in Ice Miller LLP’s business litigation group in Chicago; Barbara Bell, who practices employment law and estate planning in Arlington Heights; and Kathy Sons of Kavanagh Grumley & Gorbold in Joliet.

Asked and Answered

By John W. Olmstead, MBA, Ph.D, CMC

Q. I am a new firm administrator with a 35-attorney litigation firm in Los Angeles, California. The accounting department has seven staff members handling a variety of tasks. My partners are concerned that we are inefficient and over-staffed. I am having a hard time finding where to start so to get a handle on this issue. Please provide any information that you are willing to share.