Anesi Ozmon: Seventy Years of Trying the Comp Claim and the Negligence Case Together

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At a Glance

Firm	Anesi, Ozmon, Rodin, Novak & Kohen, Ltd., trading since 2023 as Anesi Ozmon, Ltd.
Founded	1955 by Charles E. Anesi (per the firm); merged with Ozmon & Lewin in 1964
Office	161 N. Clark Street, Suite 2100, Chicago, IL 60601 — single office
Focus	Construction injury and Structural Work Act litigation; workers’ compensation; personal injury; FELA railroad claims
Side of the docket	Plaintiff and claimant only
Size	12 attorneys listed
Client base	Union trades — ironworkers, carpenters, laborers, plumbers, electricians, Teamsters, operating engineers, police and fire
Appellate depth	Counsel of record in four Illinois Supreme Court decisions, including LaFever v. Kemlite (1998) and Ioerger v. Halverson Construction (2008)
Fee model	Contingency (per the firm)
Disciplinary record	No public discipline on file with the Illinois ARDC for any attorney at the firm — current, retired, or founding — across eighty-four years of admissions

I. First in His Class at Northwestern, and a Sergeant Who Went to Law School

Nat P. Ozmon graduated first in his class at Northwestern University School of Law, was elected to the Law Review board and inducted into Order of the Coif, taught trial advocacy as a Loyola adjunct for roughly a decade, served as president of the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association, and received the Leonard Ring Lifetime Achievement Award. He was born in Davenport, Iowa in 1925, admitted to the Illinois bar on May 20, 1954, and died on September 14, 2011 at eighty-six. The firm still lists him, and it should.

Charles E. Anesi was admitted twelve years earlier, on September 14, 1942. The firm dates itself to 1955, when Anesi opened a practice for injured workers under the Illinois workers’ compensation statute; Ozmon and Richard Lewin had their own firm; the two merged in 1964. The ARDC admission dates are consistent with that account, though they do not prove it — and one directory gives a competing 1965 founding under a different name, which we could not reconcile with anything.

The detail that says most about who works here now: David Figlioli was a Chicago Police Department patrol officer and sergeant from 1982 to 1990 before he was a lawyer. Scott Sands tried felonies for the Cook County Public Defender from 1986 to 1990. Neither came to plaintiff’s work from a large firm.

II. The Mechanism: Two Cases, One Injury, One Firm

When an ironworker falls on a Chicago jobsite, two separate legal claims come into existence. One is a workers’ compensation claim against his employer, which pays medical and wage benefits on a no-fault basis and is capped. The other is a third-party negligence suit against the general contractor, the property owner or an equipment manufacturer — the parties the exclusive-remedy bar does not protect. The second is where the money is; the first is where the rent gets paid while the second takes four years.

Anesi Ozmon’s structure is that it runs both, for the same client, out of the same building, sold through the same channel — the union local. That is not a marketing arrangement. It is visible in the firm’s published appellate record, which clusters in exactly two places: Illinois Structural Work Act and construction negligence cases (Bokodi v. Foster Wheeler Robbins, Martens v. MCL Construction, Shaughnessy v. Skender Construction, Radtke v. Schal-Bovis, LePretre v. Lend Lease, Foley v. Builtech), and Industrial Commission workers’ compensation appeals (Saunders, Mora, Ratledge). Four of its cases reached the Illinois Supreme Court.

The union relationship is the acquisition engine and the firm does not pretend otherwise. Individual attorney biographies name the locals: Ironworkers 1, 63, 111, 444 and 498; Laborers 751, 996 and 32; Carpenters 10; IBEW 15; Operating Engineers 150. Scott Sands runs a distinct FELA railroad practice and belongs to the Academy of Rail Labor Attorneys. Wayne Newman, who was installed as president of the roughly 700-member Workers’ Compensation Lawyers Association in 2011, is described as regularly teaching union members their rights under the Act.

The honest read of that model is that it is a referral relationship, and referral relationships select for volume and continuity rather than for the single largest case in the city.

III. Practice Areas

• Construction and jobsite injury, including Structural Work Act and third-party contractor liability
• Workers’ compensation (claimant side)
• Personal injury and wrongful death
• FELA railroad worker claims
• Medical malpractice
• Social Security disability

The firm’s own reported practice mix is roughly personal injury 40%, workers’ compensation 30%, Social Security disability 10%. Medical malpractice is the thinnest of the advertised areas.

IV. Track Record

Past results do not guarantee or predict the outcome of any future case. Sources are named, and figures we could not confirm outside the firm’s own materials are marked.

$67,000,000 — but see Section VI	The ConAgra grain bin explosion at Chester, Illinois. The firm’s involvement is confirmed by the Seventh Circuit’s own opinion, which lists “Marc A. Taxman, Anesi, Ozmon, Rodin, Novak & Kohen LTD” as plaintiffs’ counsel. The judgment against ConAgra was reversed outright and the punitive damages were reversed. Read Section VI before relying on this figure.
$6,300,000	Ironworker’s fall claim against Fiat Chrysler, reported by Law360 on April 7, 2022 — independent trade press, not a firm release.
$1,228,594	Cook County verdict for a Local 74 bricklayer injured in a scaffold and wall collapse, tried by Steven Berman (2023). Consistent with Law360’s coverage of the firm.
$490,000	Premises verdict for a Lowe’s customer, reported by Law360, May 2, 2022.
Illinois Supreme Court appearances	LaFever v. Kemlite (1998), Atkins v. Deere & Co. (1997), Saunders v. Industrial Comm’n (2000) and Ioerger v. Halverson Construction (2008), all with the firm as counsel of record per the published opinions. The firm also appeared as amicus curiae for the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association in Bayer v. Panduit Corp., 2016 IL 119553 — a genuine marker of standing in the plaintiff bar. It did not represent Bayer, and the $64 million verdict in that case is not its result.

Figures we could not verify. Six of the firm’s largest advertised results — $24.25M (ironworker quadriplegic, fifty-foot fall), $22M (seven masons, wall collapse), $20.93M (ironworker, severed arm), $18M (cerebral palsy settlement), and the $12M and $11.7M McCormick Place stairway cases — appear on the firm’s own site and nowhere we could reach. So do the individual career aggregates for Alter, Berman and Newman. Confidential settlements explain part of that; large verdicts being absent from accessible reporting is harder to explain.

On “billions.” The homepage banner says “Over 1 Billion Recovered.” The homepage body, two paragraphs down, says “we have recovered billions of dollars,” and the construction page says the same. Those are different claims, and summing every figure the firm itself publishes does not approach the larger one. Over seventy years, “over $1 billion” is defensible. “Billions” is not supported by anything the firm has put in public.

V. Client Voice

We have to be straight about a limitation here. Every client quote we could obtain comes from the firm’s own curated, undated testimonials page. Google, Avvo, Yelp, Lawyers.com and Martindale all blocked retrieval, so we could not read a single unfiltered client review, positive or negative. We are not going to characterise reviews we could not read.

“Working with you guys and Brian Teven was great! Highly recommend you guys”
— Jason Halvorsen, firm testimonials page, undated

“Attorney John Popelka did a great service for me, very skillful, very direct”
— Phillip Lane, firm testimonials page, undated

“THANK YOU for taking such great care of us during both situations we had”
— 5 stars, FindLaw — the only independent client review we could locate anywhere

One review on one independent platform is a thin record for a firm this old. The one substantial body of outside feedback we could read is not from clients at all: Glassdoor shows 2.8 out of 5 across 14 employee reviews, with 49% saying they would recommend the firm to a friend. Recurring themes are salary decreases following a management change, limited advancement, and criticism of upper management. Fourteen reviews is a small sample and employee sentiment is not client outcome — but at a firm whose value to a client is continuity over a four-year construction case, staff turnover is not irrelevant.

VI. The Seventy-Million-Dollar Number and What Happened to It

The firm’s premises-liability page states: “$67,000,000 — Verdict for a worker who suffered burn injuries when a grain bin exploded at a ConAgra, Inc. facility in Chester, Illinois.” Its construction page calls it a “$67 Million Record Jury Verdict.” Neither page says what happened next.

In June 2012 a federal jury in the Southern District of Illinois awarded the firm’s client Justin Becker $35,390,000 in compensatory damages and $33,333,333 in punitive damages — about $68.7 million, against ConAgra and West Side Salvage. On appeal, in Jentz v. ConAgra Foods, Inc., 767 F.3d 688 (7th Cir. 2014):

• The judgment against ConAgra was reversed entirely. The court held ConAgra was entitled to judgment as a matter of law, because it had hired West Side Salvage — a self-described expert in hot bins — to remedy the very condition at issue. ConAgra, the deep-pocket defendant named in the firm’s own advertising copy, was found not liable.
• The punitive damages were reversed, the court finding insufficient evidence of willful and wanton conduct and criticising the award as reflecting hindsight bias.
• Compensatory damages against West Side Salvage were affirmed.

Trade press reported that roughly $100 million of the approximately $180 million awarded across the three injured workers was undone. What survived for this firm’s client was a compensatory award against a salvage contractor — materially less than the advertised figure, against a materially smaller defendant. The advertised $67,000,000 also matches neither the $68.7 million jury award nor the affirmed judgment.

What makes the omission conspicuous is that the firm does annotate appellate history elsewhere: smaller entries on the same pages carry notes like “This verdict was upheld through appeals to the Illinois Supreme Court.” The largest number is the one without a note.

Two further findings on the same result. The lawyer who tried it has left. Marc A. Taxman is not on the current roster; he is now a founding partner of Taxman, Pollock & Bekkerman, whose site advertises the same “$67 Million Recovery.” Two competing Chicago firms now claim the same partially-reversed verdict. Anesi Ozmon’s claim to firm involvement is legitimate — the Seventh Circuit named it as counsel — but the trial lawyer is down the street.

And the roster has at least one entry that does not check out: John W. Chwarzynski Jr. is listed as an Associate, but the ARDC shows two lawyers by that name and neither is registered at this firm — one at Dworkin & Maciariello, the other at his own practice. ARDC addresses update annually and can lag a move, so this may be a timing artifact; on the current record it reads as a departed attorney still on the page.

What we did not find, and looked hard for. No disciplinary action, suspension, censure or reprimand against any attorney at this firm — not the twelve currently listed, not the retired partners, and not any of the five historic name partners, back to Charles Anesi’s 1942 admission. Every ARDC record reads “None.” We validated the search against control surnames that return dozens of real sanctions, so this is a genuine result rather than a broken query. We also found no malpractice suit against the firm, no sanctions order, no ethics finding, and — having specifically searched the Greylord era, given the firm’s vintage and its Cook County practice — no historical scandal of any kind. For a Chicago personal injury firm with an eighty-four-year lineage, that is a genuinely rare record, and it is the strongest affirmative thing in this profile.

Smaller housekeeping, for accuracy’s sake: the attorneys page renders Nat Ozmon as “Founder, In Memorium.” Third-party listings are worse than the firm’s own — the BBB names John Popelka as president when the firm’s site says Jeffrey Alter; Glassdoor lists a retired partner as CEO; and a directory still carries an attorney who has moved to another firm.

VII. Beyond the Courtroom

This firm’s community record runs through organised labour rather than charity. Wayne Newman is described as regularly educating union members across Illinois on their rights under the Workers’ Compensation Act. The firm sponsored the Ironworkers Local 1 golf outing in June 2025. Nat Ozmon taught trial advocacy at Loyola for roughly a decade.

Its bar service is real and it is concentrated: an ITLA presidency (Ozmon), a Workers’ Compensation Lawyers Association presidency (Newman), a Chicago Bar Association Workers’ Compensation Committee chairmanship (Alter), an ITLA Board of Managers seat since 2010 (Figlioli), and amicus work for ITLA before the Illinois Supreme Court.

We found no pro bono program, scholarship or charitable initiative attributable to the firm, and this profile does not imply one.

VIII. Credentials and Recognition

Peer-reviewed and elected:

• Best Lawyers in America (peer ballot) — Jeffrey M. Alter, Workers’ Compensation Law – Claimants, since 2026; John M. Popelka, same category, since 2015. Two Best Lawyers recognitions and one Best Law Firms award in total, which is a modest haul for a firm of this size and age and is worth saying plainly.
• Super Lawyers — eight attorneys selected: Popelka, Alter, Teven, Berman, Kuzebski, Figlioli, Moran and Sands.
• Martindale-Hubbell AV Preeminent (confidential peer survey) — Alter (2022) and Popelka, per the firm’s biographies.
• Bar leadership — Nat P. Ozmon, past President of the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association and a member of the managing boards of the American Trial Lawyers Association and the Chicago Bar Association; Wayne Newman, President of the Workers’ Compensation Lawyers Association (2011); Jeffrey M. Alter, former Chair of the CBA Workers’ Compensation Committee; David Figlioli, ITLA Board of Managers since 2010.

Paid or commercially monetized programs, which should not be read as peer honors: Leading Lawyers and Emerging Lawyers, which sell profile placement, and whose “less than 2% of all lawyers in Illinois” line is the vendor’s own marketing copy; a “10 Best Attorneys in Illinois for Client Service” award of the pay-to-display variety; and a “Top 250 lawyers in the United States” citation on one biography that names no issuing organisation at all — we could not identify the conferring body and it should not be repeated without one.

IX. The Illinois Legal Backdrop, in Plain English

General information, not legal advice. Statutes were verified as noted in the Methodology section; deadlines turn on facts a lawyer has to look at, and the jobsite injuries this firm handles are the category where that is most true.

Illinois does not recognize legal specialists. Illinois Rule of Professional Conduct 7.4(b) states that “The Supreme Court of Illinois does not recognize certifications of specialties in the practice of law, nor does it recognize certifications of expertise in any phase of the practice of law by any agency, governmental or private, or by any group, organization or association.” Rule 7.4(c) forbids a lawyer from using “certified,” “specialist” or “expert” to describe their qualifications, except to identify an actual certificate or award and then only with a disclaimer stating that Illinois does not recognize specialty certifications and that the credential is not required to practice here. Registered patent attorneys are the sole exception. No lawyer is described as a specialist anywhere in this profile.

Two years, usually — but the comp claim runs on a different clock. 735 ILCS 5/13-202 gives two years from accrual to file a personal injury action. A workers’ compensation claim before the Illinois Workers’ Compensation Commission has its own notice and filing deadlines, which are not the same and are not interchangeable. An injured worker with both claims has two calendars, and this is the single most common way a jobsite case is lost.

Fifty-one percent ends the case. Under 735 ILCS 5/2-1116, a plaintiff more than 50% at fault recovers nothing; at 50% or below, damages are reduced in proportion. In construction cases the defence argument is almost always that the worker’s own conduct crossed that line.

Children get the clock back. 735 ILCS 5/13-211 gives a person injured before turning 18 two years from their eighteenth birthday.

Public bodies are far shorter. Under 745 ILCS 10/8-101(a), a claim against a local public entity or its employee — a city, a school district, a park district, a public building authority — must be filed within one year. Subsection (b) gives two years, with a four-year repose, only for claims arising out of patient care. Public construction projects are exactly where this trap sits.

The CTA is one year, with no notice requirement. 70 ILCS 3605/41 gives one year from accrual to sue the Chicago Transit Authority. The six-month written notice requirement that older articles still recite was repealed effective June 1, 2009.

Wrongful death. Under 740 ILCS 180/1 and 180/2, the action is brought by the personal representative for the exclusive benefit of the surviving spouse and next of kin, generally within two years of death; five years where death resulted from violent intentional conduct, or one year after final disposition of a related criminal case for certain offences.

X. The Awesome Attorneys Assessment

The specific thing Anesi Ozmon does that most Chicago injury firms do not is run the workers’ compensation claim and the third-party negligence case together, for the same injured tradesperson, out of the same office — a pairing it has been doing since 1955 and which shows up in an appellate record that clusters in Structural Work Act cases and Industrial Commission appeals rather than scattering across categories. If you are a union member hurt on a Chicago jobsite, that is the single most useful structure a firm can have, because your benefits and your lawsuit are not the same case and most firms only do one of them.

The second thing is rarer and worth more than any verdict number: across eighty-four years of admissions, twelve current attorneys, four retired partners and five historic name partners, the Illinois ARDC has no public discipline on record for a single one of them. We went looking for a scandal at a mid-century Cook County plaintiff’s firm and did not find one.

The trade-offs are two, and they point in the same direction. The first is scale relative to ambition: this is a twelve-lawyer firm whose model is volume through union referrals, and the largest case in its own advertising was tried by a partner who has since left to found a competing firm that advertises the same result. If your case is a catastrophic one-off rather than a jobsite injury with a union behind it, you are not the client this structure is built around. The second is that the marketing has drifted well ahead of the record — “billions recovered” that the firm’s own published figures do not support, six of the largest advertised results with no trace outside its website, and a headline $67 million that the Seventh Circuit substantially undid twelve years ago, on a page that annotates the appellate history of smaller cases but not that one.

Neither is a reason to walk away. Both are reasons to ask, before signing, what a given advertised number actually became after appeal, and which lawyer in the room will be handling the file four years from now.

This firm is right for the union tradesperson with a jobsite injury and two parallel claims to run — an ironworker, an electrician, a bricklayer, a railroad employee under FELA. It is a poorer fit for a catastrophic case with no union referral behind it, and for a client who needs a large in-house bench rather than a long-standing referral relationship.

Methodology & Sourcing

Research conducted September 13, 2026. Attorney admission dates and disciplinary status were taken from Illinois ARDC registration records for every current, retired and historic name attorney individually — not from the firm. Both ARDC interfaces are AJAX-driven and return deceptive empty results to naive queries; the method was validated against control surnames returning known disbarments and suspensions before any null finding was relied on, and the disciplinary corpus was additionally searched by full text for the firm name. Verdicts were checked against published federal and Illinois appellate opinions (CourtListener, Justia), Law360’s firm coverage, and Legal Newsline’s reporting on the ConAgra appeal. Figures with no independent source are identified in-text as firm-sourced. Statutes were verified against the Illinois General Assembly (735 ILCS 5/13-202, 5/2-1116, 5/13-211), the Illinois Courts’ official rule text (Ill. R. Prof’l Conduct 7.4), and the current Illinois Compiled Statutes as published by Justia and corroborated by Illinois Legal Aid Online (745 ILCS 10/8-101, 70 ILCS 3605/41, 740 ILCS 180/1–2). No Google, Avvo, Yelp, Lawyers.com or Martindale client rating is published here because all five blocked retrieval; the absence is stated rather than filled. Claims we could not verify are marked as unverified rather than softened or omitted.

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