Lane Brown, LLC: A Bar President’s Firm, and the $15 Million a Client’s Death Erased

Attorney advertising. This profile was not paid for, commissioned, or reviewed by the firm before publication. Awesome Attorneys is not a lawyer referral service and does not endorse, recommend, or warrant any firm. Results described below are attributed to their published source; past results do not guarantee or predict the outcome of any future case. Nothing here is legal advice.

A note on the name before the profile. This firm was Lane & Lane, LLC and is now Lane Brown, LLC. The old name is still what nearly every legal directory carries, and the old domain now redirects to a graphic design studio in California. There is also no attorney named Mark Lane here; the “Brown” is Mark A. Brown. Anyone working from directory data on this firm is working from two wrong facts.

At a Glance

Firm	Lane Brown, LLC (formerly Lane & Lane, LLC)
Founded	1991, by Fred Lane with his two sons, Stephen I. Lane and Scott D. Lane (BBB records a January 1, 1991 start; the firm’s own About page gives no founding year at all)
Office	230 W. Monroe Street, Suite 2600, Chicago, IL 60606 — single office, no branches
Focus	Medical malpractice and birth injury; clergy and institutional child sexual abuse; wrongful death; vehicle and workplace injury
Side of the docket	Plaintiff only. Mark Brown’s practice is described as “100% litigation devoted to seriously injured parties.”
Size	Six attorneys listed — three partners, two associates, one of counsel who retired from practice in 2022
Signature result	$22,185,598.50 jury verdict, Jefferson v. Mercy Hospital (2015) — reduced to $7,177,632.82 on appeal. See Section IV.
Distinctive edge	A founder who was president of both the Illinois State Bar Association and the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association, and for whom the ISBA’s trial advocacy institute is named
Fee model	Contingency (per the firm)
Disciplinary record	No discipline located for any attorney. See Section VIII for what that check did and did not cover.

I. The Man Whose Name Is on the Institute

On October 20, 2025, Loyola University Chicago School of Law gave its Medal of Excellence to a graduate of the class of 1950. He was one hundred years old.

Fred Lane was president of the Illinois State Bar Association in 1985–86 and president of the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association. The ISBA’s trial advocacy program is called Fred Lane’s Trial Techniques Institute, and it is still running — a spring 2026 session is on the ISBA’s calendar. He co-wrote Lane’s Goldstein Trial Technique, which is what it sounds like: a treatise with his family’s name on the spine. The philosophy he gave the ISBA when they honored him was four words long: “Be a peacemaker.”

In 1991 he founded this firm with his two sons, Stephen and Scott.

Here is the strange part. None of that appears on the firm’s own website. The About page says the firm was “established by a team of veteran trial attorneys” — no year, no founder, no mention of Fred Lane anywhere. We reconstructed the origin story from the retired partner’s outside mediation biography and from the ISBA’s own records. A firm with one of the genuinely notable origins in Chicago plaintiff practice has replaced it with a sentence that could describe anyone.

One correction worth making, because the firm’s own framing invites the error: this is two generations, and the entity is thirty-five years old, not multi-generational or mid-century. Fred Lane’s ISBA presidency predates the firm that bears his name. And the third generation is not here — associate Noah A. Brown states no family relationship to Mark A. Brown, and we found none.

II. What the Firm Is Built Around

The mechanism is narrow and it is a real one: this is a medical-negligence trial shop that also built out a separate institutional child-sexual-abuse practice, and the two share a structural feature. Both are cases where the defendant is an institution with records, a hierarchy, and a reason to have documented what it knew. Neither is a volume practice.

Mark A. Brown argued a medical malpractice case before the Illinois Supreme Court at age thirty-four, and sits on the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association’s Amicus Curiae Committee. Scott D. Lane teaches: adjunct professor and trial team coach at Loyola, director and instructor at his father’s ISBA institute, and author of Illinois Motions in Limine for Thomson West. Neither of those is marketing. A motions-in-limine treatise is a book about what a jury is not allowed to hear, written by someone who spends his working life arguing that question.

The abuse practice is separately built out across clergy, youth-sports and school settings, and the results page reflects it: four of the firm’s published recoveries are child sexual abuse matters, ranging from $2 million to $3.6 million.

III. Practice Areas

• Medical malpractice, including birth injury
• Child sexual abuse — clergy, school and youth-sports settings
• Wrongful death
• Car, truck and motorcycle collisions
• Workplace, industrial and construction injury
• Premises liability
• Delivery-driver injury claims

Plaintiff-side throughout. Every Best Lawyers category the firm’s attorneys hold is designated “Plaintiffs.” We found no defense work.

IV. Track Record, and the Fifteen Million Dollars That Went Away

Past results do not guarantee or predict the outcome of any future case. Each figure below is identified by its source.

The headline number is advertised at roughly three times what the client actually received, and the reason is documented in a published appellate opinion.

$22,185,598.50	Jury verdict, December 4, 2015 — negligent tracheostomy management, Mercy Hospital & Medical Center. Decedent Jeanette Turner. The Illinois Appellate Court, First District, vacated $15,007,965.68 in future damages on February 6, 2018. Jefferson v. Mercy Hospital & Medical Center, 2018 IL App (1st) 162219, 97 N.E.3d 173. Amount that stood: $7,177,632.82.
$5,750,000	Wrongful death, fire/premises. Firm-sourced.
$5,100,000	Industrial/workplace injury. Firm-sourced.
$5,000,000	Anesthesia error. Firm-sourced.
$3,600,000	Youth-sports coach child sexual abuse. Firm-sourced.
$2,700,000	Clergy child sexual abuse. Firm-sourced.

What happened in the Mercy case matters, because the firm tells half of it. Jeanette Turner waited ten years for her case to be tried. She died the evening before the jury returned its verdict. That death converted the matter into a survival action, and the First District held that damages for a future the plaintiff would not have could not stand — “the purpose of tort damages is to make plaintiff whole rather than to bestow a windfall.” Liability was upheld. Fifteen million dollars in future damages was not.

The firm’s own case page does mention that the client “passed away the evening before the verdict was issued.” It presents it as the tragedy it plainly was. It does not mention that this exact fact is what cost the estate $15 million on appeal, and the homepage still advertises “$22,180,000.” We are not aware of a results disclaimer anywhere on the site — we checked the homepage, the case-results page, the individual Mercy case page and the reviews page, and found none.

Co-counsel is uncredited. The appellate opinion lists plaintiff’s counsel as Stephen I. Lane and Scott D. Lane of Lane & Lane, LLC, and Michael W. Rathsack, a Chicago appellate lawyer separately retained. The firm’s case page credits its own attorneys and a law clerk. Rathsack is not named.

Two other things do not reconcile. The homepage and the case-results page advertise materially different sets of results — eight figures appear on one and not the other, in both directions, and the headline is rounded three different ways across three pages. And the claim of “over 130 years of combined experience” does not survive arithmetic: the five attorneys actually practicing were admitted in 1988, 1993, 2014, 2023 and 2024, which is roughly eighty-eight years. The claim clears 130 only by counting Stephen I. Lane’s forty-eight — and his own outside biography says he retired in 2022 and now mediates at a different company on South Wacker. His firm bio still cites a “2022 Illinois Super Lawyer” award and says he “practiced law for 44 years (as of 2022).”

V. Client Voice

Google: 4.5 across 83 reviews, read through an aggregator rather than from Google directly. BBB: A+, accredited since October 2016, no complaints disclosed. Stephen I. Lane holds 5.0 across eleven Avvo client reviews and nine peer endorsements; Scott D. Lane’s Avvo profile carries an algorithmic 10.0 and zero client reviews. Lawyers.com has a single review.

• Deborah McKinney (firm testimonials page): “Scott and Nicholas go above and beyond to make sure each client is satisfied.”
• Quincy (Lawyers.com, May 4, 2025): “After fighting with the insurance company for what felt like forever, Oliver came through and proved their driver was at fault.” — The Oliver praised here has since left to found his own firm.

We could not reach the negative tail, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. A 4.5 average across 83 reviews requires some non-five-star ratings to exist; the text of those reviews was not retrievable, and Yelp and Glassdoor were not reachable at all. No negative review pattern was found, and no clean bill of health is being issued.

One real finding about the testimonials themselves: the firm’s reviews page features praise for three people who have no bio on the site — Kevin Griffin, Claire Connolly and Kellie Snyder. The page is not pruned as staff leave, which means a prospective client may be reading about a lawyer who will not be handling their case.

Separately, and worth knowing: in January 2024 the firm issued a formal correction to its own press release, stating that a man who had been presented as a firm representative announcing a $2 million settlement “is in no way associated with” the firm. The firm’s correction conceded that such misidentification creates “legal ambiguities and potential compliance issues.” The underlying case facts were not retracted. It is a small episode, but it tells you how much weight to give any press release bearing this firm’s name.

VI. Beyond the Courtroom

Thin, and we are going to say so rather than pad it. The firm’s “Professional Memberships and Associations” page lists only bar associations and recognition programs — no pro bono program, no charitable giving, no scholarship, no sponsorship, no community service of any kind.

The one specific, verifiable item across the entire site: Nick Kamenjarin sits on the junior board of Lawrence Hall, a Chicago organization serving at-risk youth.

Adjacent, and properly called professional service rather than community service: Scott Lane’s unpaid teaching at Loyola and at the ISBA institute, and Fred Lane’s two bar presidencies. Those are real. They are not the same thing as a firm that shows up in its neighborhood.

VII. Credentials and Recognition

Peer-reviewed, and verified at the source. We checked Best Lawyers’ own registry rather than taking the firm’s word, and the firm’s claims match it exactly, with no inflation — which is rarer than it should be:

• Scott D. Lane — Best Lawyers, Personal Injury Litigation–Plaintiffs, since 2018.
• Mark A. Brown — Best Lawyers, Personal Injury Litigation–Plaintiffs and Product Liability Litigation–Plaintiffs, since 2023.
• Nicholas Kamenjarin — Best Lawyers “Ones to Watch,” since 2023, and the firm correctly labels it as the junior tier.
• Fred Lane — President, Illinois State Bar Association, 1985–86 (confirmed on the ISBA’s own roll); President, Illinois Trial Lawyers Association (firm-stated).
• Stephen I. Lane — ISBA Board of Governors; charter member, ISBA Special Committee on Professionalism; Martindale-Hubbell AV Preeminent.

Firm-asserted, not independently confirmed: Scott Lane’s American College of Trial Lawyers Medal for Excellence in Advocacy, and Mark Brown’s Leading Lawyers listings 2019–2022. Both are plausible; neither was verifiable at the conferring body.

Paid or fee-based programs, listed separately because they are a different kind of thing: Super Lawyers; The National Trial Lawyers “Top 100”; the National Academy of Personal Injury Attorneys; Elite Lawyer; “America’s Most Honored Professionals”; assorted directory listings. These are marketing placements, not peer adjudications, and the firm’s awards page does not distinguish them from the Best Lawyers selections that sit alongside.

VIII. What We Checked, and What We Could Not

We searched for Illinois ARDC discipline against all six attorneys and found none. We searched for legal malpractice suits against the firm and found none. Avvo’s mirror of state bar data reports “no misconduct found” for Scott D. Lane (admitted 1988) and Stephen I. Lane (admitted 1978, active and authorized), and shows no adverse entry for the others.

The limit is worth stating plainly: the ARDC’s own lawyer lookup is a form that does not return results to a direct request, and we could not query the primary database on the research date. What we have is a clean search record and a secondary source, not a certified clean roll. Mark A. Brown, Nicholas J. Kamenjarin, Noah A. Brown and Martha A. Konovodoff were not affirmatively cleared against the primary source. Anyone relying on this should run the six names through the ARDC directly.

One identity note for anyone searching: lanelaw.com is not this firm. It is The Lane Law Firm of Texas — bankruptcy, merchant cash advance and property insurance work, with offices in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin. There is also a Marc J. Lane practicing corporate and tax law in Chicago, and a Lane Powell in Seattle that does defense work. And Hall, Prangle & Schoonveld appears in the Mercy opinion’s counsel block as defense counsel for the hospital — at least one secondary source has reported them as co-counsel for the plaintiff. They were on the other side.

IX. The Illinois Legal Backdrop, in Plain English

General information, not legal advice. Statutes below were verified against the Illinois General Assembly, the Illinois Courts, or the current Illinois Compiled Statutes as noted in Methodology; deadlines turn on facts a lawyer has to look at.

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) bars 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 the Supreme Court of Illinois does not recognize specialty certifications and that the credential is not a requirement to practice law in Illinois. Registered patent attorneys are the single carve-out. No lawyer at this firm is described as a specialist anywhere in this profile.

Medical negligence runs on its own clock, and it is the one that matters most here. Under 735 ILCS 5/13-212, a claim against a physician, dentist, registered nurse or hospital must be brought within two years of when the claimant knew or should have known of the injury, and in no event more than four years after the act or omission — a repose period that runs whether or not the injury has been discovered. For a person under 18, the period runs eight years from the act, but the suit must be filed before that person’s twenty-second birthday.

Two years for ordinary injury. 735 ILCS 5/13-202 gives two years from accrual to file a personal injury action.

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 by the plaintiff’s share. No contributory fault may be attributed to a plaintiff suing over childhood sexual abuse — a carve-out added by P.A. 103-1053, and directly relevant to this firm’s abuse practice.

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

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

Public bodies are far shorter. Under 745 ILCS 10/8-101(a), a claim against a local public entity or its employee must be filed within one year. Subsection (b) gives two years, with a four-year repose, only for claims arising out of patient care — which is how a public hospital’s malpractice case gets a different deadline from its slip-and-fall case.

X. The Awesome Attorneys Assessment

The specific thing Lane Brown has is a trial-craft lineage that is documented rather than asserted. The ISBA named its trial advocacy institute after the founder; one current partner directs and teaches at it and wrote the Thomson West book on motions in limine; another argued before the Illinois Supreme Court at thirty-four. Its Best Lawyers recognition checked out at the source with zero inflation, which in this metro is close to remarkable. No discipline surfaced, no malpractice suits, no negative review pattern, BBB A+ since 2016. For a medical negligence case or an institutional abuse case, this is a firm that knows where the evidentiary fights are before they start.

The trade-off is that the firm does not maintain its own account of itself, and in one place that has real consequences for a reader. The $22.18 million headline is the number a prospective client sees; $7.18 million is the number the estate got, after the First District vacated $15 million because the plaintiff died the night before the verdict. The firm’s own page tells you about the death and not about what it cost. There is no prior-results disclaimer anywhere on the site to frame any of it. Around that sit smaller versions of the same habit: an experience claim that only works if you count a partner who retired four years ago into a mediation practice at another company, two results pages that do not agree with each other, a 404 in the navigation, testimonials crediting departed lawyers, stale social handles, and a public press-release correction disavowing a man the firm’s own PR had presented as its representative. None of that is dishonesty about a case outcome. All of it is a firm that stopped reading its own website.

This firm is right for someone bringing a serious medical negligence or institutional abuse claim who wants trial lawyers with a teaching-level command of evidence and is prepared to ask direct questions about what a published number actually paid out. It is a weaker fit for someone who needs a large team, for a routine collision claim where the depth is wasted, and for anyone who will take a firm’s marketing copy at face value — because here, that copy is the least reliable thing about an otherwise substantial practice.

Methodology & Sourcing

Research conducted September 15, 2026. The current entity name and the correction to the attorney roster were established from the firm’s own live site and from the appellate record, which captions the predecessor name; the fate of the legacy domain was checked directly. The office address was taken from the firm’s own contact page. The Jefferson v. Mercy Hospital & Medical Center history — verdict amount, the $15,007,965.68 vacatur, the $7,177,632.82 that stood, and the identity of separately retained appellate co-counsel — was taken from the published opinion, 2018 IL App (1st) 162219, 97 N.E.3d 173, and corroborated by contemporaneous trade coverage. Remaining case figures are settlements with no public record by nature and are identified as firm-sourced. The combined-experience arithmetic was computed from the admission years published on the firm’s own attorney pages; the retirement of the of-counsel attorney is stated on his own outside mediation biography. Best Lawyers recognitions were verified on the Best Lawyers firm registry directly, not from the firm’s awards page. The ISBA presidency and the naming of the trial institute were verified on the ISBA’s own site. The January 2024 press-release correction was read in full. Review figures were taken from an aggregator’s published Google read and from BBB, Avvo and Lawyers.com directly; Yelp and Glassdoor were not reachable and no rating is asserted for either. Discipline searches were conducted by name across public sources and Avvo’s mirror of state bar data; the ARDC primary database could not be queried on the research date, and Section VIII states which attorneys were and were not affirmatively cleared. 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 secondary repositories carrying the governing Public Act notes (735 ILCS 5/13-212, 745 ILCS 10/8-101, 740 ILCS 180/1–2), the Illinois General Assembly’s own site being unreachable on the research date. Claims we could not verify are marked as unverified rather than softened or omitted.

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