Cirignani, Heller & Harman: The Cardiologist Who Sued His Own Insurer, Then Became a Malpractice Lawyer

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.

One warning before the profile, because it shapes how everything else here should be read. This firm’s personal injury page contains passages that name and praise three competing Chicago firms, inside answers to questions about why a client should choose this firm. That is machine-generated marketing copy published without an attorney reading it. It does not touch the firm’s competence or its record — but it means nothing on the website can be assumed to have been vetted, and we verified accordingly.

At a Glance

Firm	Cirignani, Heller & Harman, LLP (trading as CHH Law)
Founded	Predecessor practice circa 1988–1990; present three-name configuration no earlier than the mid-1990s. The firm advertises “40 Years.” See Section I.
Office	150 South Wacker Drive, Suite 2550, Chicago, IL 60606 — single office, no branches
Focus	Plaintiff medical malpractice: birth injury, anesthesia error, medication error, missed and delayed diagnosis, surgical error including operating-room fires, hospital and nursing error, stroke, paralysis
Side of the docket	Plaintiff only — though two of the three practicing partners came from the defense side
Size	Three practicing partners, one of counsel, one appellate/administrative associate; a sixth bio is live but absent from the team page
Distinctive edge	A Johns Hopkins–trained interventional cardiologist and a former licensed respiratory therapist, both practicing as trial lawyers in the same firm
Signature result	$8,200,000 verdict, Illinois — air embolism on central-line removal, compounded by a misread radiology film (firm-sourced)
Fee model	Contingency (per the firm)
Disciplinary record	No discipline located for the three practicing partners. Three other attorneys were not checked. See Section VIII.

I. The Cardiologist Who Sued His Own Insurer

In April 1983, an invasive cardiologist in Chicago bought a disability income policy from The Equitable Life Assurance Society. Later that year he developed carpal tunnel syndrome. By March 1984 his hands could no longer do the work — interventional cardiology is a procedure specialty, and a cardiologist who cannot thread a catheter is not a cardiologist.

Equitable paid his $7,000 a month until May 1985 and then stopped, on the theory that because he had declined the surgery his doctors recommended, he was “not under the regular care and attendance of a physician.” He sued. He won at trial. The Seventh Circuit affirmed: Heller v. Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States, 833 F.2d 1253 (7th Cir. 1987).

He then took a J.D. from Northwestern in 1988 and became a medical malpractice lawyer. Stanley J. Heller, M.D., J.D. — Johns Hopkins M.D., 1965; Fellow Emeritus of the American College of Cardiology; faculty at the University of Illinois, Loyola-Stritch and Northwestern medical schools — has been at this firm ever since.

That is the origin story, and it is a genuinely unusual one: the firm’s medical partner learned what it is like to be the person whose claim gets denied before he ever represented one.

A correction on the firm’s age, since it advertises a round number. “40 Years” does not survive checking. Heller and James Harman both date their arrival to 1988; the BBB records the business start as 1990; and William Cirignani was not admitted in Illinois until 1993 and, by his own account, did not move into Chicago plaintiff practice until 1995. A predecessor practice around 1988–1990 is defensible. The present three-name firm is not forty years old.

II. The Mechanism: Two Clinicians on the Trial Team

The structural claim this firm makes is narrow and, unusually, checkable: it does not hire medicine, it employs it.

Heller is the cardiologist. James C. Harman holds a C.R.T. from Northwestern, earned in 1982, and worked as a licensed respiratory therapist in Chicago-area hospitals for eight years before law school — which means the firm has someone who has personally managed a ventilator, run an airway, and knows from the inside how a hospital’s respiratory documentation is actually written. Before joining this firm in 1988 he was a staff attorney at the U.S. Treasury Department and a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney in Chicago.

The other half of the structure is the defense-side pedigree, which the firm discloses openly on its own bios rather than hiding. William A. Cirignani defended medical malpractice cases in Arizona before switching sides in Chicago. Daniel J. Pylman “spent a significant portion of his early career as a defense attorney representing medical institutions and professionals” before joining in 2017. Two of the three practicing partners have sat at the other table and know what the hospital’s lawyer is going to do with a chart.

The firm states plainly what it will not take: “CHH Law does not handle minor fender-benders or routine slip-and-fall claims.” Its Best Law Firms ranking is specifically in Medical Malpractice Law – Plaintiffs, not general personal injury. That is consistent.

One caution on how the firm describes this asset. The homepage correctly says “a licensed physician and a respiratory therapist.” Other pages on the same site say “board-certified physicians,” plural, and one results page offers a review by “one of our Doctor Attorneys,” plural. The team page lists exactly one M.D., and he is of counsel. The real credential is impressive enough without the pluralization.

III. Practice Areas

• Birth injury — cerebral palsy, Erb’s palsy, kernicterus, fetal monitoring failure, excessive Pitocin
• Anesthesia error, including intraoperative hypotension and oxygen deprivation
• Medication error — anticoagulant monitoring, pediatric dosing, nursing and pharmacy errors
• Missed and delayed diagnosis — cancer screening failures, brain aneurysm, myocardial infarction, septicemia
• Surgical error, including operating-room fires
• Hospital and nursing error — staffing, hand-off, test-result follow-up
• Stroke, paralysis and cauda equina claims; informed consent
• Nursing home abuse; wrongful death
• Medical malpractice appeals
• Catastrophic personal injury, filtered through medical complexity rather than taken generally

IV. Track Record

Past results do not guarantee or predict the outcome of any future case. Every figure below is firm-published. Where the firm’s own press releases characterize a figure differently from its results page, we give the press release’s version.

$14,000,000	Infant injured in an operating-room fire; brain and burn injury. The firm’s own January 2015 press release describes this as “settlements totaling $14 million” — not a single recovery. See the note below.
$10,900,000	Pediatric bacterial meningitis, brain injury. The firm’s own December 2014 press release headline reads “$10.9 Million in 3 Settlements.”
$8,200,000	Verdict, Illinois — air embolism on central-line removal, with a radiologist’s misread. The largest figure the firm identifies as a verdict.
$7,250,000	Wrongful death settlement — misread Pap smear and mammogram, cervical cancer.
$7,000,000	Verdict, Illinois — child triaged by an emergency-room technician rather than a registered nurse; bacterial meningitis, brain herniation, death.
$5,157,000	Verdict, Illinois — surgical injury.
$5,000,000	Midtrial settlement — arthritis medication prescribed without kidney monitoring; bilateral kidney loss.
$3,500,000	Intravenous nutrition dosed at ten times the intended concentration; infant cardiac arrest, leg loss, brain injury.

The largest number the firm advertises is corroborated nowhere, and we are not repeating it. A “$24 million brain injury” tile sits on the results index. It appears on no sub-page — the brain injury page tops out at $14 million — in no press release, and in no external source we could find. We are reporting its existence and declining to carry it.

Two headline figures are aggregates presented as single results. The $14 million and the $10.9 million are both described in the firm’s own press releases as multiple settlements totaling those amounts; the results page presents each as one case, one number. There is also an unresolved lead on the $14 million: a Chicago legal trade paper ran a story headlined “Injured infant to receive $8M in settlement” one month after that press release, matching the case profile. We could not read it past a paywall and we make no finding — but a reader should know the gross figure and the amount reaching the child may not be the same number.

No appellate history could be checked on any result, because the firm names no cases. Every entry is anonymized — no case name, no court, no year, no defendant. We searched for reductions, remittiturs and reversals under all four attorney names and found none. That is an unverifiability finding, not a clean one. The presentation makes independent confirmation impossible by construction.

There is no prior-results disclaimer on any of the nine results pages. The firm has one — on a separate disclaimer page most readers will never open. Six of the itemized results are Georgia, Arizona or Florida matters from defunct out-of-state practices, displayed without geographic framing under a “Chicago Medical Malpractice Law Firm” banner. And the homepage advertises motorcycle, CTA-pedestrian and truck results for which no supporting detail exists anywhere on the site.

One thing the firm does not do, and it is worth crediting: it makes no “over $X million recovered” aggregate claim. There is no inflated lifetime total here to knock down, which in this metro is a meaningful restraint.

V. Client Voice

Google: 4.9 across 98 reviews — 96 five-star, two one-star, no ratings in between, read through a third-party aggregator as of August 11, 2026, with a 94% owner-response rate. BBB: A+, accredited since 2010. Lawyers.com shows 4.8 across 27 and FindLaw 5.0 across 10 — but those two are the same company sharing a review pool, so they are not independent counts. On Avvo, all three practicing partners have algorithmic scores between 8.9 and 10.0 and zero client reviews between them.

• Jeff (Lawyers.com, November 2022, on Daniel Pylman): “Dan was very compassionate to our situation… The settlement exceeded our expectations.”
• Anonymous (FindLaw, February 28, 2025): “Their impressive team of attorneys and medical experts diligently sought out arguments for my case that resulted in a settlement beyond my expectations.”

Two one-star reviews exist and we could not read them. The aggregator reports them and characterizes the theme as “unprofessional.” We could not retrieve the text or the reviewers, and Yelp was unreachable. Two percent negative out of 98 is a low rate; we report the count and stop there rather than inventing a quote in either direction.

A pattern worth naming: the junior partner, Pylman, draws the overwhelming majority of named client praise. The two senior name partners have no client reviews on Avvo at all. That is not a criticism — a client who wants the cardiologist’s judgment on a chart and a partner who returns calls should know those may be different people.

VI. Beyond the Courtroom

One specific thing, and we could not find another.

The firm publishes a first-person page from William Cirignani about his Polish immigrant family — his mother routinely took in and helped settle newly arrived Polish immigrants around Chicago’s Polish Triangle when he was a child — and it maintains a Polish-language version of that page, “Nie jesteś sam,” meaning “You are not alone.” For a Chicago firm, a maintained Polish-language client page is a real, checkable commitment rather than a slogan.

Everything else is absent. No charitable giving, no scholarship, no nonprofit board seat, no sponsorship, no pro bono program appears anywhere on the site or in independent search. Harman’s bio mentions that he plays center field in the Chicago Men’s Senior Baseball League. That is a hobby, and we are not going to dress it up as community service.

VII. Credentials and Recognition

Verified at the conferring body:

• Best Law Firms — Tier 2, Chicago, Medical Malpractice Law – Plaintiffs, 2026 edition, confirmed on Best Lawyers’ own property. Notably, the profile carries unclaimed-profile prompts — the firm has not paid to claim it — which if anything strengthens the ranking’s independence. This is the firm’s strongest verified credential.
• Martindale-Hubbell Peer Review Rating 5.0 — William Cirignani, corroborated secondarily.

Claimed but not confirmed at the source, and therefore not asserted here: an individual Best Lawyers listing for Cirignani (a search of Best Lawyers returns no result for the name); current ITLA Board of Managers membership (he does not appear on ITLA’s 2026–27 roster, so the credential is at best historical); American Bar Foundation fellowship; “American Academy of Trial Lawyers,” which does not correspond to any recognized peer body we could identify; a Chicago Lawyer “Top Lawyer” designation; and the claim that Cirignani “wrote the book on medical malpractice,” for which the firm’s own page supplies no title, publisher, ISBN or means of obtaining it.

Paid or fee-based, listed separately: Super Lawyers and Rising Stars; the American Society of Legal Advocates “Top 100”; The National Trial Lawyers “Top 100”; an American Institute of Personal Injury Attorneys client-satisfaction award; Distinguished Counsel; Avvo’s algorithmic scores; and, on the of-counsel bios, various “Who’s Who” and “America’s Top Physicians” vanity listings. None of these is a peer adjudication.

We also decline to repeat the homepage line “The Firm Other Law Firms Call When They’re Out of Their Depth.” No referring firm is named, and no co-counsel is credited on any of the roughly thirty-five published results — which is itself notable for a firm claiming to be the referral destination.

VIII. What We Checked, and What We Could Not

We searched for Illinois ARDC discipline, legal malpractice suits, and sanctions against the firm and its attorneys. Nothing was found. Avvo’s mirror of state bar data reports “no misconduct found” and active, authorized status for William A. Cirignani (Illinois 1993; Arizona 1988, now inactive; Georgia 2003, resigned), James C. Harman (Illinois 1987; Georgia 1998, resigned) and Daniel J. Pylman (Illinois 2009).

A word on those Georgia resignations, so no one misreads them: “resigned membership” alongside an explicit “no misconduct” entry is what an orderly wind-down of an out-of-state practice looks like. They are not discipline and we do not report them as adverse.

The limit: the ARDC’s own 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. Everything above is a secondary mirror. Stanley J. Heller, Deborah A. Alroth and Stu Perlik were not checked at all, and this profile makes no claim about their records.

Two site-integrity findings that bear on the roster. A live bio page with a 2026 copyright presents Stu Perlik, M.D. as a firm medical malpractice attorney; he does not appear on the current team page. And Deborah A. Alroth appears on the team page with a photograph and title but no working link to her own bio, which exists only at a legacy path. Either the team page or those bios is stale, and both are live.

Identity notes. A Yelp listing for “Cirignani Heller Harman & Lynch” in Atlanta, Georgia is marked CLOSED — a now-defunct affiliate, consistent with four attorneys here having held Georgia bars and with three Georgia cases on the results page; the “Lynch” was never identified and the Chicago entity never used that name. The old cirignani.com domain is still indexed but fails its TLS handshake and cannot be loaded. Harman’s law school is given as John Marshall in Chicago by the firm and John Marshall in Atlanta by Avvo; the two are different institutions and we state no campus. And the competitor names sitting inside this firm’s own copy — a large Chicago aviation firm, two smaller plaintiff shops, and a recovery figure belonging to a fourth — indicate no affiliation whatsoever with any of them.

IX. The Illinois Legal Backdrop, in Plain English

General information, not legal advice. Statutes below were verified as described 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. This rule deserves particular attention in a firm like this one: a physician’s board certification in cardiology is a medical credential and entirely real, but it confers no legal specialty and nobody here is described as a legal specialist anywhere in this profile.

Medical negligence: two years, and a four-year wall. 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. That four-year repose runs even if the injury has not been discovered — which is why a slowly manifesting misdiagnosis case can expire before anybody knows there was one. 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.

Children get the clock back. 735 ILCS 5/13-211 gives a person injured before turning 18 two years from their eighteenth birthday — but note that in a medical case, 13-212’s own minority provision and its twenty-second-birthday cutoff are what govern.

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 proportionally. In medical cases this most often appears as an argument that the patient did not follow instructions or delayed seeking care.

Public hospitals are different. Under 745 ILCS 10/8-101(b), a claim against a local public entity arising out of patient care gets two years with a four-year repose — but subsection (a) gives only one year for everything else against that same entity. A county hospital’s malpractice claim and its premises claim run on different clocks.

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.

X. The Awesome Attorneys Assessment

The mechanism here is real and rare. Most plaintiff medical malpractice firms rent their medicine by the hour from retained experts. This one has a Johns Hopkins–trained interventional cardiologist and a former eight-year respiratory therapist sitting in the same office as the lawyers, and two of its three practicing partners spent years defending hospitals before they started suing them. That combination is why the firm can say credibly that it does not take fender-benders: it is built to read a chart and find the moment the standard of care broke, which is a different skill from settling collision claims at volume. Its Best Law Firms Tier 2 ranking in Chicago medical malpractice is verified, sits on an unclaimed profile, and no discipline surfaced for any practicing partner.

The trade-off is that this firm’s website cannot be trusted as a source about this firm. That is an unusual thing to have to write, and we do not write it lightly — but a practice page that names three competitors inside its own sales pitch is unreviewed machine output, and once you know that, every other number on the site needs independent support before it can be repeated. Some of it does not get there: the $24 million headline is corroborated nowhere, the $14 million and $10.9 million are the firm’s own “settlements totaling” aggregates presented as single cases, not one result anywhere is identified by case name so that no appellate history can be checked, and there is no prior-results disclaimer on any of the nine pages that display these figures. Around that sit an orphaned bio for an attorney who is not on the team page, an unlinked bio for one who is, a 404 in Google’s index, press releases frozen in 2016, a stale bar-leadership claim, and three mutually contradictory statements of how long the firm has existed.

This firm is right for a family with a serious, medically complex negligence claim — a birth injury, an anesthesia catastrophe, a misdiagnosis that turned on how a film was read — who want clinicians rather than only advocates reading the record, and who will ask directly whether a published figure was one settlement or three. It is the wrong firm for a routine injury claim, which it will decline anyway. And it is a poor fit for anyone who needs the marketing and the substance to line up, because here they do not: the practice is more solid than its own copy, and the copy is worse than the practice deserves.

Methodology & Sourcing

Research conducted September 15, 2026. The current entity name, address, roster, practice areas and every advertised figure were read directly from the firm’s own live pages, including the individual attorney bios, all eight success-stories sub-pages, the site map and the disclaimer page. The origin story rests on Heller v. Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States, 833 F.2d 1253 (7th Cir. 1987), confirmed through an independent case repository rather than the firm’s account; note that this was Dr. Heller’s personal disability claim, litigated before he became a lawyer, and it is not a firm case result. The characterization of the $14,000,000 and $10,900,000 figures as multiple settlements comes from the firm’s own press releases of January 2015 and December 2014. The $24,000,000 figure was searched for on the firm’s sub-pages, in its press releases and in general web search, and is reported as uncorroborated. Appellate history could not be checked on any result because no case is named; this is stated as an unverifiability finding. The Best Law Firms Tier 2 ranking was verified on the Best Lawyers property directly; the individual Best Lawyers claim was searched and returned no result; the ITLA Board of Managers claim was checked against ITLA’s own current roster. Review figures come from a third-party aggregator’s Google read dated August 11, 2026, and from BBB, Avvo, Lawyers.com and FindLaw directly, with the shared review pool noted; Yelp was unreachable and no rating is asserted. Discipline findings rest on Avvo’s mirror of state bar data; the ARDC primary database could not be queried on the research date, and three of the six attorneys were not checked at all, as stated in Section VIII. 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.

Publisher Disclosure & Independence Notice

Awesome Attorneys does not endorse, recommend, or warrant any firm profiled on this site. Inclusion is not paid placement, and no firm pays to appear, to be positioned, or to have material removed. “Awesome Attorneys” is a brand name only; it is not a rating, ranking, certification or assessment of any lawyer’s ability. Nothing on this page is legal advice, and reading it creates no attorney-client relationship. Facts are current only as of the research date above, and firm addresses, rosters, credentials and case outcomes change. Verify anything you intend to rely on directly with the firm and with the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission.