Smith LaCien LLP: Three Bar Presidencies, and a $19 Million Verdict That Did Not Survive

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 lineage, because this profile turns on it. Smith LaCien LLP is five and a half years old. Both name partners came from Power Rogers & Smith, a firm this publication profiles separately under its current name. Every datable headline result on Smith LaCien’s case-results page was earned at that predecessor firm, and the words “Power Rogers” appear nowhere on it. We have attributed them here.

At a Glance

Firm	Smith LaCien LLP (also styled Smith LaCien – Trial Lawyers LLP)
Founded	March 2020, by Todd A. Smith and Brian LaCien, during Smith’s transition out of Power Rogers & Smith
Office	Three First National Plaza, 70 West Madison Street, Suite 2250, Chicago, IL 60602 — single office, no branches
Focus	Catastrophic personal injury; medical malpractice and birth injury; aviation; mass tort and MDL work; trucking; product liability; wrongful death
Side of the docket	Plaintiff only. No attorney on the roster has a defense-side background — unusual, and worth noting.
Size	Seven attorneys (the firm’s own About page still says six)
Distinctive edge	A founding partner who has been president of three separate bar organizations — national, state and trial — each confirmed on that organization’s own roll
Best-documented result	$18,500,000 settlement, 2012 — film extra catastrophically injured on a studio production. Earned at Power Rogers & Smith.
Fee model	Contingency (per the firm)
Disciplinary record	No discipline located for the two name partners; five attorneys were not checked. See Section VIII.

I. The Bar Notice of January 29, 2020

On January 29, 2020, the Illinois State Bar Association published a notice that Todd A. Smith had withdrawn as a partner from Power Rogers & Smith LLP, and that he would remain at the firm through April 30, 2020 to transition his practice and his clients. The notice ended a twenty-seven-year partnership with Joseph Power Jr. that the two had begun in 1993, and it closed with mutual good wishes and no stated reason.

Smith LaCien LLP opened in March 2020 — inside that transition window. Brian LaCien came from the same firm. So did associate Andrew Mason.

We found no evidence of a dispute and are not implying one. What the notice gives us is something more useful than a story: a dated, primary-source boundary line, which is exactly what is needed to sort out which results belong to which firm (Section IV).

The firm’s own About page has no origin narrative at all — no founding year, no founder named, nothing about the twenty-seven years. It offers one sentence: “For 20 years, Brian LaCien has helped those suffering from injury.” LaCien was admitted in 2002, which is twenty-four years.

II. The Mechanism: Three Presidencies and an Aviation Section

What distinguishes this firm is not size, volume or a niche. It is institutional standing in the plaintiffs’ bar, held by one man, and verified in three separate places.

Todd A. Smith has been president of the American Association for Justice — formerly ATLA, the national plaintiffs’ trial bar — for 2004–05; president of the Illinois State Bar Association for 1997–98; and the 57th president of the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association, installed June 11, 2010. We checked each against the organization’s own published roll of past presidents rather than the firm’s website. All three hold. He is a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers, a member of the Inner Circle of Advocates since 2005 and of the International Society of Barristers since 1996, and an elected board member of the International Academy of Trial Lawyers.

Presidencies of trial bars are not honors bought or applied for. They are elected offices, and holding three of them is a description of how a lawyer is regarded by the people who try cases against and alongside him.

Brian LaCien carries the working specialization: chair of the American Association for Justice’s Aviation Section, chair of the Illinois State Bar Association’s Tort Law Section, and a seat on ITLA’s Board of Managers. He took his J.D. from DePaul magna cum laude and Order of the Coif, and started his career as assistant legal counsel to the Illinois House of Representatives. Aviation is a genuinely separate discipline — federal preemption, international conventions, NTSB material that is inadmissible, and a co-counsel economy that runs through a handful of firms nationally.

The rest of the bench is small and varied: Jason R. Williams, eight years a solo practitioner before joining in December 2021, and before that an Army paratrooper; Carla A. Colaianni, admitted in Illinois and New York, who built a birth-injury and abuse practice in Westchester before returning; Andrew W. Mason, a former bankruptcy lawyer who externed for a federal bankruptcy judge; Allyson C. Cox; and Matthew S. Leonard, admitted in 2025 after three years as the firm’s law clerk, and a third-generation trial lawyer.

III. Practice Areas

• Catastrophic personal injury — brain and spinal cord
• Medical malpractice and birth injury
• Aviation accidents
• Mass tort and multidistrict litigation
• Truck and car collisions
• Product liability
• Construction accidents
• Train and bus accidents; bicycle accidents
• Premises liability; wrongful death

IV. Track Record — With the Attributions the Firm Omits

Past results do not guarantee or predict the outcome of any future case. This publication supplies that disclaimer because the firm’s site does not carry one.

The firm’s largest advertised jury verdict was reversed on appeal and never became a final judgment. It is advertised as “obtained.” We are reporting it in full.

$19,010,273 (do not rely on this figure)	Inman v. Howe Freightways, Inc. — wrongful death of Jesse Inman, 29, a tow-truck operator. Tried in Cook County in 2017 by Todd A. Smith and Sean M. Houlihan of Power Rogers & Smith LLP. The Illinois Appellate Court, First District, reversed in part and remanded for a NEW TRIAL on May 30, 2019 — 2019 IL App (1st) 172459, 130 N.E.3d 458 — holding that excluded eyewitness testimony “very likely would have changed the jury’s apportionment of liability.” The verdict was overturned, in the predecessor firm’s own word. The case was ultimately resolved by Power Rogers, with Iowa co-counsel, for $25,275,000 in 2022 — two years after Todd Smith had left that firm.
$18,500,000	Settlement, May 23, 2012 — Gabriela Cedillo, 24, an extra on a major studio production, struck in the head by a snapped cable. Independently confirmed in national press, which names Todd Smith as her attorney. Earned at Power Rogers & Smith, eight years before this firm existed.
$93,000,000	International commercial airline crash, co-counseled with a New York aviation firm. Power Rogers advertises this same result on its own site, crediting Brian LaCien and a second lawyer who is not at Smith LaCien. Earned at the predecessor firm; the New York co-counsel is credited, the predecessor and the second lawyer are not.
$17,600,000	Accounting malpractice verdict, tried in Peoria. Corroborated in the legal press. Predecessor-firm era; appellate history not located.
~$1,500,000,000	Takata airbag economic-loss settlements across eight automakers, MDL 2599, S.D. Fla. Todd Smith served as court-appointed co-lead counsel on the economic-loss track — a real and substantial role on a multi-firm leadership team, negotiated largely in 2017–2018 while he was at Power Rogers & Smith. This is a class settlement, not a firm recovery, and should never be counted as one.
$20,000,000	Medical malpractice — college student, brain damage following heart surgery. Firm-sourced; not independently locatable.
$17,500,000	Auto collision, college student, brain injuries. Firm-sourced.

The internal contradictions are unusually easy to check, because the firm publishes both versions.

• Takata: $1.65 billion on the homepage, $1.55 billion on the case-results page. Independent sources supporting the settlement figure put it above $1.5 billion. We use approximately $1.5 billion and note that the higher number is contradicted by the firm’s own page.
• The $19 million and $18.5 million figures are swapped between two pages. The case-results page attaches $19 million to the tow-truck case and $18.5 million to the film-set injury; the truck-accidents page reverses both. Independent sources confirm the case-results page is the correct one, which means the truck page has both wrong.
• Best Lawyers “since 1995” on the About page; “since 1997” on Todd Smith’s own bio. Best Lawyers’ own registry says 1997. The About page overstates by two years, and the error has propagated into third-party business directories, some of which now list the firm’s founding year as 1995.
• The lifetime aggregate exists in four versions: “$3.5+ billion” with “100+ results exceeding $5 million” on the homepage; “more than $3 billion” with “over 100 cases of at least $1 million” on a partner’s bio on the same site; “more than $3 billion” with “over 150 cases” on a firm-supplied bar-association profile; and “$2 billion” in a 2022 legal-press profile. The $5 million and $1 million thresholds are a fivefold difference in the same claim. Net of the Takata class settlement, the firm’s twelve itemized results total roughly $200 million. We repeat no aggregate.

There is no prior-results disclaimer anywhere on the site. The disclaimer page covers “not legal advice” and no attorney-client relationship and stops there.

One further signal, offered as context rather than accusation: identical promotional pages for this firm appear on a cluster of unrelated low-quality websites — a homestead blog, a travel site, others — all linking back to the firm. That is a recognizable paid-link pattern. It is not an ethics violation and it says nothing about the lawyers’ work, but it means online mentions of this firm should not be mistaken for independent coverage.

V. Client Voice

There is almost nothing here, and the honest reading is not that the firm is hiding something.

Todd A. Smith: one client review on Avvo. Brian LaCien: none. BBB: A+, accredited since August 2021, with complaint counts not disclosed. A business-services directory shows the firm as not yet reviewed. Google and Yelp were not retrievable, so no rating is asserted for either — and this profile makes no claim that the firm has no negative reviews. We did not reach them.

• Rudy (Avvo, June 2015 — the single genuine third-party client review located): “Todd is a very intelligent, professional, caring person. He took care of my family like if it was his own.”
• Marsha Nelson (firm’s own testimonials page, self-published and citing no platform): “Todd was always available to me. If I called him he returned my call in less than a day, usually within hours.”

A firm with three bar presidencies and one client review is telling you something structural: this is a referral practice. Other lawyers send it catastrophic cases. It does not advertise for volume, so it does not accumulate volume feedback. That is a legitimate model — and it also means a prospective client has essentially no independent voices to consult, and should ask for references directly.

VI. Beyond the Courtroom

We found no firm-level community involvement, and we are going to say so rather than manufacture it. The site has no community, charitable, giving, scholarship or pro bono page, and the About page says nothing about any.

What exists instead is profession-level service, which is real and which we will name as what it is — service to the bar rather than to the neighborhood:

• Todd A. Smith: three bar presidencies (AAJ, ISBA, ITLA); AAJ’s Leonard Ring Champion of Justice Award (2015) and Lifetime Achievement Award (2009); the ISBA’s Distinguished Award for Excellence (2015).
• Brian LaCien: chair of AAJ’s Aviation Section; chair of the ISBA Tort Law Section; ITLA Board of Managers.
• Allyson C. Cox: vice-chair, Chicago Bar Association Young Lawyers Section Women in Law Committee, 2022–23.

The firm also states that Todd Smith chairs the Illinois Supreme Court’s Evidence Committee (2021). We could not confirm that appointment from a court source and do not assert it.

VII. Credentials and Recognition

Verified on the conferring organization’s own property:

• President, American Association for Justice (ATLA), 2004–05 — Todd A. Smith, confirmed on AAJ’s own past-presidents list.
• President, Illinois State Bar Association, 1997–98 — confirmed on the ISBA’s own roll.
• 57th President, Illinois Trial Lawyers Association, installed June 11, 2010 — confirmed.
• Best Lawyers in America — checked on Best Lawyers directly. Todd A. Smith, recognized since 1997 in Aviation Law, Mass Tort Litigation/Class Actions–Plaintiffs, Medical Malpractice Law–Plaintiffs, Personal Injury Litigation–Plaintiffs and Product Liability Litigation–Plaintiffs, with three “Lawyer of the Year” designations (Product Liability–Plaintiffs, Chicago, 2019; Medical Malpractice, Chicago, 2012; Mass Tort Litigation, Chicago, 2011). Brian LaCien, recognized since 2022 in Aviation Law, Mass Tort/Class Actions–Plaintiffs and Medical Malpractice Law–Plaintiffs. Four more attorneys are listed for 2026, including one in the junior “Ones to Watch” tier.
• Inner Circle of Advocates — Todd A. Smith, corroborated by the organization’s own listing. Membership is capped and invitation-only.

Firm-stated and highly credible, though not separately re-verified: American College of Trial Lawyers fellowship; International Academy of Trial Lawyers board election (2022); International Society of Barristers (1996); a 2025 lifetime achievement award from a verdict-reporting publication. Martindale-Hubbell AV Preeminent is asserted secondarily and was not confirmed at the source.

Paid, commercial or editorial — listed separately because they are a different kind of thing: Super Lawyers, where listings are paid, covering five attorneys; Lawdragon 500 and Hall of Fame selections, editorial but commercially entwined; a “Lawyer of the Year” from a commercial trial-attorney organization; Lead Counsel and directory badges.

Two claims we decline to carry. The firm advertises a “Top 5 plaintiff’s injury law firm, 2025” ranking; the underlying industry report ranks Illinois firms, and Todd Smith’s bio repeats the claim without the word “Illinois,” where a reader could take it as national. And the homepage attributes to a national newspaper the line that Todd A. Smith is “one of the leading medical malpractice lawyers in Chicago.” We could not locate the underlying article and do not repeat the quote.

VIII. What We Checked, and What We Could Not

We searched for Illinois ARDC discipline, sanctions and legal malpractice suits against the firm and its attorneys. Nothing was found. Avvo’s mirror of state bar data reports “no misconduct found” for Todd Allen Smith (Illinois 1976; D.C. 2012) and Brian LaCien (Illinois 2002).

The limit, plainly: the ARDC’s own lookup is a form that returns no results to a direct request, and we could not query the primary database on the research date. Jason R. Williams, Carla A. Colaianni, Andrew W. Mason, Allyson C. Cox and Matthew S. Leonard were not checked at all, and this profile asserts nothing about their records.

The lineage trap, stated for anyone who searches. The predecessor firm’s old website is still live and still lists Todd A. Smith as a current founding partner, six years after he left. Any directory or dataset scraped from it places him at the wrong firm — which is why several sources give this firm’s founding year as 1995, 1997 or 2012 rather than March 2020. The renamed predecessor remains an elite Chicago plaintiff firm in its own right and still advertises the same $93 million aviation result and the same tow-truck case. These are two separate firms and their records should not be merged in either direction.

Other identity notes. A California litigator named Todd W. Smith is a different person; so is a Utah attorney with a similar name. Several unrelated Chicago attorneys named Smith practice within a few blocks of this office, including a “Brian Smith” in an adjacent downtown ZIP. Match on “Todd A. Smith” or “Brian LaCien” plus the Suite 2250 address — never on the surname. Directory listings also place this firm at a stale “Suite 5770” and carry at least two marketing tracking numbers that are not the firm’s line.

Two housekeeping items: the About page still lists six attorneys and omits the 2025 addition; and that attorney’s biography sits outside the URL structure used for the other six.

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. Aviation claims and multidistrict litigation frequently run on federal law and other states’ limitations periods, not on the Illinois statutes below.

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 — and note that even a court-appointed leadership role in a multidistrict litigation, which is a real distinction, is an appointment in a case and not a certification of specialty.

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

Medical negligence runs on its own clock. 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. 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 — the provision that governs most birth-injury claims.

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. Apportionment is not an abstraction: the appellate court that overturned this firm’s largest advertised verdict did so precisely because excluded evidence would likely have changed how the jury divided fault.

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 get one year. 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.

X. The Awesome Attorneys Assessment

The credential core here is close to the top of the Illinois plaintiffs’ bar and it survived every check we made. Three bar presidencies — national, state and trial — each confirmed on that organization’s own roll, not taken from a website. Best Lawyers since 1997 with three separate “Lawyer of the Year” designations, verified at the source. Fellowship in the American College of Trial Lawyers and membership in the Inner Circle of Advocates, both capped and invitation-only. A partner who chairs the national trial bar’s aviation section. Seven lawyers, not one of whom has ever worked the defense side. When a lawyer is elected to lead the people he tries cases against, that is a form of evidence no marketing budget produces.

The trade-off is that the firm’s account of its own track record cannot be republished as written, and one item goes past sloppiness. Its largest advertised jury verdict — $19 million, for the family of a twenty-nine-year-old tow-truck operator — was reversed and remanded for a new trial in 2019 and never became a final judgment. It was won at Power Rogers & Smith, and it was ultimately settled, for more than the verdict, by that firm after Todd Smith had left it. The word on the page is “obtained,” and there is no disclosure. Around it: every datable headline result was earned at the predecessor firm with no attribution anywhere; the Takata figure is $1.65 billion on one page and $1.55 billion on another, against a class settlement that was never a firm recovery in the first place; the $19 million and $18.5 million figures are attached to the wrong cases on a second page; the Best Lawyers start year is off by two; the lifetime total exists in four incompatible versions against roughly $200 million itemized net of Takata; and no prior-results disclaimer exists anywhere on a site leading with billions. Add a second trade-off: one client review in total, and no community involvement of any kind.

This firm is right for a catastrophic case that needs standing — an aviation disaster, a birth injury, a mass-tort matter, the kind of case another lawyer refers out because it requires someone the defense bar already knows by name. It is the wrong firm for an ordinary collision claim, which it is not structured to handle at volume. And it is a poor fit for anyone who takes a results page at face value: the lawyers here are demonstrably among the most decorated in Illinois, and the numbers on their website are the least reliable thing about them. Ask which firm won each one, and ask what the appellate court did next.

Methodology & Sourcing

Research conducted September 15, 2026. Entity name, address, roster, practice areas and all advertised figures were read directly from the firm’s own live pages, including each attorney bio, the case-results page, the truck-accidents page, the testimonials page and the disclaimer page. The founding boundary rests on the Illinois State Bar Association’s published notice of January 29, 2020 recording Todd A. Smith’s withdrawal from Power Rogers & Smith LLP and his April 30, 2020 departure date, corroborated by an independent legal-press profile. Inman v. Howe Freightways, Inc., 2019 IL App (1st) 172459, 130 N.E.3d 458 (May 30, 2019), was read in the official opinion for its disposition, its stated reasoning on the excluded eyewitness testimony, and its counsel block naming Todd A. Smith and Sean M. Houlihan of Power Rogers & Smith LLP; the predecessor firm’s own published account describing the verdict as overturned, its 2022 settlement figure, and subsequent court-approval reporting were used for the case’s later history. The 2012 film-set settlement and the attorney named in it were confirmed in national press. The $93,000,000 aviation result and its second credited attorney were taken from the predecessor firm’s own results page. Takata figures and Smith’s court-appointed co-lead role on the economic-loss track of MDL 2599 were taken from co-lead counsel’s own published account and from an independent legal-press profile; the class settlement is expressly not counted as a firm recovery. All four aggregate claims were collected from firm-controlled or firm-supplied sources and no aggregate is repeated. Bar presidencies were verified individually on the AAJ, ISBA and ITLA rolls; Best Lawyers recognitions and start years were verified on the Best Lawyers registry directly, which contradicts the firm’s About page. Review figures come from Avvo and BBB directly; Google and Yelp were unreachable, no rating is asserted for either, and no claim is made about the absence of negative reviews. Discipline findings rest on Avvo’s mirror of state bar data for two of seven attorneys; the ARDC primary database could not be queried on the research date and five attorneys were not checked, 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.