Davis Friedman: A Skulk of Foxes, an Eighty-Year Claim, and the Appeal That Was Never Filed

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.

At a Glance

Firm	Davis Friedman LLP — the name every one of its attorneys uses on their bar registration. The site brands itself “Davis | Friedman” and its footer says “Davis Friedman Law.” Formerly Davis, Friedman, Zavett, Kane & MacRae.
Founded	1946, by Benjamin B. Davis, with four partners — firm-sourced across three documents; see Section I for what we could and could not corroborate
Offices	135 South LaSalle Street, 36th Floor, Chicago, IL 60603 — labeled “Main Office,” city proper, and the registered bar address of all 24 active attorneys. Satellite in Northbrook — suburban, outside this profile’s scope.
Focus	Family law only: dissolution, marital property and financial issues, allocation of parental responsibilities, support, maintenance, marital agreements, post-decree
Size	24 active attorneys plus 4 expressly labeled retired. Roughly 539 combined years at the Illinois bar, computed from admission dates.
Distinctive edge	A partner co-authored the 1,818-page Illinois family law practitioner treatise. The tagline “We Wrote The Book On Illinois Family Law” is literally true.
Signature result	The firm advertises none. Its one appearance in the Illinois Supreme Court, and one malpractice suit against it, are in Section IV.
Peer standing	Chambers High Net Worth 2026: one ranked individual at Band 2. The firm carries no departmental ranking — and claims none.
Fee model	Not published (per the firm’s site)
Disciplinary record	All 24 active attorneys verified at the ARDC directly: active, authorized, public record of discipline NONE. The only firm in this batch where that was possible. See Section VIII.

I. A Skulk of Foxes

Foxes filled Muller Davis’s office at 135 South LaSalle. The story, as a 2008 profile of him tells it, is that the Chicago legal community had called his father — Benjamin B. Davis, who started this firm in 1946 — “smart as a fox,” and the collection grew from there. When Muller Davis died in October 2017, the firm did not box them. Its own memorial page records the outcome: “Today, in the office of nearly every Davis Friedman attorney, there is a fox of some sort which belonged to Muller, which we keep as a reminder of Muller.”

The same 2008 piece supplies the specifics that make the founding checkable rather than atmospheric. Benjamin Davis started the firm in a building across the street from the offices it occupies today. It began with four partners. By 2008 it had fifteen lawyers; today it has twenty-four active. Muller Davis took his degree from Harvard Law in 1960, served briefly in the Army, spent six and a half years at Jenner & Block, joined his father in 1967, and practiced with him until the elder Davis died in 1977.

The 1946 date, honestly stated. It appears in three separate firm-linked documents — the about page, the memorial page, and that 2008 profile, which was written by an outside author but is hosted by the firm. We could not corroborate it from a genuinely independent source. The Illinois Secretary of State’s corporate records were unreachable from our environment, which is an access limitation rather than a negative finding, and we recommend a manual check there. No obituary or bar memorial for Benjamin B. Davis surfaced in any archive we could search. And two sibling legal directories both state the firm was established in 1985 — a figure we treat as directory error, since the same listings also report a headcount roughly a third of the real one, but which we disclose rather than quietly discard.

The “oldest” claim, tested — and it survives. The firm’s about page states: “we have been standing beside them since 1946. That makes us the oldest law firm devoted to family law in Chicago.” That is a comparative superlative stated as fact, which this publication normally treats as a red flag. We checked it against the three other major Chicago matrimonial firms, reading each founding claim in raw HTML on that firm’s own website:

Davis Friedman	1946
Beermann LLP	1958
Schiller DuCanto & Fleck	1981
Berger Schatz	1987

Davis Friedman predates all three by between twelve and forty-one years. The honest formulation, and the one we will use: no Chicago family law firm we could find claims an earlier founding date. Two caveats belong with it. The 1946 date itself rests on the firm’s own account. And nothing establishes that the firm was exclusively matrimonial from the beginning — the 2008 profile notes only that when Ben Davis started, there were perhaps ten to twenty divorce lawyers in Chicago.

What the narrative leaves out. The about page tells an unbroken story from 1946 to the present without mentioning that Benjamin Davis died in 1977, that Muller Davis died in 2017, and that no attorney named Davis practices at the firm. The memorial pages exist and are honest; the Muller Davis page is not linked from the site-wide banner and we found it only by search. A current partner named Joshua T. Friedman is on the roster; his bio claims no relation to the name-partner Friedman and we found no evidence either way, so this profile asserts none. We could not establish who the original Friedman was at all.

II. The Mechanism: They Actually Wrote the Book

The homepage tagline reads “We Wrote The Book On Illinois Family Law.” It is the kind of line this publication usually strikes out. Here it checks out.

Illinois Practice of Family Law, by Muller Davis and Jody Meyer Yazici, published by West Group, runs to 1,818 pages. The firm’s memorial page calls it “the Muller Davis book.” By 2008 the two had produced eight editions with a ninth in progress. It is the practitioner treatise, not a marketing pamphlet.

And the firm discloses that the relationship has ended. Its site says “Former Publishers of Illinois Practice of Family Law,” and Jody Meyer Yazici is no longer on the roster. A firm that wanted to trade on a credential it no longer holds would have dropped the word “former.” This one kept it.

Bar leadership is the second mechanism, and it is verified at the conferring bodies. On the ISBA’s own current Family Law Section Council roster, two Davis Friedman attorneys appear: Staci L. Balbirer, listed as Ex-Officio, and Heather M. Hurst, listed as Member. Both are present-tense accurate. On the AAML Illinois chapter’s own leadership roster, Robert Segal is listed as Immediate Past President and Staci Balbirer sits on the Board of Managers with a term expiring October 2028.

Unusually, the firm under-claims all of this. Segal’s own bio says only “Fellow, AAML, 2000–Present” and does not mention that he was the chapter’s president. Balbirer’s bio says “Member (2021–Present)” of the ISBA council when the council’s roster gives her the more senior Ex-Officio designation. Across this batch of Chicago firms we found several bios claiming current offices that the conferring body’s roster contradicts. This is the only firm we found claiming less than the roster gives it.

Depth and longevity. Twenty-four active attorneys, all family law, all registered at one Loop address, with roughly 539 combined years at the Illinois bar — eight admitted before 1995 and six since 2015, so the depth is not all at one end. Backgrounds the firm reports include former Cook County public defenders and state’s attorneys, child welfare advocates, mental health workers, in-house counsel, and — the detail the firm likes best — a professional ballerina. One attorney, admitted in 2017, is described as a former U.S. Army paratrooper and Chicago Police Department sergeant, which is consistent with a second career.

In-house financial capability is claimed but not independently verifiable. The firm points to attorneys with backgrounds in economics, accounting, corporate law, finance and tax. Those backgrounds are supported in individual bios. There is no evidence of employed non-lawyer forensic accountants, and this profile does not imply one.

III. Practice Areas

Dissolution of marriage. Financial aspects of divorce, including marital property division, business interests and valuation. Maintenance. Child support. Allocation of parental responsibilities and parenting time. Premarital and postnuptial agreements. Paternity. Post-decree modification and enforcement. Relocation. Appeals.

Exclusivity is verified two ways: every one of the firm’s fifty-six site pages is family law, and every attorney’s bar registration lists this single family law firm.

IV. Track Record — and the Appeal That Was Never Filed

Past results do not guarantee or predict the outcome of any future case.

The firm advertises no case results. We enumerated all fifty-six pages in its sitemap. There is no results page, no verdicts page, no dollar figures and no client testimonials anywhere. That eliminates the single most common adverse finding in this project.

A technical note, stated so nobody mistakes it later: three aggregate counters do exist in the homepage’s source code — “100+ years of collective experience,” “Over 3000 Cases Closed,” and an attorney-ratings line. All three are commented out and do not render to any visitor. We do not report them as live claims. For the record, the “100+ years” figure would be a drastic understatement; the real number is about 539.

The Illinois Supreme Court appearance is real. In In re Marriage of Eckersall, 2015 IL 117922, Davis Friedman LLP represented the appellant, with Pamela Hutul, Benton Page and Errol Zavett as counsel. The Illinois chapter of the AAML appeared as amicus. The honest characterization is not “a win.” The disposition was that the appeal was dismissed as moot and the appellate court’s judgment vacated — the circuit court had entered a final judgment of dissolution in June 2014, superseding the interim parenting order under challenge. The practical benefit to the client was the erasure of an adverse appellate precedent rather than a ruling on the merits. Notably, the firm does not advertise this case at all.

In In re Marriage of Kranzler, 2018 IL App (1st) 171169, the firm represented the appellee and the judgment was affirmed — a win for its client. One name in that counsel listing came back garbled in our source and we have not reproduced it.

The most significant adverse finding in this profile is a legal malpractice action against the firm and a lawyer who still practices there.

Schweihs v. Davis, Friedman, Zavett, Kane and MacRae, and James L. Rubens, No. 1-01-3994, decided by the Illinois Appellate Court, First District, on November 3, 2003. The plaintiff alleged that her lawyers negligently failed to file a timely notice of appeal from a fee award, and sought both the reduction she said she would have won and a refund of roughly $26,000 she had paid for the appeal that was never perfected. The trial court granted the firm summary judgment.

The appellate court’s disposition: “Affirmed in part and reversed in part; cause remanded.” The court agreed she would have lost the underlying appeal on its merits, which disposed of the malpractice damages theory — but it found sufficient evidence of breach of contract for the failure to file, holding she was entitled to a return of the fees she had paid for an appeal that was not filed, and sent the case back.

Why it belongs in a profile written in 2026: James L. Rubens is a current partner of this firm, admitted in 1979, and is one of the nine attorneys the firm identifies as Best Lawyers–recognized. The firm discloses none of this. Three things should be said alongside it, because precision matters more than impact. It produced no ARDC discipline — we verified his disciplinary record directly at the primary register and it is clean. It is twenty-three years old. And the outcome on remand is not found; we do not know what the case finally cost or resolved for.

There is no accessible disclaimer on this website at all. The footer of every page links to a “Disclaimer” page. That page returns HTTP 500 site-wide — we tested it repeatedly, and the sitemap URL beside it returns 200, so the failure is specific to the disclaimer. There is no prior-results, no-guarantee, results-may-vary or attorney-advertising language anywhere else on the site. The firm advertises no results, so little hangs on it practically. A broken disclaimer link on a law firm’s every page is still a defect worth naming.

V. Client Voice — Three Reviews, and Two of Them Are Bad

For a firm of twenty-four lawyers and eighty years, there is effectively no client-review corpus. The whole of it, verified in the review page’s structured data rather than from a summary: 2.3 out of 5, from three reviews — one star, five stars, one star. All three were posted between May and July 2026.

First, a directory-literacy note: the same aggregator page advertises “120 Reviews” in its own title while its structured data says three. Do not repeat the 120.

The positive one, posted July 6, 2026:

“I cannot speak highly enough of Vincent Stark. From start to finish, he demonstrated outstanding professionalism, patience, and dedication to my case… He is truly the best in the game and a credit to his profession.”

A negative one, posted July 9, 2026, naming a specific attorney and a specific sequence:

“David Goldman seemed to be a good attorney but is certainly judgy and arrogant. He insulted our sons’ integrity during the litigation process. After I called out his unprofessional conduct and requested an apology, David Goldman never apologized and instead immediately withdrew his services and same-day motioned into court for all their fees to be paid on the spot.”

A necessary caveat that cuts in the firm’s favor and that we will not omit: the David M. Goldman at this firm has been listed as retired at the Illinois bar since 2022. Either this review describes events before that, or it is misattributed. It should not be read as an account of current conduct at the firm.

The third review, from May 2026, is a one-star attack on another named attorney in language that is severe, entirely unverifiable and defamatory in tone. We are describing rather than reproducing it. Our standard is to disclose adverse material, not to relay anonymous character allegations verbatim; the existence and the rating are the reportable facts.

Elsewhere: eighteen reviews on a listing that blocks automated access, so we obtained the count and no rating and make no claim about their content — and note that the firm has two duplicate listings there. A directory shows 1.0 from two reviews. A peer-rating service shows 4.6 from three peer reviews, which measures lawyers’ opinions rather than clients’. The professional-rating site blocks access entirely.

The finding is the absence, and the fact that what little exists is currently negative. Three Google reviews over eighty years is not a reputation record; it is close to no data. A prospective client should weigh it as such rather than as a verdict.

VI. Beyond the Courtroom

The firm reports volunteering at the Greater Chicago Food Depository and the Uptown Café Soup Kitchen, and pro bono work for Metropolitan Family Services, Cabrini Green Legal Aid and the Chicago Volunteer Legal Services Foundation. We could not confirm any of it with any recipient organization, and found no acknowledgment on any of their sites. It is reported here as firm-stated and unverified.

The individually documented record is thinner and more specific. David M. Sternfield is described as founder and director of the Autism Legislation Project and of Worldwide Mental Health Initiatives, a panelist at the 2014 United Nations World Autism Awareness Day, a participant in the legislative process behind Illinois House Resolution No. 856 recognizing that day, and a board member of the Illinois chapter of the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts. James L. Rubens served on an American Jewish Committee board in 2004 and 2005. Joy M. Feinberg supports the Shakespeare Theatre, the Goodman and Steppenwolf. One retired attorney’s community entries all end by 2009 — a stale bio rather than a claim.

A small irony given Section VII: the only documented legislative involvement by a current partner is the autism advocacy above, not the maintenance statute the firm’s own about page gestures at.

VII. Credentials and Recognition

Verified at the conferring body. Chambers High Net Worth 2026 ranks Joy Feinberg at Band 2 in Illinois Family/Matrimonial. The firm itself carries no departmental Chambers ranking — and, to its credit, claims none anywhere on its site. Best Lawyers records nine recognized lawyers across Family Law and Family Law: Arbitration and Mediation, with the firm’s tenure beginning in 2010, and one Best Law Firms ranking in Family Law. No “Lawyer of the Year” title was found. The listed profiles are unactivated, meaning the firm is not paying into the program — which strengthens rather than weakens the credential.

AAML and ISBA leadership are covered in Section II and verified on those organizations’ own rosters.

One internal inconsistency, and it runs against the firm. The about page says “six of our partners have served as President” of the AAML Illinois chapter. A partner’s bio says she was the firm’s sixth partner to hold the office, as of 2017–18. But the Academy’s own roster now lists Robert Segal as Immediate Past President, which would make him the seventh. The firm’s number is stale and appears to undercount itself. We could verify five of them by name; the sixth is unnamed and we could not identify them, because the chapter publishes no list of past presidents.

The legislation claim is anonymous and we could not corroborate it. The about page states: “A Davis Friedman partner led the effort to draft recent Illinois legislation that changed the way spousal maintenance is awarded and clarifies property settlement awards in family law cases.” It names no attorney. The relevant acts are Public Act 98-961, which created the maintenance guidelines effective January 1, 2015, and Public Act 99-90. The ISBA’s own contemporaneous reporting credits the Family Law Section Council collectively and names no Davis Friedman lawyer; its 2015 Bar Journal analysis of the guidelines names no drafters and never mentions the firm. The only roster-side support is one partner’s bio saying that, as a past member of the ISBA Family Law Section Council, he “was involved in the drafting of legislation” for the IMDMA — which names no act, is a weaker claim than “led the effort,” and belongs to an attorney whose own bio says he joined this firm in 2019, years after the 2014–15 legislation. He was not a Davis Friedman partner when it was written. A superlative-grade credit, stated without a name, that the conferring record does not support.

Kept separate, because they are not peer review. Super Lawyers, Leading Lawyers Network and trade-press lists are commercial programs that monetize the people they name. And one credential on the site — “Illinois Top Lawyers” — we could not attach to any conferring body at all, and report as unverifiable.

A compliance flag. The homepage describes the firm’s lawyers as “successful specialists in the practice of family law.” Illinois Rule of Professional Conduct 7.4 restricts “specialist” language, and Illinois has no family law certification program (Section IX). We note it; we do not adjudicate it.

VIII. What We Checked, and What We Could Not

This is the one firm in this batch whose disciplinary record we verified at the primary source, and it came back clean. We reached the Illinois ARDC’s lawyer register through its full request chain and confirmed a working control query before trusting any result. All twenty-four active attorneys returned: active and authorized to practice law; public record of discipline and pending proceedings, NONE; malpractice insurance reported as maintained; registered address 135 S. LaSalle Street, 36th Floor. That is a verified finding, not an inference from a secondary mirror, and it is worth more than every marketing credential on the site combined.

Of the four retired attorneys, three show no discipline. The fourth is recorded as not currently authorized because she has not registered with the ARDC and has not demonstrated continuing-education compliance, last registered in 2024. That is an administrative lapse, not discipline, and we state it that way.

An identity trap that would have been defamatory to get wrong, resolved. The ARDC register contains two different David Goldmans admitted in 1981. David Marc Goldman, admitted May 1, 1981, is this firm’s attorney; retired since 2022; discipline: none. David A. Goldman, admitted November 5, 1981, registered at a residential address and last registered in 1999, is an entirely different person with no connection to this firm, and was disbarred on consent effective March 22, 2000. We pulled both full records side by side. Any profile that attached that disbarment to Davis Friedman would be false. Future researchers in this market should treat the two as a known trap.

No other malpractice action, sanction or disciplinary news naming the firm or its attorneys was found beyond the 2003 Schweihs case in Section IV.

Site defects, recorded because they are the texture of the same problem. The footer disclaimer link returns HTTP 500 on every page. A COVID-19 notice is still displayed site-wide in September 2026 — “Davis Friedman remains open for business… Nothing has changed for us” — roughly five years stale, on all fifty-six pages. The “In the News” and “News & Insights” pages are in the primary navigation and are completely empty. “Financial Aspects of Divorce” appears twice in the navigation pointing at two live duplicate URLs. Legacy pages from an older website platform return HTTP 500 rather than a redirect or a 404.

Directory data about this firm is badly stale and should not be relied on. Two sibling legal directories give the founding year as 1985 and the headcount as eight to sixteen against an actual twenty-four. A review aggregator lists a suite number the firm does not occupy and advertises a review count forty times the real one. There are two duplicate listings on one review site. Two attorneys who have left the roster still appear as Davis Friedman lawyers on third-party sites.

IX. The Illinois Legal Backdrop, in Plain English

General information, not legal advice. Statutes below were verified as described in Methodology; outcomes 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 stating or implying that they are “certified,” a “specialist” or an “expert” except to identify an actual certificate or award, and then only with a disclaimer that the Supreme Court of Illinois does not recognize specialty certification and that it is not required to practice law in Illinois. Registered patent attorneys are the only carve-out. There is no Illinois board certification in family law. No lawyer is described as a specialist, certified or an expert anywhere in this profile — and the firm’s own homepage use of that word is flagged in Section VII rather than repeated here.

There is one ground for divorce, and fault is not it. Under 750 ILCS 5/401, irreconcilable differences is the sole ground for dissolution; the fault grounds were abolished by Public Act 99-90, effective January 1, 2016. Six months of living separate and apart creates a presumption the requirement is met. One spouse must have lived in Illinois for ninety days before filing.

Illinois divides marital property equitably, not equally. Under 750 ILCS 5/503 the court divides marital property in “just proportions” on statutory factors; Illinois is not a community property state and there is no presumption of an even split. Non-marital property — gifts, inheritances, property owned before the marriage, property excluded by valid agreement — is assigned to the spouse who owns it.

Maintenance runs on a formula, up to a ceiling. Under 750 ILCS 5/504, where combined gross income is under $500,000 and the court finds maintenance appropriate, the guideline figure is 33⅓% of the payor’s net annual income minus 25% of the payee’s, capped so the payee’s total does not exceed 40% of combined net income, with duration set by a multiplier keyed to the length of the marriage. The guideline framework was created by Public Act 98-961 effective January 1, 2015, the duration table was revised by Public Act 100-520 effective June 1, 2018, and the current net-income formula arrived with Public Act 100-923 effective January 1, 2019, after the federal change eliminating the maintenance deduction. Above the income ceiling the guidelines do not apply.

Child support is an income-shares calculation. Public Act 99-764, effective July 1, 2017, replaced the old percentage-of-the-payer’s-income model with one that begins from both parents’ incomes and the number of overnights.

“Custody” is not a term Illinois law uses. Since January 1, 2016, 750 ILCS 5/602.5 governs allocation of significant decision-making responsibilities and 5/602.7 governs parenting time.

Moving with a child has a mileage rule. Under 750 ILCS 5/609.2, relocation means more than 25 miles if the child’s primary residence is in Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake, McHenry or Will County, more than 50 miles elsewhere in Illinois, and more than 25 miles across a state line. At least 60 days’ written notice is required to the other parent and the court.

Orders of protection. Under the Illinois Domestic Violence Act of 1986, 750 ILCS 60/, an emergency order issues without notice and runs 14 to 21 days; an interim order up to 30 days; a plenary order, after a full hearing, up to two years, renewable.

X. The Awesome Attorneys Assessment

The specific thing about this firm is that it is the only one in this batch we could verify at the primary register, and it passed. Twenty-four active attorneys, every one confirmed at the Illinois ARDC as active, authorized, and carrying no public record of discipline or pending proceedings. In a month of Chicago research in which that database defeated every other attempt, that is the single most useful fact a client could have. Add a genuine 1,818-page treatise its own partner co-wrote, two seats on the ISBA Family Law Section Council and two on the AAML Illinois chapter leadership — all verified on those bodies’ rosters — and an eighty-year founding date that no Chicago competitor’s own claim beats, and the substance here is real.

The honest limitation is that the firm’s public record does not match its private one, in both directions. It under-claims what it has: a partner who was the AAML Illinois chapter’s president does not mention it in his own bio, and the firm’s count of its own past presidents is one short. It over-claims what it cannot support: an anonymous assertion that “a Davis Friedman partner led the effort to draft” the Illinois maintenance legislation, which the ISBA’s own record does not corroborate and which the one roster attorney with any drafting claim could not have made, since he joined in 2019. It links a disclaimer on every page that has been returning a server error. It has displayed a COVID notice for five years. And the one malpractice judgment we found in this entire batch is this firm’s — a 2003 appellate decision holding a client entitled to the return of roughly $26,000 in fees paid for an appeal that was never filed, against a lawyer who is still a partner and is one of the nine the firm holds out as Best Lawyers–recognized. It produced no discipline and it is twenty-three years old. It is also not mentioned anywhere.

This firm is right for the client who wants long institutional memory and a verifiable clean regulatory record — a conventional but contested Illinois dissolution, a property or maintenance question inside the statutory framework, someone who would rather hire the firm that wrote the practitioner text than the firm with the best homepage. It is a weaker fit for a client shopping on reputation signals, because there are three reviews on the internet and two of them are hostile; and it is the wrong fit for anyone who needs the reassurance of an obviously well-run public face, since a broken disclaimer link and a 2021 pandemic notice are what a prospective client meets first. Ask which partner will run the file, ask directly about the 2003 Schweihs decision if it matters to you, get the fee arrangement in writing, and know that the ARDC record — the part that actually matters — is clean.

Methodology & Sourcing

Research conducted September 16, 2026. The firm’s entire site — fifty-six pages and twenty-eight attorney biographies — was mirrored and read as raw HTML rather than through a summarizer, and the HTTP 500 on the disclaimer page, the commented-out homepage counters, the duplicate navigation entry and the site-wide COVID notice were each confirmed in that source. The 1946 founding and the fox story rest on three firm-linked documents including a 2008 outside-authored profile hosted by the firm, and are reported as firm-sourced; the Illinois Secretary of State’s corporate records were unreachable from this environment and a manual check is recommended. The “oldest” claim was tested by reading three competitor firms’ founding claims in raw HTML on their own sites. The treatise title, authors, publisher and page count were confirmed against a bibliographic record. In re Marriage of Eckersall, 2015 IL 117922, and In re Marriage of Kranzler, 2018 IL App (1st) 171169, were confirmed through the court record and corroborating independent reporting; Schweihs v. Davis, Friedman, Zavett, Kane and MacRae, and James L. Rubens, No. 1-01-3994, was read in the official Illinois Courts opinion and independently corroborated twice, and its disposition is quoted from the opinion. Disciplinary status for all twenty-four active and four retired attorneys was verified directly against the Illinois ARDC’s own register after a successful control test, and the two-David-Goldman identity conflict was resolved by pulling both complete records. Chambers, Best Lawyers, the ISBA Family Law Section Council roster and the AAML Illinois chapter roster were each read at the conferring organization. The legislation claim was checked against the ISBA’s own contemporaneous reporting and its 2015 Bar Journal analysis, neither of which names this firm. Review figures come from an aggregator’s machine-readable structured data rather than its page title, which overstates the count forty-fold. One negative review is described rather than quoted, because its allegations are unverifiable and defamatory in tone; a second is quoted with the express caveat that the attorney it names has been retired at the Illinois bar since 2022. Statutes were verified against the Illinois Courts’ own published text for Rule of Professional Conduct 7.4, and, for the family law provisions, against current compilations carrying the governing Public Act notes — the Illinois General Assembly’s own site was unreachable on the research date for a fifth consecutive day, with a TLS certificate-verification failure, so 750 ILCS 5/401, 5/503, 5/504, 5/505, 5/602.5, 5/602.7, 5/609.2 and 750 ILCS 60/ rest on secondary repositories rather than primary text. 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.