Katz & Stefani: The Firm Whose Founder Chaired the Committee That Rewrote the Divorce Statute

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	Katz & Stefani, LLC. No former name, no merger, no rebrand — unusual in this market.
Founded	2008, by P. André Katz and Daniel R. Stefani — stated on the firm’s own about page, which most of its competitors do not manage
Offices	222 North LaSalle Street, Suite 2150, Chicago, IL 60601 (headquarters, city proper). Satellite in Bannockburn — suburban, outside this profile’s scope.
Focus	Family law only: child custody matters, child support, cohabitation agreements, collaborative divorce, enforcement, grandparents’ rights, Jewish divorce, maintenance, paternity, prenuptial agreements, relocation
Size	Nine attorneys: two principals, three senior partners, two partners, two associates. The smallest firm in this batch by a wide margin.
Distinctive edge	Its founding principal chaired the bipartisan committee that rewrote the Illinois divorce statute — corroborated by two independent bar organizations
Signature result	The firm advertises none, and has no reported appellate footprint. See Section IV.
Peer standing	Chambers ranks André Katz as an “Other Ranked Lawyer” and does not rank the firm. Best Lawyers recognizes seven of nine attorneys. The firm claims Best Lawyers and does not claim Chambers.
Fee model	Not published (per the firm’s site)
Disciplinary record	No discipline located. The ARDC’s primary database failed its own control test and could not be queried — see Section VIII. This is not a clearance.

I. The Year He Founded the Firm, the Speaker Put Him in Charge of Rewriting the Statute

On May 19, 2008, the Illinois House of Representatives adopted House Resolution 1101 and created the Illinois Family Law Study Committee, charged with reviewing the Illinois Marriage and Dissolution of Marriage Act, then thirty-one years old. Speaker of the House Michael Madigan appointed P. André Katz as its chairman — to lead a bipartisan body of practitioners, judges and legislators, with equal appointees from the House majority and minority leaders plus appointees from the Illinois Supreme Court and the Illinois Child Support Advisory Committee, in rewriting the statute.

That same year, he and Daniel Stefani founded this firm.

The chairmanship is corroborated from two directions that had no reason to coordinate. The Illinois State Bar Association’s Illinois Bar Journal, in November 2015, carried an author biography describing Katz as “chair of the Illinois Family Law Study Committee… a principal of Katz & Stefani, LLC, a family law firm with offices in Chicago and Bannockburn.” The DuPage County Bar Association’s December 2015 journal independently documents House Resolution 1101 and the committee’s creation on that date. A firm-hosted 2016 article co-authored by Katz supplies the appointment detail itself.

The output is citable. The committee’s work became Public Act 99-0090, rewriting the IMDMA, and Public Act 99-0085, rewriting the Parentage Act — both signed in late 2015 and effective January 1, 2016. Between them they abolished the fault grounds for divorce and left irreconcilable differences as the only one, retired “custody” and “visitation” in favor of allocation of parental responsibilities and parenting time, and abolished the heart-balm actions for alienation of affections, breach of promise and criminal conversation. Every Illinois divorce filed since is governed by that text.

The lineage behind it is documented too. Katz’s own bio records that before founding this firm he was a partner in the litigation department of McDermott Will & Emery and an equity partner at Berger Schatz — a firm ranked Band 1 by Chambers in this practice area and separately profiled on this site. He took his J.D. from Loyola University Chicago in 1989.

The asymmetry is worth recording, because it is conspicuous. Daniel Stefani’s bio says he has practiced exclusively in matrimonial law for his entire career. He was admitted in 1994 and this firm was founded in 2008. It names no prior employer anywhere — a fourteen-year gap with nothing in it. We searched for a connection to the established Chicago matrimonial firms and found none. Where his partner’s pedigree is spelled out in two sentences, his is simply absent.

II. The Mechanism — Which Is Not the One the Firm Advertises

Take the advertised version first, because it does not fully hold. The about page says the firm’s team has “extensive backgrounds in business, financial, tax and accounting issues, as well as an understanding of business valuations, complex employee benefits, retirement planning.” A reader plausibly hears in-house financial firepower.

What we found: the roster lists nine attorneys and zero non-lawyer financial professionals — no CPA, no forensic accountant, no valuation staff. There is no named valuation practice and no such practice page. There is no appellate practice, named or otherwise. The sentence describes the lawyers’ own academic and work backgrounds, which is a fair thing to say, and it should not be read as a separate in-house discipline. This profile does not imply one.

The real mechanism is better than the advertised one, and the firm barely leans on it.

Statutory authorship. Katz chaired the committee that wrote the statute this firm litigates under. Every competitor in Chicago argues from that text; one of them helped draft it. That is a structural advantage no marketing program confers and no rival can replicate, and it is documented by two independent bar organizations rather than asserted.

Sustained practitioner authorship. Stefani has written a standing column for Chicago Lawyer magazine since 2008. His bio lists more than forty titled articles running continuously from that year through December 2024 — not a handful of thought-leadership posts but sixteen years of consecutive publication. He also wrote the “Stock Options and Other Employee Benefits” chapter in the IICLE Family Law Handbook in 2006, and contributed to the ABA Family Advocate in 2001 and the ISBA Family Law newsletter in 2000.

Genuine exclusivity, and one unusual practice area. All eleven of the firm’s practice areas are family law. Among them is Jewish divorce — a named practice area, consistent with the firm’s charitable profile, and specific enough to be a real service offering rather than a keyword.

Deliberate small scale. The firm describes itself as “strategically sized,” with limited caseloads. With nine lawyers against competitors at 24, 36, 38 and 57, that is at least an accurate self-description.

Teaching: Stefani’s bio says he has taught at Loyola University Chicago School of Law and Chicago-Kent College of Law. Not independently verified. Katz’s bio claims recognition for international child custody and jurisdictional disputes across Latin America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East, and credit for laying the early foundation of the expedited child support program in the Circuit Court of Cook County. Neither is independently verified, and both are reported here as the firm’s claims.

III. Practice Areas

Child custody matters — in the statute’s current terms, allocation of parental responsibilities and parenting time. Child support. Maintenance. Prenuptial agreements. Cohabitation agreements. Collaborative divorce. Enforcement. Grandparents’ rights. Jewish divorce. Paternity. Relocation.

Eleven practice areas, all family law. Exclusivity verified.

IV. Track Record — an Empty Page, and One Court Record the Firm Does Not Mention

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

The firm advertises no results whatsoever. Its results and case-results URLs do not exist. Its Testimonials page is live and in the navigation and contains the words “Coming Soon!” and nothing else. There are no dollar figures, no outcome tallies and no aggregates anywhere. On the dimension where this project has found the worst abuses across Chicago — firms advertising verdicts that were reversed, remitted or never paid — this firm has nothing to expose. Say it plainly: there is no advertised-results problem here because there are no advertised results.

There is also almost no reported appellate record. Full-text searches of the published-opinion corpus for “Katz & Stefani,” “Katz and Stefani” and “Daniel R. Stefani” each returned zero results. The firm does not appear as counsel of record in indexed published Illinois appellate matrimonial opinions. For a nine-lawyer firm that positions itself around high-stakes, valuation-heavy work, the absence of any appellate footprint is a real and reportable gap — most such cases settle, and a firm can be excellent without published opinions, but a client choosing on the expectation of appellate capability should know there is nothing on the record to point to.

The firm does appear in the Illinois Official Reports once, and not as counsel. In In re Marriage of Harnack, 2014 IL App (1st) 121424, a substantial dissolution involving 280,000 shares of exchange holding-company stock, footnote 8 reads:

“The report of proceedings shows that the court heard argument from counsel for Harnack, Israelov, Katz & Stefani, LLC, a law firm seeking fees from Harnack in the dissolution action, and Grund & Leavitt regarding the proposed distribution of 140,000 shares to Harnack. Each asserted claims to the shares and/or against Fanady and/or Alpha.”

The firm had represented Harnack and was competing — alongside another Chicago matrimonial firm in the same posture — to be paid out of its own client’s marital award. This requires precision and we are going to give it. Fee petitions in long, bitterly contested dissolutions are routine and entirely proper; a lawyer is entitled to be paid. There was no sanction, no misconduct finding and no ruling against the firm. It is not discipline and should not be read as such. What it is: a documented court record, in the state’s official reports, of this firm seeking fees from a client, which the firm does not disclose — and which sits beside the most-read review of the firm on the internet, a billing complaint (Section V). Neither item establishes anything about the other. Together they are what a prospective client would want to have seen.

Appellate counsel in Harnack were other firms, and the disposition was affirmed with remand. The litigation ran more than a decade through further appeals in 2021, 2022 and 2025; Katz & Stefani appears in none of them.

One further court record we are declining to use. A 2021 First District opinion records a legal malpractice and tortious interference suit brought by a “P. Andre Katz,” individually and as limited guardian of his mother’s estate, against a large Chicago firm over changes to her estate plan; the appellate court reversed the dismissal. The distinctive name rendering and the Chicago venue point strongly to the same individual, but we could not confirm the identity, and it would in any event be personal family litigation rather than firm representation. We record that we found it and that we are not relying on it. It should be verified independently or left alone.

The disclaimer page is empty. Every page on this site links to a “Disclaimer” page in its footer. We fetched it and parsed the content region: it is 128 bytes containing the single word “Disclaimer.” There is no prior-results, no-guarantee, results-may-vary or attorney-advertising language anywhere else on the site either. Because the firm advertises no results, little turns on it in practice. A law firm linking an empty disclaimer page from every page it publishes is still a defect, and an easily fixed one.

V. Client Voice — a Real Corpus, and It Is Split

Unlike its larger competitors, this firm has an actual public review record: 4.1 out of 5 from 32 reviews, verified in the aggregator page’s machine-readable structured data rather than from a summary. The star distribution is not published, but a 4.1 sitting alongside visible one-star content is a split corpus, not a uniform one, and we are not going to describe it as uniformly strong.

Three things to know about the shape of it. The aggregator profile is unclaimed by the firm — nobody is managing it. The firm publishes zero testimonials of its own (“Coming Soon!”). And both founders carry high scores on a lawyer-rating site with zero client reviews behind them — those scores are algorithmic, not client sentiment, and should not be read as the latter.

The most substantive negative, posted about a year before this research:

“Do not hire this firm. They took advantage of my ex (and me) by playing the game of going around and around, petition after petition, fake emergency motions, etc. just to run up fees… My ex and I would make progress and Katz & Stefani would disagree just to disagree and drag it out for months and years charging for every minute. They billed my ex $5,500 in one day!”

A second, about intake rather than representation:

“I called to ask about the possibility of receiving services on an accelerated timeline, and the person answering the phone was condescending and literally laughed at me. Not a great way to greet a potentially new client…”

And two positives, including one from a lawyer in another state who called the firm on a client’s behalf:

“I am an estate planning attorney in Arkansas. One of my clients is in need of assistance regarding a family law issue. I called Katz and Stefani and was greeted in a warm professional manner…”

“Excellent professional service… He maintained a positive attitude and gave good sound advice. Had we known that the opposing side had been secretly reading our confidential emails, we may have obtained the normal 50/50 split rather than the resulting 47/53 split.”

We include that last one in full deliberately. It is a five-star review that also says the client did worse than an even split, and names a reason. That is more useful to a prospective client than either a curated testimonial or a hostile one-star, and it is the kind of thing a firm-controlled testimonials page would never carry.

A note on the reviewer who names his attorney: the lawyer he thanks is not on the current nine-person roster. He has left. The firm has correctly removed him rather than leaving a departed attorney listed as current — a failure we found repeatedly at other firms in this market.

VI. Beyond the Courtroom

The firm publishes a charitable-events page listing twenty-eight organizations it says it supports financially or through active engagement — among them Lurie Children’s Hospital, the Chicago Metropolitan Battered Women’s Network, the Center for Advancing Domestic Peace, the Center for Conflict Resolution, Equip for Equality, the Chicago Public Library Foundation, Jewish Child & Family Services, Ronald McDonald House, the Women’s Bar Association of Illinois, the Goodman Theatre and the Lyric Opera.

We are not going to present that as verified involvement. The page is dated July 7, 2016 — a decade old. It gives no amounts, no dates, no named roles and no individuals, and we found no confirmation from any recipient organization. By this publication’s standard — verified involvement, ideally confirmed by the recipient — it is an unverified self-assertion on a stale page, and that is how it is reported.

One category note: the list includes the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, a professional bar-adjacent body, among its charitable causes. That is a category error — and it is also the firm’s only stated connection to the Academy (Section VII).

VII. Credentials and Recognition

Two corrections to the conventional description of this firm, and one runs in its favor.

Chambers does not rank this firm. We read the Chambers Illinois High Net Worth rankings directly from the guide’s own published table for Family/Matrimonial. The Band 1 leading firms are Berger Schatz and Schiller DuCanto & Fleck (a later edition adds Beermann LLP). Katz & Stefani does not appear as a ranked firm. André Katz appears under the heading “Other Ranked Lawyers,” a designation the guide’s own key defines — recognized, but not placed in a band. Daniel Stefani is not ranked at all. Chambers’ commentary on Katz is genuine and worth quoting: sources describe him as “a go-to person… thought of very highly” who “practises at the highest level,” and as “very good with business assets.”

And here is the part that counts in the firm’s favor: it never claims Chambers anywhere on its website. The correction above is to the market’s description of the firm, not to anything the firm says about itself. Several Chicago firms we examined this month claim credentials the conferring body does not support. This one leaves a credential it could arguably claim entirely unmentioned.

Best Lawyers — verified at the source, and the firm’s claims are accurate. Seven of the firm’s nine attorneys are recognized, in Family Law and Family Law Mediation; the firm’s tenure with the program began in 2010; there is no “Lawyer of the Year” designation. The about page’s claim that both founders have been designated Best Lawyers is true. The profiles are unactivated and the firm is marked ineligible for certain marketing options — meaning it is not paying into the program, which strengthens the credential rather than weakening it. The firm’s Tier 1 Chicago ranking in Family Law and Family Law Mediation for the 2026 edition also checks out, with the standard caveat that the firm-ranking program requires firm submission and is commercially affiliated.

No AAML fellowship was found for either founder. Katz’s bio claims only that he has lectured before the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers and published in its journal — so, again, no false claim is being made. But the Academy’s fellowship is the principal peer credential in this practice area, and the Chambers Band 1 competitors are dense with fellows and chapter officers. For a firm positioned on high-net-worth matrimonial work, its absence is notable. The honest qualifier: the Illinois chapter’s own roster was unreachable from our environment, so this is unverified rather than a confirmed negative.

Bar leadership: clean, and this is the check most firms in this batch failed. Katz’s bio claims one office and puts it in the past tense — that he “served as co-chairman” of a Chicago Bar Association committee. Stefani claims membership only. Because neither asserts a current office, there is nothing for any organization’s roster to contradict.

Kept separate, because they are not peer review. Both bios cite Super Lawyers and Leading Lawyers; both are commercial programs that monetize the lawyers they name, and we could not independently verify the Leading Lawyers recognition at all. A vanity “Who’s Who” press release exists in the public record for this firm — notably, it is not claimed on the firm’s own site. One further claim we could not corroborate: that Stefani was named by a Chicago city magazine as a top family law practitioner.

VIII. What We Checked, and What We Could Not

No evidence of discipline was found in secondary sources. This is not a clearance. We constructed valid authenticated requests to the ARDC’s lawyer register — token harvested, cookie held, parameters echoed back correctly by the server — and every query returned a failure notice and zero results. Our control query was the surname Smith, statewide, with no filters. It returned nothing. Illinois has hundreds of licensed attorneys named Smith. The channel is non-functional from our environment and yields no data in either direction, so no attorney at this firm has been verified against the primary register. A lawyer-rating site’s mirror of state licensing data reports “no misconduct found” and active, authorized status for both founders. No malpractice suit, sanction or disciplinary news naming the firm or its attorneys was found. The fee record in Section IV is a fee claim, not a disciplinary matter, and is not counted as one.

Copy that has not been maintained. Katz’s bio says he has “thirty years of family law experience.” He was admitted in 1989, which makes it thirty-seven. It also says he was “recently named a ‘Best Lawyer’”; the firm’s Best Lawyers tenure began in 2010.

The firm contradicts itself about its own signature credential. Katz’s bio frames the Study Committee chairmanship in the present and ongoing tense — that he “has led” the public review and “is responsible for submitting” the committee’s final report. The committee’s work concluded when the statute took effect on January 1, 2016. The firm’s own about page gets it right, in clean past tense: he “was responsible for rewriting the divorce statute that became effective January 1, 2016.” Two pages of the same website, two different tenses, one of them wrong.

Superlatives, one of which sits against the firm’s own data. The site calls the firm “one of the most respected family law firms in the Chicago area,” claims an “unrivaled level of responsiveness” and an “elite team,” and describes itself as among the region’s “most respected and highest-rated” law firms. “Highest-rated” against a 4.1 out of 5 from 32 reviews, at a firm Chambers does not rank while ranking two competitors Band 1, is not supportable, and this profile does not repeat it. A site-wide pull-quote also uses the word “guarantee” — aimed at the lawyer’s understanding of the law rather than at any outcome, so we flag it lightly rather than calling it a violation.

Stale satellite properties still live. Two personal-brand sites for one founder remain online, the more substantial one last updated in July 2018, and it gives his title as “Senior Partner” where the firm’s own site says “Principal.” Separately, a review aggregator lists the firm’s street as a boulevard rather than a street and duplicates the suite number.

Identity notes. The bar-registered name is Paul Andre Katz; “P. André Katz” is the professional rendering of the same person, confirmed by matching firm, ZIP code and 1989 admission. A separate Chicago attorney named John Aaron Stefani is a different person. A Cook County judge named Katz appears in the Harnack opinion and is unrelated. A large Chicago firm named Katten appears in litigation involving the Katz name as a defendant — that is not an affiliation. And this firm has no relation to Katz Friedman, Kaplan Katz, or any other Katz-named practice.

A research-integrity note, recorded because it bears on how this profile was built: during this project a retrieval of a competing Chicago firm’s website returned this firm’s about page instead. We re-verified every fact in this profile against cache-busted fetches of the firm’s own canonical pages before writing. The anomaly appears to have been a transient caching fault at a shared web host and is not a finding about either firm.

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 — which matters here, because helping write a statute is a documented historical fact about a lawyer, not a credential, and it is stated that way throughout.

The statute this firm’s founder helped rewrite starts here. Under 750 ILCS 5/401, irreconcilable differences is the sole ground for dissolution in Illinois. The fault grounds were abolished by Public Act 99-90, effective January 1, 2016 — the act that came out of the committee described in Section I. 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 a 50/50 split. Non-marital property — gifts, inheritances, property owned before the marriage, property excluded by valid agreement — is assigned to the spouse who owns it. Worth reading alongside the five-star client review in Section V that describes a 47/53 outcome: “the normal 50/50 split” is not what Illinois law promises.

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 current net-income formula arrived with Public Act 100-923, effective January 1, 2019. Above the ceiling the guidelines do not apply and the court works from the statutory factors.

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 — and this firm’s own practice-area menu still does. Since January 1, 2016, 750 ILCS 5/602.5 governs allocation of significant decision-making responsibilities and 5/602.7 governs parenting time. The Parentage Act was rewritten in the same package by Public Act 99-0085. We note without drawing a conclusion that the firm lists “Child Custody” as a practice area — common usage that clients search for, and the old statutory word, on the site of the lawyer who chaired the committee that retired it.

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. This is the firm’s named relocation practice, and the rule it turns on.

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 this firm has is authorship of the statute. Not familiarity with it, not experience under it — the Speaker of the Illinois House appointed its founding principal to chair the bipartisan committee that rewrote the Illinois Marriage and Dissolution of Marriage Act and the Parentage Act, and the resulting Public Acts 99-0090 and 99-0085 govern every Illinois divorce filed since January 1, 2016. Two independent bar organizations document the chairmanship. Nothing else in this batch of Chicago firms is comparable, and no competitor can acquire it. Around it sits a genuinely clean record: no advertised results to overstate, no credential claimed that the conferring body contradicts, Best Lawyers recognition for seven of nine attorneys on profiles the firm is not paying for, and sixteen consecutive years of a practitioner column by the other founder.

The honest limitation is size and the absence of a demonstrated record. Nine lawyers, no non-lawyer financial staff despite copy that implies financial depth, no named valuation practice, no appellate practice, and zero appearances in the published Illinois appellate record — against competitors with Illinois Supreme Court opinions to point to. Its client corpus is real and split: 4.1 from 32 reviews, with the most substantive negative one a detailed billing complaint, on a profile nobody at the firm manages. It appears in the official reports once, seeking fees from its own client, which it does not disclose. Its disclaimer page is empty, its testimonials page says “Coming Soon,” its charitable page is a decade old, and it calls itself “highest-rated” while Chambers ranks two competitors Band 1 and does not rank it at all. None of that is misconduct. Together it describes a small firm that has not invested in being checkable.

This firm is right for the client who wants the statute’s architect and a small, senior team — a matter turning on a hard question of statutory interpretation, a relocation or jurisdictional dispute, an international custody problem, or anyone who would rather have a principal’s direct attention than a large firm’s bench. It is a weaker fit for a case that will need heavy forensic accounting or business valuation, where the capability here is the lawyers’ own backgrounds rather than in-house staff, and a poor fit for a matter with a serious prospect of appeal, where there is no track record to assess. And given both the billing review and the fee record in the official reports, a prospective client should settle the fee arrangement in writing at the outset — the hourly rate, what triggers a fee petition, and what happens if the relationship ends mid-case. Ask it directly. It is a fair question anywhere, and here it is the obvious one.

Methodology & Sourcing

Research conducted September 16, 2026. Every fact taken from the firm’s own website — the about page, all nine attorney biographies, the eleven practice-area pages, the testimonials page, the charitable-events page and the disclaimer page — was read from raw HTML retrieved directly, with cache-busting and canonical-tag verification, rather than through a summarizer; the empty disclaimer page was confirmed by parsing its content region, and the 128-byte figure is measured. The Study Committee chairmanship rests on three sources: the Illinois State Bar Association’s Illinois Bar Journal author biography of November 2015, the DuPage County Bar Association’s December 2015 documentation of House Resolution 1101 and the committee’s creation on May 19, 2008, and a firm-hosted 2016 article co-authored by Katz that supplies the appointment detail; the resulting Public Acts and their January 1, 2016 effective date were confirmed separately. In re Marriage of Harnack, 2014 IL App (1st) 121424, was downloaded from the Illinois Courts and read in full, and footnote 8 is quoted from that text. The absence of an appellate footprint reflects three separate full-text opinion searches, all returning zero. A second court record bearing a matching name is expressly flagged as unconfirmed as to identity and is not relied on. Chambers rankings and the “Other Ranked Lawyer” designation were read from the guide’s own published Illinois table and its key, not from the firm. Note for future work: the live Chambers table and the archived edition we read differ as to which firms appear in Band 1, so the edition should be re-checked before that comparison is restated. Best Lawyers and Best Law Firms recognitions, attorney counts, the 2010 tenure start and the unactivated profile status were verified at those programs. Review figures come from an aggregator’s machine-readable structured data and the quoted reviews are reproduced verbatim from it. The Illinois AAML chapter roster was unreachable from this environment, so the absence of a fellowship is reported as unverified rather than as a confirmed negative. Discipline was not verified: authenticated requests to the ARDC returned a failure notice, and a statewide control query for the surname Smith returned zero results, so no attorney here has been checked against the primary register. 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.