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Cooney & Conway: The Firm Whose Asbestos Practice Began When a Judge Refused to Certify Its Class

Sometime in the 1970s, Kevin Conway filed a class action seeking $50 million on behalf of factory workers with mesothelioma — an extraordinary number for the period. The court declined to certify the class. What the firm did next is the whole story: it started bringing the cases one at a time, and it has been bringing them one at a time ever since. By the account of a defense-side study of the Cook County docket, Cooney & Conway came to file the overwhelming majority of asbestos cases in Northern Illinois. A refusal to certify is the kind of setback most firms treat as the end of a theory. Here it produced a practice that has outlasted most of the companies it sued.

At a Glance

FIRM	Cooney & Conway LLP
FOUNDED	1958, as the predecessor firm Cooney & Stenn; renamed Cooney & Conway when Kevin J. Conway became partner
OFFICE	191 North Wacker Drive, Suite 1500, Chicago, IL 60606 — a single office. The firm moved here from 120 North LaSalle Street on February 23, 2026; older directory listings still show the LaSalle address
PRACTICE	Plaintiff-side, concentrated in asbestos and mesothelioma; also silicosis, toxic exposure, sexual abuse, medical malpractice, mass torts, construction and transportation injury
ASBESTOS WORK SINCE	1973, beginning with two mesothelioma cases involving workers at the Amoco refinery in Whiting, Indiana (per the firm)
SIZE	Approximately 25 practicing attorneys; the firm’s own About page says 24 and its directory lists 27, three of whom are memorial entries for deceased attorneys
MANAGEMENT	Co-managing partners Charles A. Porretta and Daniel T. Ryan
AGGREGATE CLAIM	“$7 billion recovered” (per the firm; no methodology disclosed and not independently auditable)

Origin and Background

The firm dates itself to 1958 and began as Cooney & Stenn. Kevin J. Conway worked there as a law clerk while still a law student, was hired as an attorney after graduating, and the name changed when he made partner — an account the Chicago Bar Association published in its own profile of the family. He was admitted in Illinois in 1976 and has practiced forty-nine years. The Stenn half of the original name still appears in the firm’s giving: it funds an endowed chair in medicine at Northwestern established in honor of Marcia Stenn. One correction worth making, because it circulates: an obituary describes John D. Cooney, born in 1954, as a founding partner. He cannot have founded a firm established in 1958, and Awesome Attorneys does not repeat it.

What Makes the Firm Structurally Different

It is not a general injury practice with an asbestos department; it is an asbestos practice with other work attached. The mechanism is volume plus continuity in a single disease area over five decades, and the clearest outside evidence of it is adversarial. A 2013 study of the Cook County asbestos docket published by the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform — written by a defense lawyer, and critical of the firm — nonetheless documents the scale: Cooney & Conway filing volume rising from 52 cases in 2001 to 219 in 2004, an average of 119 mesothelioma claims a year between 2009 and 2012, and 496 mesothelioma complaints over that four-year span. The second structural element is the firm’s position inside the asbestos bankruptcy system rather than merely in front of it: the firm states John D. Cooney was appointed by United States Trustees in the Owens Corning, USG, Halliburton, Armstrong World Industries, Honeywell and General Motors reorganizations, and describes him as one of the architects of the resulting trusts. Awesome Attorneys could not retrieve the appointment orders and reports that as the firm’s account.

Practice Areas

Mesothelioma and asbestos disease. Silicosis. Toxic exposure, including herbicide litigation. Sexual abuse. Medical malpractice. Mass torts and class actions. Construction accidents. Trucking, auto, rideshare, aviation and rail. Brain and burn injury. Nursing home abuse. Premises liability. Police misconduct. Wrongful death.

Track Record

Matter	Result	Verification
Schoepke v. E.I. DuPont de Nemours and Company — the first asbestos case brought over shotgun shell wadding, Delaware Superior Court, New Castle County	$9 million jury verdict, upheld post-trial; fault allocated 60 percent to DuPont and 40 percent to Remington	Independently reported (WGLT, Legal Newsline); David O. Barrett and Devitt Cooney as counsel with Delaware local counsel
Jackson v. A.W. Chesterton Co. et al. — take-home asbestos exposure from a father’s work at a Decatur tire plant	$30 million verdict, Cook County, December 22, 2023 ($5.25M economic, $11.14M wrongful death, $13.6M survival)	Independently reported; co-counseled with a Texas firm, whose office issued the announcement
Shell Oil refinery worker — asbestos disease	$35.1 million	Per the firm; no court, case name or year published
Insulator — asbestos disease	$12.3 million	Per the firm; no court, case name or year published
Sexual abuse matters, aggregate	“$100+ million recovered”	Per the firm; no case names

Three claims on the firm’s own materials did not survive checking and are therefore not presented as results. The firm describes an “$875 million settlement against Pfizer, Inc.”; public reporting on the Pfizer and Quigley asbestos resolution gives materially different figures — $430 million in 2004 and $264.9 million in cash plus reorganized stock in 2011 — and Awesome Attorneys found no source supporting $875 million. Kevin Conway’s biography describes settling 177 asbestos cases during trial for more than $200 million and calls it the largest in Illinois history at the time; no independent coverage of that settlement was located, and no year, court or case name is given. The “$7 billion recovered” aggregate is not auditable. Roughly seventeen further results appear on the firm’s site as bare dollar figures with no case name, court or date, and are not repeated here. Past results do not guarantee or predict a similar outcome in any future case.

Client Voice

The review record is small, and it is mixed rather than uniform. An aggregator reporting the firm’s Google listing shows 4.8 across thirty-two reviews. On a smaller platform carrying six reviews at an average of 4.2, a reviewer identified as Heather Deane wrote that the firm was “handling my dad’s asbestos case and they’ve gotten us the most money possible,” and a reviewer identified as Paul Kenny named an individual attorney as “a man to be trusted completely.” The same six-review set contains a four-star review from a reviewer identified as Melissa — “a great practice but they are a little slow getting back to you on emails and phone calls” — and a one-star review from a reviewer identified as Cheryl C. calling the firm “the worst people to deal with.” Awesome Attorneys quotes the negative reviews alongside the positive ones because quoting only the five-star entries from a set that contains a one-star entry is the thing that makes a testimonial section untrustworthy. The Better Business Bureau lists the firm as A-rated but not accredited, with no customer reviews; Kevin Conway’s Avvo profile has no client reviews. Yelp, Martindale-Hubbell and Lawyers.com all blocked retrieval, so Awesome Attorneys cannot say what those platforms hold. Readers should also know that the firm is a listed sponsor of a prominent mesothelioma information website that carries a profile of it; that profile is advertising, not third-party validation.

Beyond the Courtroom

Loyola University Chicago School of Law holds the Cooney & Conway Chair in Advocacy, whose inaugural holder, Professor Barry Sullivan, was appointed in 2009 — independently confirmed by the university. The firm also funds a Loyola scholarship, an endowed chair in medicine at Northwestern in honor of Marcia Stenn, and mesothelioma research at the University of Chicago, where John D. Cooney Sr. served on the medical center’s board of trustees and to which his family directed memorial gifts. Three of the firm’s lawyers have led the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association: Kevin J. Conway, John D. Cooney, and Kathy Byrne, who in 2023 became only the second woman to hold that office. Byrne, the only child of Jane Byrne, Chicago’s first female mayor, spent her entire thirty-five-year career at this firm and died in August 2024. John D. Cooney died in February 2023. Both remain listed in the firm’s online directory, as does James E. Ocasek, who died in 2023; anyone reading that roster should not take it as a current staff list.

Recognition

Illinois Rule of Professional Conduct 7.4(b) provides that the Supreme Court of Illinois does not recognize certifications of specialties in the practice of law, and 7.4(c) restricts the words “certified,” “specialist” and “expert.” Awesome Attorneys does not use specialist language for Illinois firms.

Peer-balloted or invitation-only: Best Lawyers in America recognizes the firm in Mass Tort Litigation and Class Actions for plaintiffs, Personal Injury Litigation for plaintiffs, and Product Liability Litigation for plaintiffs, and lists it as top-listed in Chicago in the first of those categories, with eight individual lawyers listed; the firm states Kevin J. Conway holds fellowships in the American College of Trial Lawyers and the International Society of Barristers, both invitation-only, and received the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association’s Leonard M. Ring Lifetime Achievement Award; the Women’s Bar Association of Illinois gave Kathy Byrne a leadership award in 2016; and three ITLA presidencies are offices actually held rather than honors received. Commercial or fee-based, kept separate: Super Lawyers, the Leading Lawyers Network, and a National Trial Lawyers “Top 100” placement. Awesome Attorneys found no Chambers ranking for this firm and makes no claim of one.

Illinois Legal Backdrop

An Illinois action for damages for personal injury must generally be commenced within two years after the cause of action accrued, under 735 ILCS 5/13-202. Under 735 ILCS 5/2-1116, a plaintiff is barred from recovering if the trier of fact finds the plaintiff’s contributory fault is more than 50 percent, and damages otherwise reduce in proportion to that fault. Where the injured person was a minor, 735 ILCS 5/13-211 permits two years after that person turns 18. Asbestos disease sits awkwardly against a two-year clock, because mesothelioma commonly appears decades after the exposure that caused it; Illinois law addresses this through discovery-based accrual rules that are litigated case by case and are not reducible to a single date. A further practical layer is that many of the companies responsible for historical asbestos exposure no longer exist as solvent defendants, and compensation often runs through bankruptcy trusts with their own claim procedures and deadlines rather than through a conventional lawsuit. None of this is legal advice, and asbestos timing questions in particular should go to a licensed Illinois lawyer rather than be estimated from a statute.

Awesome Attorneys Assessment

Five decades in one disease, a seat inside the bankruptcy-trust machinery that pays many of these claims, and a first-of-its-kind verdict in 2025 over a product nobody had previously litigated as an asbestos source — that is a genuinely deep and genuinely narrow practice, and for a mesothelioma claim the depth is the point. The trade-offs are real and a prospective client should hear them. The narrowness cuts both ways: this is not the obvious firm for a car collision or a routine premises claim, and outside asbestos the only quantified claim on its site is an unsourced aggregate. The firm’s published record needs care, too — a Pfizer settlement figure that public reporting does not support, a “largest in Illinois history” settlement with no case name or year, an unauditable $7 billion total, and a directory that still lists three deceased attorneys. And there is one substantive published criticism: the 2013 Cook County docket study, written by a defense attorney for a tort-reform organization, faulted the firm for naming the same core group of fifteen defendants in 99 percent of the 496 mesothelioma complaints it filed between 2009 and 2012, calling it implausible that so many consecutive plaintiffs had identical exposure histories. That is advocacy from the opposing side of the docket, not a court finding, and no sanction or disciplinary action followed it; it is also worth noting that when a gasket manufacturer brought racketeering suits against asbestos firms over claim-filing practices, this firm was not among those it sued. For a mesothelioma or asbestos-disease claim in Illinois, the combination of volume, continuity and trust-system fluency here is hard to match. For anything else, the firm’s own record gives a client much less to go on.

Methodology and Sourcing

Researched from the firm’s own site, including its About, attorney directory, community-involvement and asbestos results pages, and its published notice of the February 23, 2026 office move, which was confirmed against the firm’s current contact page and a Better Business Bureau record. The Cooney & Stenn lineage and the 1970s class-action origin of the asbestos practice come from the Chicago Bar Association’s published profile of the Conway family. Filing volumes and the defendant-naming criticism come from A Docket on the Brink: Asbestos Litigation in Cook County, published by the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform in December 2013 and authored by defense counsel; it is cited here as a defense-side source and labeled as such. The Schoepke verdict was checked against WGLT and Legal Newsline reporting and a defense-side case tracker, which disagree on the verdict year; the year is therefore given as 2025 with that conflict noted. The Jackson verdict was checked against the co-counsel firm’s announcement and independent asbestos trade coverage. The Pfizer figure was checked against contemporaneous chemical-industry and legal reporting on the Quigley reorganization. Deaths of John D. Cooney and Kathy Byrne were confirmed against Illinois State Bar Association and Chicago Sun-Times reporting; the Loyola chair against Loyola University Chicago School of Law. Illinois limitations, comparative fault and minority-tolling provisions were verified against the Illinois General Assembly’s published text of 735 ILCS 5/13-202, 5/2-1116 and 5/13-211. The ARDC lawyer-search form could not be queried directly during this research; no discipline was found for any named attorney in any accessible source, and Awesome Attorneys states that limit rather than reporting a clean record it could not confirm at the primary source. Yelp, Martindale-Hubbell and Lawyers.com blocked retrieval.

Publisher Disclosure and Independence Notice

Awesome Attorneys is an independent legal directory and editorial publication. This profile was not paid for, commissioned, or reviewed by Cooney & Conway LLP prior to publication. Awesome Attorneys may in the future offer sponsored placement products to attorneys and firms, including this one, but sponsorship has no bearing on the editorial content, inclusion, or findings of this profile. Facts in this profile are current only as of the research date and may change.