Keating Law Offices: A Citation Dismissed, a Bill Drafted, and a Law Named for the Cyclist

Attorney advertising. This profile was not paid for, commissioned, or reviewed by the firm before publication. Awesome Attorneys is not a lawyer referral service and does not endorse, recommend, or warrant any firm. Results described below are attributed to their published source; past results do not guarantee or predict the outcome of any future case. Nothing here is legal advice.

One thing to rule out at the top. This firm markets heavily under the banner “Illinois Bicycle Lawyers,” and there are two national bicycle-law affiliate networks that license their brands to local firms. Keating Law Offices belongs to neither. “Illinois Bicycle Lawyers” is this firm’s own name for itself. The national Bike Law network’s Illinois member is a different, competing Chicago firm.

At a Glance

Firm	Keating Law Offices, P.C. (also publishing as Illinois Bicycle Lawyers, a name of its own)
Founded	2008, by Michael S. Keating — corroborated independently. The corporate shell dates to December 2006.
Offices	20 S. Clark Street, Suite 2301, Chicago, IL 60603 (main), and 825 N. Milwaukee Avenue, Suite 1, Chicago, IL 60642 (West Town). Both inside city limits; no suburban or out-of-state offices.
Focus	Bicycle, pedestrian and e-scooter injury — vulnerable road users — plus car and semi-truck collisions, nursing home negligence, construction negligence, institutional sexual abuse, product liability
Side of the docket	Plaintiff only
Size	Three attorneys. The firm does not claim to be larger.
Distinctive edge	Drafted the legislation that became Public Act 99-0785, “Dennis’ Law” — independently confirmed
Signature result	$5,300,000, semi-truck collision. Firm-reported; see the note on verifiability in Section IV.
Fee model	Contingency (per the firm)
Disciplinary record	No discipline located for two of three attorneys; the third was not checked. See Section VIII.

I. The Citation a Judge Threw Out

On May 18, 2015, Dennis E. Jurs — sixty-eight years old, a Vietnam veteran, an experienced cyclist — was struck and killed in Hampshire, Illinois. The driver was cited for failure to yield.

A judge dismissed the citation. The reasoning was that under the Illinois Vehicle Code, a bicycle is not a “vehicle,” and so the driver had nothing to yield to.

Michael S. Keating represented Jurs’s daughters in the civil case, with co-counsel F. John Steffen. He also drafted the corrective legislation and worked with legislators and lobbyists on the bill’s final language. State Representative Anna Moeller of Elgin sponsored it. House Bill 5912 passed 164–1, was signed by Governor Bruce Rauner in August 2016, and took effect on January 1, 2017 as Public Act 99-0785. Everyone in Illinois cycling calls it Dennis’ Law.

We did not take this from the firm. A suburban daily newspaper reported in July 2026 that Keating “represented his daughters in the case,” “drafted legislation to correct this understanding, and then crafted the bill’s final language (HB5912) with legislators and lobbyists.” The bill number, the 164–1 vote and the substance were separately confirmed through a Chicago public-television news report. And the firm credits its co-counsel by name rather than claiming the case alone — which, across the Chicago firms this publication has verified, is not the default.

That is a specific, checkable, unusual credential: a named client, a named date, a named place, a named legislator, a bill number, and a Public Act.

II. The Mechanism: A Three-Lawyer Firm Built Around One Kind of Collision

The structural fact about this firm is that it is small on purpose and deep in one place. Three lawyers. No volume intake operation. What it has instead is eighteen years of a single, unglamorous niche: the crash where the person who was hit had no metal around them.

That niche is a real body of knowledge rather than a marketing angle. It means knowing how a dooring case differs from a right-hook case; how Illinois’s bicycle statutes interact with municipal ordinance; that an e-scooter rider occupies a legal position the Vehicle Code was not drafted for; and — because of Dennis’ Law — exactly what the Code used to say and why it had to change.

The independent record supports the specialization without the firm having to assert it. A Chicago business weekly profiled the city’s cyclist-lawyer niche and identified Keating as chairing the American Association for Justice’s bicycle litigation committee. The Chicago Sun-Times ran front-page coverage of the firm’s e-scooter client representation in October 2024. The Illinois Trial Lawyers Association seats him on its Board of Managers and as co-chair of its Transportation Committee — both verified on ITLA’s own current roster, and worth noting that one of his two Transportation co-chairs is a name partner at another firm this publication profiled in the same session.

Keating’s route into this work also explains it. Before founding the firm he was Assistant Counsel to the Illinois House of Representatives in the 93rd General Assembly and a staff attorney to its State Government Administration and Judiciary committees. He had written statutes before he ever needed to fix one. M. Catelyn Viggiano, now a partner, similarly spent two years with the Illinois House before law school. Christopher C. Cortese, the third partner, carries the firm’s broader injury docket.

III. Practice Areas

• Bicycle crashes — the core practice
• Pedestrian injury
• E-scooter and vulnerable-road-user claims
• Car and semi-truck collisions
• Nursing home negligence
• Construction negligence
• Institutional sexual abuse
• Product liability
• Medical malpractice and premises liability

IV. Track Record

Past results do not guarantee or predict the outcome of any future case. This publication supplies that disclaimer because the firm’s own case-results page does not — see below.

The firm publishes roughly 150 results from $15,000 to $5.3 million. The largest:

$5,300,000	Semi-truck collision, vehicle struck shortly before trial. Firm-reported.
$4,250,000	Wrongful death — pedestrian killed walking back from lunch. Firm-reported.
$2,500,000	Fatal motor vehicle collision near the Fox River. Firm-reported.
$1,320,000	Bicyclist hit-and-run fatality; recovery assembled across multiple policies. Firm-reported.
$1,250,000	Bicyclist killed in a motor vehicle collision. Firm-reported.
$1,000,000 (six separate)	Bicyclist, shuttle-bus and nursing-home matters, several stated as full policy limits. Firm-reported.

We searched for reduced, remitted, vacated or reversed results and found none — and we want to be precise about why that is a weaker finding than it sounds. Almost every figure above is a settlement, many expressly confidential and several described as policy-limits tenders. Settlements are not subject to remittitur or appeal, and confidential ones cannot be checked against any public record at all. No case is identified by name anywhere on the results page. So the correct characterization is not “clean” — it is not contradicted and not verifiable. These figures should be read as firm-reported and nothing more.

The firm’s aggregate claim is that it has recovered “tens of millions of dollars.” Roughly 150 published results are broadly consistent with that; there is no arithmetic contradiction and no inflated lifetime total to knock down.

Two superlatives we will not carry. The firm’s bicycle page states that “no one handles more Illinois bike accident court cases” and that it handles more than “any other firm in Illinois.” That is a factual comparative about relative case volume, offered with no supporting data, and no public dataset exists by which it could be substantiated. Separately, the firm’s blog describes it as “the most prominent Illinois firm” in this area and “one of the first firms in the nation” — against which a Chicago business weekly identified a different Chicago lawyer as having represented cyclists since 2006, two years earlier, and called him one of the city’s first in the niche. We also decline two unsourced single-result claims: that a $550,000 recovery was “one of the largest in Illinois history” for a non-catastrophic bicycle injury, and that a $1,000,000 nursing-home settlement was the “second-highest” in Chicago for the client’s age. Neither cites a verdict reporter.

On disclaimers, the firm is inconsistent in an odd direction. Its bicycle-accidents page does carry proper language — “while past case results are no guarantee of future case outcomes” — so the firm plainly knows the rule. The dedicated case-results page listing 150 figures up to $5.3 million carries no disclaimer anywhere: not in the header, not in a sidebar, not in the footer. We checked twice.

V. Client Voice

Aggregate 4.5 across 111 reviews — 66 on Google and 45 on Facebook, read through a third-party aggregator. BBB: A+, not accredited. On Avvo, Keating holds a 10.0 algorithmic rating on two client reviews and eight peer endorsements; Cortese holds 8.0 on two. Employee reviews are 5.0 across four, which is too small a sample to mean anything and we treat it as such. Yelp was unreachable.

• Kendall Monahan (Facebook): “Mike and his team really came through for me. I was hit by a car that ran a stop sign while on my bike.”
• Richard (Avvo, June 25, 2019): “Mike truly cares about his clients. He is intelligent and honest and kept me in the loop for every step.”

We could not retrieve a negative review, and that is a limitation rather than a finding. A 4.5 average across 111 reviews mathematically requires sub-five-star ratings to exist. The aggregator surfaces only positive reviews and Yelp was not reachable. No negative pattern was found; no claim is made that none exists.

One note on the firm’s own testimonials page: it attributes quotes by initials only — “K.M., Bicycle Commuter” — alongside a statement that all testimonials are from real former clients in their own words. We have no reason to doubt that. It is simply not independently verifiable, and it carries no testimonial disclaimer.

VI. Beyond the Courtroom

This is the strongest independently corroborated thing about the firm after the legislation, because the organizations themselves say it rather than the firm.

• Active Transportation Alliance — ATA’s own website names the firm as presenting sponsor of its Winter Bike Challenge and thanks it for sponsoring “many other major Active Trans events over the years.” That is third-party confirmation of a multi-year relationship, not a logo on a firm page.
• Chicago Bike PAC — a Chicago streets-and-transportation news outlet listed the firm among the named sponsors of the PAC’s September 2026 Campaign Trail Party, alongside a component manufacturer, a scooter-share operator and an engineering firm.
• Firm-stated and plausible, though not separately confirmed: ATA’s Bike to Work Challenge and Bike the Drive, a Bike Lane Uprising day of service, Ride Illinois’s Grand Illinois Trail & Parks Tour, the Chicago Cyclocross Cup, the Dennis Jurs Memorial Race, the Intelligentsia Cup, the Glencoe Grand Prix and the Chicago Family Bike Fest.

And the legislative work in Section I is community advocacy of a materially higher order than sponsorship. A firm that gets a statute changed has done something for every cyclist in the state, including the ones who will never hire it.

VII. Credentials and Recognition

Verified on the conferring organization’s own roster:

• Illinois Trial Lawyers Association, Board of Managers, 2026–27 — Michael Shay Keating, confirmed on ITLA’s own list.
• ITLA Transportation Committee, Co-Chair, 2026–27 — confirmed on ITLA’s own list. This is a shared seat with two other lawyers, and we say so.

A correction the firm should make. Keating’s bio and awards page describe him as “Chair of the Legislative Committee for ITLA.” ITLA’s current committee roster shows him as Transportation co-chair and lists no Legislative Committee at all. The Board of Managers seat is genuine and current; the Legislative Committee title appears to be historical and is presented as present-tense. Similarly, his bio says he “currently serves as the chair of the Bicycle Litigation Group” for the American Association for Justice. That was documented in 2013 and again by a business weekly in 2015. Its currency in 2026 could not be verified, and it should be read as a historical credential.

What the firm does not claim, which is worth noting: no Best Lawyers listing and no Martindale AV rating appear anywhere on its site, and none exists. A firm that leaves a blank space where most firms manufacture a badge has earned a small amount of credit.

Peer-survey based, credible but commercially operated: Leading Lawyers — Keating as a “Leading Lawyer” (2019) and Viggiano as an “Emerging Lawyer.” Firm-sourced only: ITLA’s William J. Harte Amicus Volunteer Award to Viggiano.

Paid, fee-based or algorithmic, listed separately: Super Lawyers “Rising Star” 2011–2015 for Keating — a tier capped by years in practice, whose most recent selection is now eleven years old with no elevation to the main list claimed; The National Trial Lawyers “Top 100” and “Top 40 Under 40,” which are membership-fee organizations; Avvo’s 10.0, which is algorithmic and rests on two client reviews; and an Expertise.com directory listing. The firm’s awards page mixes these with the verified ITLA credentials and omits years for most entries.

VIII. What We Checked, and What We Could Not

We searched for Illinois ARDC discipline, sanctions and malpractice suits against the firm and its attorneys. Nothing was found. Avvo’s mirror of state bar data reports “no misconduct found” and good standing for Michael Shay Keating (Illinois 2002) and Christopher Coyne Cortese (Illinois 2012).

The limit, plainly: the ARDC’s own lookup returns only an empty search form to a direct request, and we could not query the primary database on the research date. M. Catelyn Viggiano was not checked at all — no secondary disciplinary profile for her was located — and this profile asserts nothing about her record.

A live self-contradiction worth flagging, because it puts the wrong address into every directory. The firm’s Illinois Bicycle Lawyers blog is actively maintained — the most recent post is dated September 14, 2026 — yet it still publishes the firm’s former address at 111 West Washington Street, Suite 1631, and a four-attorney roster including Jack Dassow, who has since moved to another Illinois firm. This is not a stale blog; the content is current. It is a stale identity layer on a live property, and it has seeded the old address into the firm’s BBB and Avvo listings. The correct address is 20 S. Clark Street, Suite 2301. Cortese’s Avvo profile separately lists him at an entirely different firm.

Identity notes. A Seattle firm shares the Keating name and does municipal, employment and civil-rights defense work — the highest-risk lookalike here precisely because it is on the other side. A separate Illinois solo practitioner named Thomas M. Keating is a different person. Two national bicycle-law brand networks exist and this firm belongs to neither; one of them licenses to a direct Chicago competitor. And two former Keating attorneys, Jack Dassow and Thomas Reuland, still appear in stale third-party profiles and in an older client review.

IX. The Illinois Legal Backdrop, in Plain English

General information, not legal advice. Statutes below were verified as described in Methodology; deadlines turn on facts a lawyer has to look at.

Illinois does not recognize legal specialists. Illinois Rule of Professional Conduct 7.4(b) states that “The Supreme Court of Illinois does not recognize certifications of specialties in the practice of law, nor does it recognize certifications of expertise in any phase of the practice of law by any agency, governmental or private, or by any group, organization or association.” Rule 7.4(c) bars a lawyer from using “certified,” “specialist” or “expert” to describe their qualifications, except to identify an actual certificate or award — and then only with a disclaimer stating that the Supreme Court of Illinois does not recognize specialty certifications and that the credential is not a requirement to practice law in Illinois. Registered patent attorneys are the single carve-out. This matters for a firm defined by a niche: a lawyer may truthfully describe what kind of cases he handles, but “the bicycle specialist” is language Illinois does not permit, and nobody here is described that way anywhere in this profile.

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

Fifty-one percent ends the case — and this is the central battleground in a bicycle 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. In practice, nearly every defense in a cyclist or pedestrian case is an argument about the plaintiff’s own conduct: the light, the lane, the helmet, the dark clothing. Comparative fault is where these cases are won and lost.

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 — half the ordinary deadline. A crash caused by a road defect, a badly designed bike lane or a municipal vehicle can land here, and a cyclist who waits eighteen months has waited too long.

The CTA is one year, and there is no longer a notice requirement. 70 ILCS 3605/41 gives one year from accrual to sue the Chicago Transit Authority — relevant in a city where a bus and a bike share the same lane. The six-month written notice requirement that older articles still describe was repealed effective June 1, 2009 by P.A. 96-12. It is not current law.

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.

Medical negligence runs on its own clock. Under 735 ILCS 5/13-212: two years from discovery, four-year repose; for a minor, eight years from the act but never past the twenty-second birthday.

X. The Awesome Attorneys Assessment

Almost every firm says it fights for its clients. This one changed a statute. When a judge held that a bicycle was not a vehicle and threw out the citation against the driver who killed Dennis Jurs, Keating did not just litigate the civil case — he wrote the bill, worked the language with legislators, and it passed 164–1 and became Public Act 99-0785. That is corroborated by an independent newspaper, not just claimed, and the firm credits its co-counsel rather than taking sole billing. Around it sits a genuinely specialized three-lawyer practice with a verified ITLA board seat and committee co-chairmanship, sponsorships confirmed by the organizations receiving them, coverage in the Sun-Times and on public television, and — notably — no fabricated Best Lawyers badge where one could easily have been invented.

The trade-offs are two, and the first is the honest limit of any three-lawyer firm. Three attorneys carrying nursing home, construction, product liability, institutional abuse and medical malpractice alongside the bicycle work is real breadth on a thin bench. A catastrophic case that needs six lawyers and a war room is not what this structure is for, and a client with one should say so and ask directly how the firm would staff it. The second is marketing discipline. “No one handles more Illinois bike accident court cases” is a factual comparative with nothing behind it; “most prominent” and “premiere” are contested by the existence of an earlier-established competitor in the same city; two single-result superlatives cite no verdict reporter; an ITLA committee title on the bio does not match ITLA’s own roster; an AAJ chairmanship documented in 2013 is written in the present tense; the case-results page has no disclaimer even though another page on the same site does; and the firm’s own live blog has been publishing the wrong address and a departed attorney for long enough to corrupt its directory listings. None of that touches a case outcome. All of it is a firm that writes better statutes than website copy.

This firm is right for the cyclist, pedestrian or scooter rider hurt in Chicago — the client it has organized eighteen years around, where knowing the Vehicle Code’s treatment of bicycles well enough to have rewritten it is a genuine and unusual advantage, and where comparative fault will decide the case. It is a weaker fit for a catastrophic multi-defendant matter needing depth of bench, and a poor fit for anyone who wants the firm’s claims about itself to hold up as well as its claims about the law — ask for the figures behind the volume claim, and read the results as firm-reported until they are.

Methodology & Sourcing

Research conducted September 15, 2026. Entity status, addresses, roster, practice areas and all advertised figures were read directly from the firm’s own live pages, including both offices’ contact listings, the case-results page, the bicycle-accidents page, the testimonials page and each attorney bio; the firm’s separately hosted Illinois Bicycle Lawyers blog was fetched independently and its contradictory address and roster are reported rather than resolved. Affiliate status was tested by checking the national Bike Law network’s own announcement of its Illinois member, which names a different Chicago firm. The Dennis Jurs account — the decedent’s identity and age, the May 18, 2015 crash in Hampshire, the dismissal of the citation, Keating’s civil representation and drafting role, co-counsel’s name, Representative Moeller’s sponsorship and the bill’s final language — rests on a suburban daily newspaper’s July 2026 report, with House Bill 5912’s substance and 164–1 vote confirmed through a Chicago public-television news report. The text of Public Act 99-0785 itself could not be read: the Illinois General Assembly’s site was unreachable on the research date. The act number, effective date and substance are corroborated by two independent outlets. ITLA Board of Managers membership and Transportation Committee co-chairmanship were verified on ITLA’s own current rosters, and the Legislative Committee claim was checked against the same roster and found unsupported. The AAJ chairmanship was traced to 2013 and 2015 sources and is reported as historical. Best Lawyers was searched and no listing exists; the firm makes no such claim. Community sponsorships were confirmed on the Active Transportation Alliance’s own website and through an independent Chicago transportation news outlet. Review figures come from a third-party aggregator and from Avvo, BBB and Glassdoor directly; Yelp was unreachable and no rating is asserted, 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 three attorneys; the ARDC primary database could not be queried on the research date and one attorney was 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, 70 ILCS 3605/41, 740 ILCS 180/1–2). Claims we could not verify are marked as unverified rather than softened or omitted.

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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.