Taxman, Pollock & Bekkerman: A $13.8 Million Verdict That Survived Appeal, and a Headline That Hasn’t

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	Taxman, Pollock & Bekkerman, LLC (still appears in filings and directories as “Taxman, Pollock, Murray & Bekkerman” — see Section VI)
Founded	LLC formed August 1, 2016 (single-sourced; the firm’s About page gives no founding year and names no founders)
Principal office	225 W. Wacker Drive, Suite 1650, Chicago, IL 60606
Second office	1001 Warrenville Road, Suite 500, Lisle, IL 60532
Focus	Construction injury; trucking and motor vehicle; medical malpractice; product liability; sexual abuse; claimant-side workers’ compensation
Side of the docket	Plaintiff and claimant only
Size	Approximately 22 attorneys
Best-documented result	$13.8M wrongful death verdict, affirmed in full — FNCB Bank & Trust v. MK Deliveries, 2026 IL App (1st) 242281, August 31, 2026
Bar standing	Gerald J. Bekkerman, Parliamentarian, Illinois Trial Lawyers Association, 2026–27; Bradley N. Pollock, ITLA Board of Managers
Fee model	Contingency (per the firm)
Disciplinary record	No public discipline on file with the Illinois ARDC for any attorney checked

I. A Name Partner Nine Years Out of Law School

Gerald J. Bekkerman was admitted to the Illinois bar on November 8, 2007. He ran a solo practice for six years, grew it to six attorneys, and then co-founded a three-name Chicago personal injury partnership roughly nine years into practice. That is young for a name on a Chicago plaintiff’s door, and it is the most telling fact about how this firm came together: it was assembled, not inherited.

His partners came the long way. Marc A. Taxman was admitted November 10, 1988 (Chicago-Kent); Bradley N. Pollock on November 9, 1995 (Loyola). In June 2012 — four years before this firm existed — Taxman personally tried the ConAgra grain-bin explosion case in federal court in southern Illinois, alongside Robert Clifford, and CBS Chicago named him in its contemporaneous report on the $180 million verdict. That case is the origin of the “$67M” figure on the firm’s results page, and Section VI explains what happened to it.

A gap worth noting, since we looked for the answer: the firm’s About page gives no founding year, no founder names and no origin narrative — only that it was “proudly founded by very successful and established lawyers.” For a firm of twenty-two attorneys, that is unusual reticence.

II. The Mechanism: One Verdict That Went All the Way Through

Plenty of firms advertise verdicts. Comparatively few can point to one a defendant fought to the appellate court and lost.

On August 31, 2026 the Illinois Appellate Court, First District, affirmed in full a $13.8 million wrongful death verdict in FNCB Bank & Trust v. MK Deliveries, Inc., 2026 IL App (1st) 242281, on appeal from Cook County No. 20-L-8609. The decedent was a thirty-three-year-old Berwyn police officer killed as a passenger in a collision with a box truck. The jury apportioned fault 99% to the trucking defendant and 1% to the driver.

The detail that makes the case instructive rather than merely large: the jury awarded $0 for pain and suffering. The entire $13.8 million went to the officer’s two minor children — for loss of society, grief, and lost benefits. That is the Illinois Wrongful Death Act working exactly as written, and it is a useful corrective to the common assumption that a death case is valued by what the decedent suffered. It is valued by what the survivors lost. Counsel of record were James P. Lynch, Gerald J. Bekkerman, Grant A. Bosnich and Jackson D. Wingert.

That is a real, checkable, appellate-tested result, and it is the strongest thing on this page. Note the arithmetic on the other side, though: this is a twenty-two-lawyer firm whose results page lists a hundred outcomes, and this is one of two we could independently confirm.

III. Practice Areas

• Construction and jobsite accidents — the clear core; it dominates the results page
• Trucking, car, motorcycle and pedestrian collisions
• Medical malpractice and nursing home negligence
• Product liability, electrical and machinery injury
• Premises liability and wrongful death
• Sexual abuse — roughly ten dedicated practice pages covering clergy, medical, athletic, scouting, campus, hazing and detention settings
• Workers’ compensation, claimant side

Two qualifications to the catastrophic-injury framing. The firm runs a substantial claimant-side workers’ compensation practice — a full benefits-and-appeals section, and a Super Lawyers practice category — which is a volume practice distinct from the marketing, and which is where its most pointed negative review comes from. And the sexual-abuse vertical is large and growing, which is a different kind of litigation again.

IV. Track Record

Past results do not guarantee or predict the outcome of any future case. Sources are named; figures we could not confirm outside the firm’s own materials or its paid press releases are marked.

$13,800,000 — affirmed on appeal	FNCB Bank & Trust v. MK Deliveries, Inc., 2026 IL App (1st) 242281 (August 31, 2026), Cook County No. 20-L-8609, Hon. Brendan A. O’Brien. Wrongful death of a Berwyn police officer; fault 99%/1%; $0 pain and suffering; entire award to two minor children. Counsel: Lynch, Bekkerman, Bosnich, Wingert. Note: one firm biography renders this as “$16,159,910.95,” presumably judgment plus interest and costs, without saying so.
$67,000,000 — but see Section VI	The ConAgra grain bin explosion, tried by Marc Taxman in 2012, four years before this firm existed. The Seventh Circuit reversed ConAgra’s liability entirely and reversed the punitive damages. Read Section VI before relying on this figure.
Appellate outcome worth reporting accurately	In Allumi v. Oswego Community Unit School District 308, 2026 IL App (3d) 250108 (April 20, 2026), the defendants asked the court to sanction the firm’s client for a frivolous appeal. The court refused, expressly finding the appeal was not frivolous, and ruled affirmed in part, reversed in part and remanded — a partial win. This is not a sanction against the firm and should not be described as one.

The $5.85 million concrete-burns verdict: we could not corroborate it. A September 5, 2025 item reported a $9 million Cook County compensatory award against Ozinga Ready Mix Concrete, reduced to $5.85 million after a 35% comparative-fault finding, for a man chemically burned by wet cement, with a pre-trial offer of $50,000 and deliberation under two hours. Every source we found for it is the same paid press release, distributed by a newswire and syndicated verbatim to release-carrier sites. We found no verdict reporter, no docket entry, no bylined journalism. It does not appear on the firm’s own results page. And both attorneys credited with it have since left the firm — Sean Murray now claims it on his own firm’s website. It may well be accurate. It is not verified.

The aggregate claim does not reconcile with the firm’s own casebook. The homepage and page titles claim “Over $1 Billion Recovered.” We totalled every entry on the firm’s results page — exactly 100 results, $400,000 to $67,000,000 — and the sum is approximately $370.5 million. The firm’s own itemised record supports about 37% of its headline. A third figure, “over $750 million,” appears in a directory listing. None of the hundred entries carries a case name, court, docket number or year, so ninety-eight of them cannot be checked at all.

V. Client Voice

The firm aggregates 4.8 across roughly 346 reviews, the large majority on Google. Read the negatives anyway, because one of them is about the reviews themselves.

“Do not!!! absolutely donot hire this firm for a workers comp claim, they have 1 attorney for wc and he is very unproductive, doesnt care and he will leave you hanging with zero results…”
— Ringo A., Birdeye, approximately 2024

“I put my review out there 2 yrs ago right after this happened so I could have some closure but was kind of enough to remove it at their request. After thinking about this, I am the one who continues to suffer…My attorney seemed kind in the beginning…but as time went on, it changed. I was treated disrespectfully, and I felt that my settlement was unjust…”
— Sharon R., Birdeye, approximately January 2026

“My lawyer was Jonathan Treshansky. He was knowledgeable, professional, responsive, and informative. He communicated with me every step of the way…I never felt out of the loop which I appreciated.”
— Richard Griffin, Google review, via the firm’s testimonials page

“I’m absolutely grateful for James Hardy & his team. For doing such a dynamic job on my workmen comp case…I’m extremely happy with the outcome of both my workmen & personal injury case.”
— Estella Jackson-Brigman, Google review, via the firm’s testimonials page

The Sharon R. review is worth more than its star rating. It is a client stating that she took down an earlier negative review at the firm’s request, and later reposted it. That is a documented instance of review suppression, and its practical effect is that the visible 4.8 average may understate dissatisfaction by an unknown amount. It also means the two positive quotes above — which the firm selected for its own testimonials page — should be read as curated, while the two negatives come from an uncurated aggregator.

A second asymmetry points the same way: 327 Google reviews against 13 on Yelp. That gap is the signature of review solicitation directed at one platform.

VI. Three Things the Marketing Does Not Say

1. The “$67 million” was substantially undone twelve years ago. The results page shows “$67m Work Injury — record jury verdict for a client who suffered burn injuries in a grain bin explosion,” and Taxman’s biography repeats it. In 2012 a federal jury awarded Taxman’s client Justin Becker $35,390,000 compensatory and $33,333,333 punitive. In Jentz v. ConAgra Foods, Inc., 767 F.3d 688 (7th Cir. 2014), the court reversed ConAgra’s liability entirely — holding it was entitled to judgment as a matter of law because it had hired a self-proclaimed hot-bin expert to fix the very condition at issue — and reversed the punitive damages, criticising the award as reflecting hindsight bias. Compensatory damages against the smaller salvage contractor were affirmed. Trade press reported roughly $100 million of the total award was tossed. Two further points: the verdict predates this firm by four years, and Sean Murray advertises the same case, at “$67.2 million,” on his competing firm’s site. Two Chicago firms now claim one partially-reversed verdict.

2. A name partner left, and the firm kept filing under his name. Sean Patrick Murray is no longer at the firm — he runs Murray Legal Group, and the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association’s 2026–27 roster lists him there while separately listing Bekkerman and Pollock at “Taxman, Pollock, & Bekkerman.” The firm’s site, footer and page titles all use the three-name form. But the four-name form was still on Illinois Appellate Court filings in April 2026 and again on August 31, 2026, and it remains on the firm’s Best Law Firms profile, its LinkedIn page, its BBB alternate name and its own 2025 press release. Directory lag is ordinary; appellate briefs filed under a departed partner’s name are not. No firm-news item announces the departure — or that of William E. Parrish, credited in the firm’s own 2025 press release and absent from the roster.

3. A B− from the Better Business Bureau, for not answering. The firm is not BBB accredited and carries a B−, with the downgrade attributable specifically to an unanswered complaint. That is not a legal failing and it is one complaint. It is also an unforced error for a business whose product is responsiveness on someone else’s behalf.

Two smaller observations. Marc Taxman is listed as “Founding Partner” while Pollock and Bekkerman are “Founding Partner & Managing Partner,” and the homepage partner block surfaces only the latter two; Taxman remains ARDC-active with a firm email, so this appears to be a change in role rather than a departure, but the site does not explain it. And the partner biographies are stale in a way the news page is not — Bekkerman’s awards list stops at 2021 and omits his current ITLA office, Pollock’s at 2018, Taxman’s at 2014.

What we did not find, having searched for it. No disciplinary action, suspension, censure or reprimand against any of the eleven named and partner-level attorneys we checked, including Murray. Every ARDC record reads “None,” and every attorney reports maintaining malpractice insurance. We validated both ARDC search interfaces against control queries that return known disbarments before relying on any null result, and we separately confirmed that same-surname hits in the disciplinary database — a David Pollock, a Jeremiah Murray, a Whitney Hardy — belong to unrelated lawyers. No malpractice suit against the firm, no sanctions, no ethics findings.

VII. Beyond the Courtroom

The firm sponsors Chicago Volunteer Legal Services’ Race Judicata 5K, at the Trainer level — the lowest of the five sponsorship tiers listed in CVLS’s own prospectus, alongside firms like Foley & Lardner and McDermott Will & Emery. It sponsors the IBEW Local 9 golf outing, which fits its construction and electrical-injury practice.

The bar and teaching service is more substantial than the giving. Bradley Pollock has chaired the DuPage County Bar Association’s Trial Advocacy Program since 2007, served on the ISBA Tort Section Council since 2011 and chaired it in 2016–17, was DCBA General Counsel from 2011 to 2013 and its Lawyer of the Year in 2016. Marc Taxman sits on the Chicago Bar Association’s Judicial Evaluation Committee as an investigator and hearing officer. James P. Lynch was elected to the Loyola Chicago Law School Board of Governors in 2026. Bekkerman received Chicago-Kent’s Distinguished Young Alumni Award in 2021.

We found no dedicated pro bono program, scholarship or charitable foundation. The record here is sponsorship and bar service, not direct pro bono representation.

VIII. Credentials and Recognition

Peer-elected, verified against the conferring organisation:

• Gerald J. Bekkerman — Parliamentarian, Illinois Trial Lawyers Association, 2026–27. A statewide elected officer, serving alongside officers drawn from Clifford Law Offices, Power Rogers and Levin & Perconti. Confirmed on ITLA’s own officer roster. This is the single most meaningful distinction held by anyone at the firm.
• Bradley N. Pollock — ITLA Board of Managers, 2026–27, plus the ISBA and DuPage County bar roles above.
• Grant A. Bosnich — ITLA Board of Advocates, 2026–27.
• Best Law Firms 2026 — Tier 1, Personal Injury Litigation – Plaintiffs, Chicago metro. Peer and client survey based. The profile is unclaimed and still carries the departed partner’s name.
• Best Lawyers in America — Marc Taxman, Personal Injury Litigation (peer nomination).
• Jury Verdict Reporter Trial Lawyer Excellence Award — Taxman, 2012 and 2014. Verdict-derived rather than purchased.
• Super Lawyers / Rising Stars — 13 attorneys, with James P. Lynch named to the Illinois Top 100 in 2025 and 2026. Peer nomination plus research, though the publisher also sells marketing to selectees.

One correction, since the claim circulates: Marc Taxman holds no ITLA board or officer position. He does not appear on ITLA’s 2026–27 Officers, Board of Managers or Board of Advocates rosters. His biography claims only that he has been an invited speaker before ITLA, the ISBA and the CBA, which is accurate as written and should not be upgraded. The ITLA leadership at this firm is Bekkerman, Pollock and Bosnich.

Paid marketing programs, which should not be read as peer honors: The National Trial Lawyers “Top 100” and “Top 40 Under 40,” a dues-based membership organisation cited in three partner biographies; Avvo’s algorithmic “Superb” ratings, computed largely from self-supplied profile data; Leading Lawyers and Emerging Lawyers, which are nomination-based but monetised through profile and plaque sales; and a long tail of scraped or paid aggregator listings, most of which still use the departed partner’s name.

The homepage also carries an unsubstantiated comparative superlative — “Chicago’s Fastest Growing Personal Injury Law Firm” — with no cited basis.

IX. The Illinois Legal Backdrop, in Plain English

General information, not legal advice. Statutes were verified as noted in the Methodology section; 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) forbids 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 Illinois does not recognize specialty certifications and that the credential is not required to practice here. Registered patent attorneys are the sole exception. No lawyer is described as a specialist anywhere in this profile.

Two years, usually. 735 ILCS 5/13-202 gives two years from accrual for a personal injury action. A workers’ compensation claim runs on its own separate notice and filing deadlines before the Illinois Workers’ Compensation Commission; a worker with both claims has two calendars.

Fifty-one percent ends the case. Under 735 ILCS 5/2-1116, a plaintiff more than 50% at fault recovers nothing; at 50% or below, damages are reduced in proportion. The reported concrete-burns result above is a live illustration of the second half — a 35% finding is said to have cut a $9 million award to $5.85 million. No contributory fault may be attributed to a plaintiff suing over childhood sexual abuse, which matters directly to this firm’s abuse practice.

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, and who the money is for. 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, distributed by the court in proportion to each person’s dependency. Recoverable damages include pecuniary loss plus grief, sorrow and mental suffering. The deadline is generally two years from death — five years where death resulted from violent intentional conduct, or one year after final disposition of a related criminal case for certain charged offences. The FNCB verdict in Section II is that statute in operation: nothing for the decedent’s suffering, $13.8 million for what his children lost.

Public bodies are far shorter. Under 745 ILCS 10/8-101(a), a claim against a local public entity or its employee — including a school district, as in the Allumi case above — must be filed within one year. Subsection (b) gives two years, with a four-year repose, only for claims arising out of patient care.

The CTA is one year, with no notice requirement. 70 ILCS 3605/41 gives one year from accrual to sue the Chicago Transit Authority. The six-month written notice requirement that older articles still recite was repealed effective June 1, 2009.

X. The Awesome Attorneys Assessment

The specific, checkable thing about Taxman, Pollock & Bekkerman is a $13.8 million wrongful death verdict that a defendant took to the Illinois Appellate Court in 2026 and lost — a result that exists in a published opinion rather than only on a results page, and which the firm’s own lawyers are named in. Add a sitting statewide officer of the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association, a Tier 1 Best Law Firms ranking, and a clean ARDC record across every attorney we checked, and this is a legitimate, well-credentialed Chicago plaintiff’s firm with genuine construction and trucking depth.

The trade-off is not competence and it is not ethics. It is that the marketing is not reliable as a guide to the lawyering. A headline of “Over $1 Billion Recovered” sits on top of a casebook the firm itself publishes that totals about $370 million. The single largest number on that casebook is a 2012 verdict whose punitive half was vacated and whose deep-pocket defendant the Seventh Circuit exonerated, tried four years before the firm existed, and simultaneously advertised by a competitor. A name partner left and the firm was still filing appellate briefs under his name in August 2026. The BBB grade is a B− for not answering a complaint. And a client has publicly stated she removed a negative review at the firm’s request — which, more than any single number, is the reason to treat the 4.8-star average as a floor of unknown height rather than a measurement.

None of that makes it a bad firm. It makes the published numbers the wrong basis for choosing it. The right basis is the FNCB verdict and the ITLA office, both of which are real and verifiable, and the right question at intake is which lawyer in the room worked on the results you were shown, and what those results collected after appeal.

This firm is right for a construction, trucking or wrongful death case where twenty-two lawyers and a genuine appellate win are worth more than a boutique’s attention — and for claimant-side workers’ compensation, with the caveat that its own reviews identify that as the thinnest-staffed part of the practice. It is a poorer fit for a client who will choose between firms by comparing advertised recovery totals, because this firm’s total will not survive the comparison it invites.

Methodology & Sourcing

Research conducted September 13, 2026. Identity was confirmed throughout against the Chicago firm at tpmblegal.com and its ARDC registrations; an unrelated Nashville firm with a near-identical domain was excluded. Attorney admission dates and disciplinary status were taken from Illinois ARDC registration records for eleven named and partner-level attorneys individually, not from the firm. Both ARDC interfaces are AJAX-driven and return deceptive empty results to naive queries; the query method was validated against control searches returning known disbarments and suspensions, and same-surname hits were individually resolved to unrelated lawyers before any null finding was relied on. Verdicts were checked against published Illinois Appellate Court opinions and the Seventh Circuit’s decision in Jentz v. ConAgra Foods; the aggregate recovery figure was tested by totalling all 100 entries on the firm’s own results page. Press-release syndication was not treated as independent corroboration. Bar credentials were verified against the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association’s own rosters. 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 Justia and corroborated by Illinois Legal Aid Online (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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