Chicago, IL – The Chicago Bar Foundation (CBF) has raised a remarkable $900,000 in its inaugural, three-week long fundraising effort, the “Investing in Justice Campaign,” to help provide special grants to Chicago’s pro bono and legal aid attorneys and thereby help keep them in their critical posts.

 

“We estimate that this year’s funding will increase the average salary of the City’s legal aid attorneys by between eight and ten percent,” said Jenner & Block Partner Anton R. Valukas, who chaired the 2007 Campaign, which took place between March 5^th  and March 23^th  and was joined by hundreds of attorneys at nearly three dozen Chicago law firms and companies. According to Mr. Valukas, the CBF and the Campaign leadership were able to bring Chicago’s legal community together around this cause in a way that had never been done before, and the Campaign may serve as a model elsewhere in the country. A full list of law firm and company participants in the unique campaign is set forth below.

 

A new study (available at www.chicagobarfoundation.org), published by the Chicago Bar Foundation and the Illinois Coalition for Equal Justice, had taken an in-depth look at legal aid attorney retention and revealed that nearly half will leave their jobs in the next three years because they simply can’t afford not to. Besides low pay, large law school loan debts were cited as primary drivers of the impending crisis.

 

Losing just 10% of our experienced legal aid attorneys over the course of a year means that about 10,000 fewer low-income Chicagoans have access to critical legal services, the study concluded.

 

“We wanted to take ownership of this problem and send a clear signal to our colleagues in legal aid as well as the people of Chicago that the City’s legal community cares,” said CBF President, Kimball Anderson, a Partner at Winston & Strawn. 

 

Currently, there are only about 250 legal aid attorneys in the Chicago area to serve the more than 750,000 Cook County residents living in poverty. As a result, more than half of low-income Chicagoans who seek legal assistance that is often critical to their safety and independence are turned away because pro bono and legal aid organizations do not have the capacity to serve them. Hundreds of thousands more are left to try to solve often complex legal problems on their own.

 

“By embracing this campaign, Chicago area lawyers helped to ensure that the most vulnerable members of our community will have the best legal advocates working for them,” noted Mr. Valukas.

 

Added Mr. Anderson: “By utilizing 100% of the campaign funds to address this fundamental need in our community’s justice system, the CBF is making a substantial down payment towards the ultimate goal of bringing legal aid attorneys’ salaries in line with comparable government service positions.”

 

For more information on the CBF’s “Investing in Justice Campaign,” please contact Bob Glaves, CBF Executive Director, at (312) 554-1205 or bglaves@chicagobar.org.  

AT & T Midwest; AON Corporation; Baker & McKenzie; Bartlit Beck; Bell Boyd & Lloyd; Clifford Law Offices, DLA Piper; Exelon Corporation; Foley & Lardner; Goldberg Kohn; Grant Thornton; Hennessy & Roach; Holland & Knight; Jenner & Block; Katten Muchin Rosenman; Kirkland & Ellis; Lord, Bissell & Brook; Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw; McDermott Will & Emery; Morgan, Lewis & Bockius; Playboy Enterprises, Inc.; PricewaterhouseCoopers; Schiff Hardin; Schiller DuCanto & Fleck; Segal McCambridge Singer & Mahoney; Seyfarth Shaw; Shefsky & Froelich; Sidley Austin; Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom; Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal; Law Offices of Susan E. Cox; Takeda Pharmaceuticals North America, Inc.; Vedder Price; and Winston & Strawn.