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Judge Dorothy Kirie Kinnaird (1949 – 2020)
Making Law Better By Looking Outside of Law—The Wrap
CBA/CBF Task Force Preparing to Release Draft Report for Public Comment
A Time for Our Legal Community to Reflect and Act
Illinois Supreme Court Enters Order Supporting CARES Act Housing Protections
February 15, 2018
JEPY Award Voting Underway, Legal Service Delivery Innovation Award Hotly Contested
The Second Annual JEPY Awards Ballot is live through Sunday, February 26. Votes are being cast for six categories ahead of the February 26th Awards Ceremony.
Voting has begun for the JEPY Awards, the CBF Justice Entrepreneurs Project’s annual event recognizing achievement in bringing affordable legal services to the masses and celebrating innovative and community focused practices.
Tags: Awards | Events | JEP | Legal Innovation read more ...February 14, 2018
Breaking Poverty Barriers To Equal Justice
Join the CBA’s Legal Aid Committee on Tuesday, March 6th at 3pm for a multimedia, interactive video and panel CLE presentation designed to help legal professionals better understand the life circumstances and day-to-day challenges of their clients who are experiencing poverty. Expert panelists will provide practical strategies to help legal professionals communicate more effectively with their clients and improve client services and case outcomes. Attendees will receive 2.75 PR-CLE credits.
Tags: Legal Aid Committee | Pro Bono | Training | Volunteer read more ...January 25, 2018
A Bittersweet End, A Solid Model for the Future
In the ongoing budget saga for the Cook County government, one of the unfortunate casualties has been the Circuit Court Mortgage Foreclosure Mediation Program, which officially ended in December when its funding was not renewed.
While there is no doubt the current budget challenges facing the County in the aftermath of its recent soda tax debacle are real, eliminating this successful program is a shortsighted move that will end up costing the County much more than it would to fund the program at its prior 2017 level. As we continue to evaluate whether there are other potential County funding options to restart the program, looking back on what made the program most effective over the past 7+ years offers a good model for developing effective court-based programs going forward.
Tags: Court Help Desks | Courts read more ...January 24, 2018
Rebecca Eisner to Chair 2018 Investing in Justice Campaign
Rebecca Eisner, Partner-in-Charge of Mayer Brown’s Chicago office, will lead the CBF’s 12th Annual Investing in Justice Campaign. The Campaign is the CBF’s annual initiative that rallies Chicago’s entire legal community around our common cause of ensuring that everyone has access to necessary legal help, not just people who can afford it. This year’s Campaign will kick off on March 5th and run throughout the month. Thousands of individual lawyers and legal professionals at more than 150 Chicago-area law firms, corporate legal departments, companies, and other-law related organizations again will be part of the Campaign.
Tags: Investing in Justice Campaign read more ...December 21, 2017
Maximize Your Year-End Charitable Giving
As 2017 comes to a close, many of us are taking out our checkbooks and making our end-of-year gifts to the charities we support. However, if you are considering a larger gift, a better strategy may be to put away your checkbook and pick up the phone to your financial advisor instead. With the stock market at an all-time high right now, a look at your entire financial picture may reveal that it’s more beneficial to your bottom line to give a gift of appreciated assets than to give cash.
Tags: CBF Supporters read more ...December 20, 2017
2018 New Year’s Resolution for the Legal Profession: Make it a Priority to Incorporate Technology Into Our Work, but Set Clearer Boundaries
Last year at this time, you may remember my new year’s resolution for our profession was to stop calling people non-lawyers, which sadly continues to be a problem and needs to carry forward as a 2018 resolution.
My new resolution for next year is that we as a profession make it a priority to catch up to the rest of the world in the way we use technology. But it comes with a critical corollary: wherever we are on the spectrum of technology adoption, we need to set much clearer boundaries so that technology doesn’t so overwhelm our lives that we lose what makes us uniquely valuable as professionals and people.
Tags: Future of the Profession read more ...December 14, 2017
Support the CBF with a Year-End Gift
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”
That of course is the opening line of the Dickens classic, A Tale of Two Cities. It could also be a metaphor for the state of access to justice in 2017. We are getting dangerously close to a tale of two justice systems, one for those who can afford legal help and another for the growing numbers of people in our community who cannot.
Tags: CBF Supporters read more ...November 30, 2017
Groundbreaking Illinois Armed Forces Legal Aid Network Launches
Earlier this month, the Illinois Armed Forces Legal Aid Network officially launched in conjunction with Veterans Day.
The new network was made possible by the Access to Justice Act, one of the CBF’s major legislative initiatives the past few years. The Act provides the framework and funding for a new legal hotline and network of services for Veterans and military families in Illinois.
Tags: Advocacy read more ...November 29, 2017
Thank you Ryanne!
For the second time this year, the CBF faced the bittersweet moment of saying thank you and good luck to one of our longtime colleagues who moved out of state for personal reasons.
Ryanne Easley, who has been an integral part of the CBF in many roles, recently moved to New York when her husband Jeff accepted a dream job offer to become assistant general counsel for the Major League Baseball Players Association.
Tags: CBF Staff read more ...November 27, 2017
People Remember How You Made Them Feel, Part 2 – The Courts
In my September post, I used a famous Maya Angelou quote as food for thought on how lawyers can better serve their clients: I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. That quote could be a downright call to action in the context of the courts and how people without lawyers experience the current system.
To put it mildly, we can do a lot better. And this is no academic exercise—it’s critical to the future of access to justice.
Tags: Courts | Future of the Profession read more ...