PRESS RELEASE

PHILIP F. MAHER AWARDED
LEONARD M. RING LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD

Philip F. Maher of Chicago, will be awarded the prestigious Leonard M. Ring Lifetime Achievement Award at the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association Convention on Friday, June 9, 2006. The convention will be held at the Oak Brook Hills Resort in Oak Brook, Illinois.

The criteria of the award is as follows:

“This award is given annually at the convention banquet to someone selected by a committee appointed by the president. The recipient is someone who has devoted, as Leonard did, a substantial part of their life and their practice to ITLA, someone who has done more than is called for. Someone who had the standards of Leonard, the work ethics of Leonard and the commitment to ITLA that Leonard had. At the same time, it keeps alive the memory of Leonard Ring.”

Phil Maher entered the practice of law in 1970 after graduating from John Marshall Law School. In the early 1970s, he began to build his personal injury practice at the same time as he and his wife, Roseann, were starting their family of four children. After developing his practice and his reputation, in 1985, he chaired an ITLA committee of over one hundred through which attorneys brought in excess of 110 seriously injured clients to Springfield to oppose tort reform sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce. Phil Maher was named to the Board of Managers of the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association in 1986 and has now served twenty years on the board.

In 1994, he was elected by ITLA to represent the membership on the Board of Governors of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America (ATLA), and he continued to serve on ATLA’s board for eleven years until 2005. From 2001-2004, the ATLA Board of Governors elected Maher to three consecutive terms of service on ATLA’s Executive Committee. He was a founder and past chair of ATLA’s
Birth Trauma Litigation Group. As chairman of ATLA’s Law Student Education Program, he founded the ATLA Partnership in Advocacy Program, which has provided over 200 law students with scholarships to attend the ATLA conventions for academic credit upon writing a publishable paper. He also served as chairman of ATLA’s Law School Ambassador Program, and within one year obtained at least one ATLA member to serve as an Ambassador to each law school in the United States. Maher received ATLA’s Weidman-Wysocki Citation for Excellence in 1994, 2000, 2003, and 2004 and was honored with the ATLA Stalwart’s Award in 2000. In July 2005, at the ATLA convention in Toronto, Canada, Maher received the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association of Trial Lawyers of America.

Maher served as co-chair of the ITLA Legislative Committee from 1987 to 1989, and is a past chair of the Section on Tort Law of the Illinois State Bar Association and past chair of the Liaison Committee between the ISBA and the Circuit Court of Cook County. He has lectured numerous times for the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association, the Association of Trial Lawyers of America and the Illinois State Bar Association. Maher is a past President of the John Marshall Law School Alumni Association, and has been honored by the law school with its Distinguished Alumnus Award. He is a member of the American Board of Trial Advocates, certified with the rank of Advocate, and is a Fellow in the Roscoe Pound Foundation.

For more than thirty years, Phil Maher has represented catastrophically injured plaintiffs in all types of personal injury cases, predominantly medical negligence. Maher has had a number of substantial verdicts and several landmark appeals. He was joined in the firm by Stephen E. McLean in 1985 and Janice L. Schaffrick in 1993.

Past recipients include Jon G. Carlson, Rex Carr, Robert J. Cooney, Philip H. Corboy, George J. Cullen, David A. Decker, James Thomas Demos, William J. Harte, Thomas F. Londrigan, Nat P. Ozmon, Eugene I. Pavalon, and John G. Phillips.