2024 DIVERSITY DATABASE UNDERWRITER Neal, Gerber & Eisenberg LLP

The spry Windy City firm of Neal, Gerber & Eisenberg LLP was founded in 1986 and has since stayed close to its roots, concentrating all its talent in one Chicago office. Today it boasts 140 attorneys, and their expertise covers everything from intellectual property to corporate governance to real estate issues.

One Firm, One Office

Neal Gerber’s practices focus on four main areas: business, intellectual property, litigation, and private wealth. The firm handles everything from bankruptcy to corporate matters to estate planning to labor and employment to real estate to tax issues to trusts and estates, as well as a wide range of IP matters, including patents, trademarks, and copyrights.

The firm’s client base is diverse, ranging from dozens of Fortune 100 companies to smaller startups and wealthy private clients. The firm has served companies including AOL, Beats Electronics, Citigroup, Hyatt, Illinois Tool Works, Match.com, Northern Trust, Polaroid, and United HealthCare. In the tax arena, the firm has served as lead counsel to the taxpayers of Cook County in their yearly attempts to strike down certain Cook County property tax levies as illegal. Other notable matters have included representing publisher Penguin/Random House in a dispute over the publishing rights to Dorothy Parker's poetry and counseling the Advocate Health Center Patient Care Express in a case involving veterans' employment rights.

Chicago-Style Pro Bono

While encouraging all of its attorneys to undertake at least 50 hours of pro bono services per year and providing support through strong relationships with local legal aid agencies, the firm allows its attorneys to pursue pro bono projects of their choosing. Under the aegis of the pro bono program, Neal Gerber lawyers helped start the Inner-City Education Program, which serves unprivileged young people in the Chicago area. Another pro bono team from Neal Gerber achieved a settlement to a six-year class action that the firm says will expand living arrangement options for Illinois' developmentally disabled population. And throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the firm focused on helping the community in a number of ways—from donating PPE to advising the Office of the Governor of Illinois on policy issues related to the authority to limit liability for health care providers during a crisis.