About this analysis
This review of Illinois State Board of Elections data includes lawyers who identified their occupation with their campaign donations, as contributors are required to do when they give $500 or more. This story does not include contributions from any lawyers who couldn’t be identified because they declined to list their occupation with their contribution.

When Gov. Bruce Rauner sought the state’s highest executive office, plaintiff lawyers and other attorneys sent $1.4 million to support his opponent.

But the Republican businessman had Big Law help.

That includes donations from attorneys at the largest law firm in the state, Kirkland & Ellis LLP. Lawyers there gave his campaign almost $400,000 — or about half of Rauner’s roughly $800,000 haul from attorneys.

The figures, identified in a Daily Law Bulletin analysis of state campaign records, are only a fraction of the more than $100 million the candidates jointly raised for last year’s gubernatorial race. Rauner received around $70 million in the run-up to Election Day; donors gave about $35 million to former governor Patrick J. Quinn.

Despite the relatively small amount, the contributions help illustrate the degree to which members of the legal community in Illinois are politically aligned.

They also provide context for the spat between Rauner and the plaintiff-friendly Illinois Trial Lawyers Association — a dispute that has partially defined the governor’s tenure in office that reached the 100-day mark last week.

On April 7, Rauner made headlines when he said he didn’t trust the Illinois Supreme Court. He cited trial lawyer donations as a reason he didn’t believe the high court issues rational decisions.

“You tell me if you look at who gives them the money, and you decide whether there’s a conflict of interest going on in the courts,” he told the Daily Herald newspaper.

Rauner eventually backed down on the statements later in the week, telling the Springfield State Journal-Register that he sometimes doesn’t choose his words perfectly. He also said he was “not criticizing any particular court or any particular judge” and that the Supreme Court justices he knows personally are “awesome.”

Two months before that, Rauner called for the ban on trial lawyers donating money to judicial campaigns. ITLA characterized that State of the State proposal as “a declaration of war.”

The campaign donation totals show the battle began raging well before Rauner was elected.

Top donors

No firm had more lawyers contribute to Rauner than Kirkland & Ellis.

Attorneys there gave more than 100 donations and nearly $400,000 to the governor’s campaign committee during the 2014 cycle.

By comparison, attorneys at Kirkland & Ellis made two donations to Quinn’s campaign committee, Taxpayers for Quinn, amounting to $5,000.

The second-largest group of lawyer-contributors to Rauner, those who described themselves as “self-employed,” gave about 75 times, amounting to a little more than $55,000.

Rounding out Rauner’s law firm contributors are Sidley, Austin LLP, where lawyers donated slightly less than $40,000.

DLA Piper attorneys chipped in about $30,000, and K&L Gates LLP lawyers gave about $22,000 to Rauner.

Neither the firms nor the governor’s office responded to requests for comment.

Compared to the large law firms that make up the top donors for Rauner, Quinn’s largest individual lawyer-donors mostly either worked for themselves or plaintiff personal-injury firms, the Illinois State Board of Elections data reveals.

Self-employed lawyers were the largest single-donor group, giving nearly $330,000 to the former Democratic governor, who stepped into the top job in 2009 when then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich was impeached. Quinn won the office in the 2010 election.

Second on Quinn’s list were the lawyers at the personal-injury firm Cooney & Conway, where ITLA President John D. Cooney is a partner. Lawyers at the firm gave close to $190,000 during the 2014 campaign cycle.

Power, Rogers & Smith P.C. lawyers gave close to $180,000 to Quinn’s campaign fund.

Clifford Law Offices attorneys gave about $90,000. Myron M. Cherry & Associates lawyers contributed $50,000.

Among the ITLA-backed legislation that Quinn signed into law during his tenure were bills that set a timetable for defendants to make settlement payments; removed time constraints on filing asbestos-related claims against construction companies; and increased juror pay while halving the number of jurors in civil cases from 12 to six.

Although multiple firms appeared on both Rauner’s and Quinn’s donor lists, none of the aforementioned plaintiff firms gave to Rauner.

Indeed, absent donations by lawyers at those plaintiff firms, which typically support Democrats regardless of who’s in office, both the total dollar amounts received by Rauner and Quinn from individual lawyers would be roughly identical.

‘We know who our friends are’

Philip Harnett Corboy Jr., a partner at plaintiff firm Corboy & Demetrio, said his firm donates as an entity sometimes when a candidate or group asks them specifically for help. The firm gave about $15,000 to Quinn for his 2014 campaign; Corboy personally gave more than $10,000.

“Tom (Demetrio) and I sit down, we close the door, we go through the pros and cons. … It’s a quick meeting usually. Tom and I have been doing this for a long, long time. And for the most part, we know who our friends are,” Corboy said.

Plaintiff lawyers are also traditionally much more active with their wallets during campaign season compared with their counterparts in the defense bar.

Defense firms such as Pretzel & Stouffer Chtd.; Swanson, Martin & Bell LLP; Cassiday, Schade LLP; and Reno & Zahm LLP have only given between $20,000 and $35,000 each to political candidates since 1994, when the state began tracking donations digitally.

John A. Krivicich, managing partner at Donohue, Brown, Mathewson & Smyth LLC — a go-to firm for medical-malpractice defense that has given just a little more than $28,000 over the last 20 years — said the de facto policy is that the firm typically stays out of campaigns.

“There was one donation where an in-house client ran for a judgeship,” Krivicich recalled. “But that’s a once or twice in 20 years type of thing.”

Whether the firm should be more active in supporting candidates or issues, he said, is “a good, open question.”

“But we have a hard enough time agreeing on what days to take off during the year,” Krivicich said.

Like many attorneys, Pretzel & Stouffer equity partner Edward B. Ruff III was listening when Rauner blasted the Supreme Court this month.

“I don’t know if it was just a mistake because of not knowing how to say things the right way,” Ruff said, “but that did not sit well with me.”

Still, he has no regrets about his donations to Rauner, which amounted to about $400.

Rauner, he said, deserves more time before his tenure and agenda can be adequately evaluated.

David H. Levitt, president of the Illinois Association of Defense Trial Counsel and partner at Hinshaw & Culbertson LLP, said the plaintiff bar gives more because they have a personal financial stake in the outcomes of tort cases.

He cited the effort last year by Clifford Law Offices; St. Louis-based Korein, Tillery; and Power, Rogers & Smith to defeat Illinois Supreme Court Justice Lloyd A. Karmeier during his retention election last year while they worked on high-stakes cases before the Supreme Court.

Lawyers at the firms combined to put more than $1.7 million in an effort to defeat Karmeier, who narrowly won retention with about 60.8 percent of the vote. Judges rarely lose retention efforts and need to pass a 60 percent threshold to stay on the bench.

“If you’re a lawyer and you’re giving money to defeat a judge who’s about to rule on your case in which you have more than $1 billion in attorneys’ fees at issue, maybe it shouldn’t be just a judge who has to recuse themselves,” Levitt said.

“That’s not the magic answer. There are pros and cons of what I just said. I want to have an open discussion. I’m not going to go so far as what the governor said. I think he was a little over the top.”