Best Lawyers 2010 Names McDermott Partners As Lawyers of the Year in Health Care and Trusts and Estates
CHICAGO (November 20, 2009) — McDermott Will & Emery LLP is pleased to announce that The Best Lawyers in America, the oldest peer-review publication in the legal profession, has named two of the Firm’s Chicago partners as “Lawyer of the Year” for 2010 in their respective disciplines. Bernadette M. Broccolo was named Chicago Best Lawyers Health Care Lawyer of the Year, and Carol A. Harrington was named Chicago Best Lawyers Trusts and Estates Lawyer of the Year.
After more than a quarter of a century in publication and the compilation of millions of detailed evaluations of lawyers by other lawyers, Best Lawyers has created its new “Lawyers of the Year” to honor individuals in high-profile legal specialties in large legal communities. Only a single lawyer in each specialty in each community is honored as the “Lawyer of the Year.” These honorees have received particularly high ratings in the publication’s surveys by earning a high level of respect among their peers for their abilities, professionalism and integrity.
Steven Naifeh, Managing Editor of Best Lawyers, said, “We continue to believe that recognition by one’s peers is the most meaningful form of praise in the legal profession. We would like to congratulate McDermott partners Bernadette M. Broccolo and Carol A. Harrington on being selected as the Chicago Best Lawyers Lawyers of the Year for 2010 in their chosen fields.” Naifeh also congratulated both attorneys on their inclusion in Best Lawyers for more than ten consecutive years.
Bernadette M. Broccolo has been counseling health industry organizations for 29 years. She currently serves as chair of the Life Sciences Division of McDermott’s Health Law Department and as co-chair of the Personalized Medicine Team. Ms. Broccolo advises clients on leading-edge health industry relationship formation and realignments, health information technology acquisitions, electronic health information networks and data repositories, data privacy, conflict-of-interest and corporate compliance, and clinical and translational research programs. She is a frequent speaker and author on health law issues and co-author of Tax-Exempt Status of Health Care Organizations, which is part of BNA’s Health Law & Business Series. She has also served in leadership positions for various organizations serving the health industry and the legal profession, including the American Health Lawyers Association, the Illinois Association of Hospital Attorneys and the American Bar Association. Most recently, she served as a member of the Governing Council of the American Bar Association’s Health Law Section and as the Chair of the Health Law Section’s Tax & Accounting Interest Group.
Ms. Broccolo has been included in The Best Lawyers in America for the past 19 years. She has also been named as a Fellow of the American Health Lawyers Association and is listed as a leading individual in health care in Illinois in Chambers USA 2009: America’s Leading Lawyers for Business. She was named a 2008 Illinois Super Lawyer by Law & Politics based upon a survey of 47,000 attorneys throughout Illinois; only 5 percent of Illinois attorneys received this distinction. In 2009, Bernadette was named to the Leading Lawyers Network “Top Ten Women Business Lawyers in Illinois.”
Carol A. Harrington heads McDermott’s Private Client Department. She advises clients on a variety of matters, including estate, gift and generation-skipping tax issues, closely held businesses and succession planning, family office structures and issues, private trust companies, private foundations, trust and estate administration, and contested trust and tax matters. As a national authority on the federal generation-skipping tax, Ms. Harrington has advised attorneys, tax professionals, executors, trustees and others nationwide on this issue. She is a co-author of a tax treatise, Generation-Skipping Transfer Tax (Harrington, Plaine & Zaritsky) and has published many articles on the federal generation-skipping tax. She is also a frequent speaker for professional groups.
The past chair of the Generation-Skipping Tax: Regulations and Legislation Committee for the American Bar Association's Real Property, Probate and Trust Law Section, Ms. Harrington is also a former member of its governing body and a co-supervisor of the Tax Regulations and Legislation Committees. She is a fellow of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel, currently serving on the Estate and Gift Tax Committee, where she was a member of its Board of Regents (from 1999 to 2005). She is a member of the Advisory Committee for the Heckerling (Miami) Institute of Estate Planning. In addition to her inclusion in The Best Lawyers in America for the past 15 years, Ms. Harrington has been named an Illinois Super Lawyer in the estate planning and probate area by Law & Politics. Since 2006, she has been among a select group of lawyers ranked in the top tier by Chambers USA in the wealth management category.
Best Lawyers compiles its lists of outstanding attorneys by conducting exhaustive peer-review surveys in which thousands of leading lawyers confidentially evaluate their professional peers. The current, 16th edition of The Best Lawyers in America (2010), is based on more than 2.8 million detailed evaluations of lawyers by other lawyers.
McDermott Will & Emery is a premier international law firm with a diversified business practice. Numbering more than 1,100 lawyers, we have offices in Boston, Brussels, Chicago, Düsseldorf, Houston, London, Los Angeles, Miami, Milan, Munich, New York, Orange County, Rome, San Diego, Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. Extending our reach to Asia, we have a strategic alliance with MWE China Law Offices in Shanghai.
