Super Lawyers - Illinois 2012

MICHAEL T. REAGAN MAKES HIS CASE

The Ottawa appellate attorney is all about the details

INTERVIEW CONDUCTED AND EDITED BY BETH TAYLOR

Q: Why did you want the law degree as a
precursor to becoming an entrepreneur?

A: [Laughs] Like I said, the plan was half-
baked. I just wanted to be self-sufficient.

Q: When you started out in civil litigation, were you on the defense side?

A: Defense for a long period of time. Then as I moved into appellate work, I [would] get referrals from both clients and law firms on both sides—and I still do. It’s probably 50-50.

Q: Do you enjoy one more than the other?

A: No, I enjoy the issues as opposed to the side of the fence.

Q: Can you describe one interesting case?

A: Last year, I did a case pro bono for Chicago Volunteer Legal Services. It involved two mortgage foreclosure cases, which I’d never done before. A very smart judge on the circuit court—the trial court in Cook County—had ruled in the case of a foreclosure against two deceased borrowers … that the foreclosure case could not proceed unless a personal representative had been appointed to represent the decedent or the decedent’s estate. The lenders refused to do that, and the judge dismissed their cases, and then the lenders appealed. So I got into it, along with Chicago Volunteer Legal Services.

Now, what made the case complicated is that we did not have a client. We were not representing the estates, because nobody had ever been appointed as a representative, and so we were only in the case solely as amicus, arguing in favor of the propriety of what the trial judge had done. We lost in the appellate court, and the Illinois Supreme Court agreed to take the case. We had a very interesting oral argument, and the Supreme Court agreed

Q: What do you like best about
appellate law?

A: I get to work with a wide variety of great lawyers. There are, most of the time, already lawyers in the case, and most of the time the cases are of some size and have sufficient interest to warrant somebody taking an appeal. I’m lucky.

On the more substantive side, appellate lawyers are, in my view, part of the world of the appellate courts. Appellate lawyers are not appellate judges, but nonetheless the appellate judges and the lawyers ultimately have a responsibility to figure out how the particular case is going to fit into the law … or whether the law should be changed to accommodate the case. So in one way, the judges and the lawyers do the same thing.

Q: When did you decide to go into law?

A: I had a half-baked plan to get a degree in mechanical engineering, which I did; to get a law degree; and then to get an MBA. I wanted to be an entrepreneur. So I worked hard getting the mechanical engineering degree from Purdue [University], and then in the first couple of weeks at Georgetown law school, I realized that this was going to be three more years of a great deal of work. So I sat on a bench outside the Court of Military Appeals in D.C.—it just happened to be near Georgetown law school—and thought about what I wanted to do: whether I wanted to pursue this plan of being an entrepreneur or whether I ought to be a lawyer. Because I was not really relishing the idea of getting a second degree which I also wasn’t going to use directly.