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    • Sarah Grady
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312-852-2184
  • Team
    • Howard Kaplan
    • Sarah Grady
    • David Schmutzer
    • Nabihah Maqbool
    • John D. Tinder
    • Sarah Brodwolf
  • Practice Areas
    • Overview
    • Prisoners’ Rights
      • Wrongful Death
      • Medical & Mental Health
      • Sexual Assault
      • Failure to Protect
    • Business Litigation
      • Complex Commercial Litigation
      • Employment Litigation
  • Dispute Resolution
  • Resources
    • Seventh Circuit Roundup
    • Prisoner’s Rights Listserv
    • Prisoners’ Rights Resources
    • Press Kit
  • Careers

Overview 

Practice Areas

Kaplan & Grady has two primary practice areas: business litigation and constitutional damages cases on behalf of incarcerated individuals who suffered a serious injury or died in custody.

We have found this pairing of practice areas to be complementary. Cases involving a death in custody, for example, include a wide range of challenging legal issues, voluminous discovery, an array of experts, and defendants that include senior government officials and the executives of private companies that provide healthcare at correctional facilities on billion-dollar contracts. The skills needed to effectively develop and win these cases are no different from what is required in complex commercial matters.

Our experience in these cases also supports our commercial practice. We are skilled at litigating efficiently and passionately as plaintiffs with a constitutional cause, and we bring that edge to our business matters, where the life or health of a business, rather than an individual, may be at stake.

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Business Litigation
Prisoners' Rights
Business Litigation

We represent individuals and companies in breach of contract, fraud, employment, and other statutory and tort litigation. As a partner at Kirkland & Ellis, Howard Kaplan successfully represented plaintiffs and defendants in hundreds of complex and high-profile disputes in federal and state courts across the country.

Howard builds on that experience at Kaplan & Grady, leading a team of biglaw-trained attorneys and staff to provide top-tier representation in a boutique setting.

Prisoners' Rights

We represent incarcerated people and their families pursuing justice for constitutional violations and other wrongs, including failures to provide adequate medical and mental health care, wrongful death, sexual assault, and failures to protect.

At Kaplan & Grady, we have experience with the operations of prisons and jails across the country, and our partners have successfully navigated the complexities of federal civil rights laws to achieve record results on behalf of clients.

We know that when an incarcerated person or their loved one has suffered abuse by prison or jail staff, getting answers is nearly impossible. But we will fight for you to get those answers and to uncover even the most well-hidden abuse.

Complex Commercial Litigation

Our team brings deep experience litigating all aspects of commercial litigation to your case, having successfully prosecuted and defended fraud, breach of contract, merger, indemnification, trade secret, insurance, and financial cases in a broad range of industries. As a dedicated litigation boutique untethered to a transactional practice, we are able to pursue cases that other high-quality firms cannot or will not due to conflicts.
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Employment Litigation

We understand that whether you are an executive seeking to vindicate a right to work in your chosen field despite an employer’s attempt to enforce a non-compete or a company attempting to enforce an employee’s promises, employment matters can be contentious and personal for all parties involved. Our team has experience successfully litigating the fast-paced matters related to restrictive covenants and the claims that frequently go with non-compete and non-solicit cases, including, for example, theft of trade secrets or confidential information, severance payments, and non-disparagement.

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Wrongful Death

Our team has deep experience successfully litigating damages cases on behalf of families who lost a loved one in prison or jail due to failures of medical care or other constitutional violations. We understand that people who die while incarcerated do not deserve to have their lives discounted simply because they were in custody when they died. These cases are legally complex, frequently requiring hard-fought discovery into the defendants’ policies and practices as well as deaths of other inmates from related constitutional violations. We have the skill to get the information needed to expose untimely deaths in prison and jail as the unacceptable and preventable tragedies that they are.

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Medical & Mental Health

Our partners have successfully represented dozens of incarcerated or formerly incarcerated people who have been seriously injured as a result of failures to provide constitutionally adequate care for serious medical conditions. These cases typically require discovery into the care provided to other similarly situated inmates and are expert intensive. We have the resources and experience to litigate these cases properly and endeavor to achieve some measure of justice for people who had no alternatives for mental health and medical and care.

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Sexual Assault

Our team has experience litigating cases involving sexual assault by guards and other prisoners. We know how to navigate complications of defendants charged criminally and defenses of consent, among others. 

Our team also has a special interest in matters related to pregnancy, where women’s claims about the care they require may be cast as a psychological problem with the pregnant woman.

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Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome • This website contains attorney advertising

Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome

This website contains attorney advertising

Terms • Privacy • Accessibility

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