Page 41 - ACTL_Fall23

NEIL AND TOM
QUINN
ONE COULD SAY THAT INSTEAD OF CHOOSING THE LAW, THE LAW CHOSE BOTH FATHER NEIL QUINN (’77) AND SON TOM BAKER QUINN (’18) – AS DID THE AMERICAN COLLEGE OF TRIAL LAWYERS. BEFORE BECOMING DEDICATED AND RESPECTED TRIAL LAWYERS, BOTH FOLLOWED NONLE- GAL CAREER PATHS, UNTIL THE CHOICE OF A LIFE IN THE COURTROOM BECKONED. AND ONCE THEY HAD EACH SET THEIR GOALS ON BECOMING TRIAL LAWYERS, THEY NEVER LOOKED BACK.
Both were relatively late bloomers to the practice of law. Neil was attending undergraduate school at the University of Illinois just as the Korean War was heating up. Since he thought he would be drafted when he finished, he chose to enlist in the Marine Corps in December 1950, entering an OCS program that allowed him to graduate from the University in the spring of 1951, before immediately going to Parris Island, and then Quantico, where he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. He was then sta- tioned in the Second Marine Division at Camp Lejeune on the East Coast.
Neil had been trained to be a platoon leader in the Marines, with a second job as a military police officer. There, it was his responsibility to ensure that marines who were arrested over the weekends had some sort of monitoring, or actual representation, when they got to court. He even had an office in the basement of the Wilmington NC Courthouse, complete with spittoons. Somehow, one of those spittoons followed him
home, where it has now been re-purposed as a table lamp.
Neil had some exposure to the legal profession in his childhood, as he had two uncles who practiced law in Chicago, one in insurance defense, and the other a successful plaintiff’s lawyer. But it was those early court- house observations in the Marines that truly piqued his interest in the law. By the time he left the Marine Corps, his wife was expecting their first child, so he chose a more practical life choice – going to work for IBM selling electric typewriters. He somehow managed to combine both the practicality of making a living and the higher calling of law by attending night law school at DePaul University in Chicago, graduating in 1957. He said he knew he always wanted to be a lawyer and that kept him motivated during his legal school- ing – he wanted to be a part of this higher profession.
Upon graduation he was still employed at IBM. But the law won; he quit his job at IBM and started a six de- cade career as a trial lawyer with a Chicago firm filled with Fellows in the American College of Trial Lawyers, such as Robert Rooney (‘69), Matthew Egan (’04) and Brian T. Henry (’02). The firm’s core was insurance defense work, but he branched out and took other cases including some involving notable union leaders.
FALL 2023 JOURNAL 40