Firm Background / Attorney Profile
Robert E. Lehrer, a graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School, both with honors, has more than 35 years of experience in the practice areas in which his firm specializes, including extensive trial and appellate court experience in complex class action cases.
From 1973 to 1996, Mr. Lehrer was affiliated with what is now the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago (“LAF”), which is the legal services office for Cook County, IL, including Chicago. At LAF, he was, successively, a staff attorney, supervisory attorney, and, from 1982-1996, the agency’s deputy director and litigation director. As deputy director and litigation director, he supervised a staff of dozens of attorneys and was a principal counsel in dozens of major civil rights cases, covering areas as diverse as public benefits, such as Social Security and Medicaid, employment, children’s rights, reproductive rights, public housing, and prisons and jails.
When Congress eviscerated the legal service programs in 1996, burdening it with restrictions on the type of work they could do, Mr. Lehrer formed a public interest law office, Lehrer & Redleaf, with an LAF colleague. The firm (1996-2005) specialized in plaintiffs’ civil rights litigation. Among the many successful cases he, with co-counsel, litigated during this period were Dupuy v. McDonald, a federal court (Illinois) class action challenging the investigative and appeal hearing practices of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, and People Who Care v. Rockford Bd. of Educ., a federal court (Illinois) school desegregation case.
Mr. Lehrer established his own law office in 2005. Among the major cases he, with co-counsel, has worked on since then are, in addition to the Dupuy case, Duran v. Dart, a federal court (Illinois) class action involving conditions at the Cook County Jail, and Comas v. Schafer, a federal court (Missouri) class action under the Americans With Disabilities Act challenging the State of Missouri's delivery of mental health services to deaf persons throughout the state.
In his practice with LAF and in his private practice, Mr. Lehrer has litigated many cases involving attorney’s fee disputes, and also personal injury cases (plaintiffs’ side).
Click here for a list of representative published opinions in federal and state cases in which Mr. Lehrer has been a principal counsel.
Since 2004, Mr. Lehrer has been an Adjunct Professor of Law at the Loyola University Chicago School of Law, where he has taught Remedies.
Mr. Lehrer has also been or is currently a hearing officer for two Illinois state agencies ( Illinois Board of Education; Illinois State Toll Highway Authority) and one Missouri state agency (Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education).
Mr. Lehrer is a certified mediator and a member of the National Association of Attorney Mediators. He has participated in many mediations as counsel for a party to the mediation or as the mediator.
Mr. Lehrer is a member of the bars of Illinois, Missouri, the District of Columbia, Vermont, and Massachusetts (though his bar status is “inactive” in the latter three jurisdictions). His litigation practice is concentrated in Illinois, and then in the Cook County courts (for state court cases) and in the Northern District of Illinois (for federal court cases). But he also maintains an active practice in Missouri, where he maintains an affiliation with and works with the St. Louis firm of Chackes, Carlson and Halquist. Mr. Lehrer is also a member of many federal district court bars (including the trial bar in the Northern District of Illinois), two federal courts of appeals bars, and the United States Supreme Court. Mr. Lehrer has litigated many cases in the United States Supreme Court, most recently Camreta v. Greene, 131 S. Ct. 2020 (2011).