Costello, McMahon, Gilbreth & Murphy, Ltd. was provided the highest rating, AV, by Martindale Hubbell, which rates firms throughout the nation.
Jim Costello, Paul McMahon and Rick Murphy have been designated as “Leading Lawyers”, which purports to rate the top 5% of lawyers in Chicago.
Paul McMahon holds the Cook County record for the largest verdict in Illinois against a municipality, with a $50 million jury verdict. (That verdict is also our firm’s largest verdict.)
Jim Costello has been recognized as a Super Lawyers for many years.
The 40 under Forty is a recognition given to the best young lawyers in Illinois. At our firm, we have three members of this illustrious group: Rick Murphy (2013), Rich Egan (2014), and Michael Crane (2024).
Rich Egan holds the second highest verdict in Cook County for an un-operated herniated disc.
Rich has been named a Super Lawyers Rising Star since 2011.
Tom Plouff holds the Cook County record for the largest verdict in a slip-and-fall case, the largest verdict in a case involving a knee injury and the record for un-operated compression fractures. Tom also holds the largest verdict for an apparent agency issue, where a hospital is held liable where they hold doctors out as its agent.
Paul McMahon’s $50 million-dollar verdict in the case of Gant v. City of Chicago, involving a botched call to Chicago’s 911 center, received national exposure. It was one of the year’s most important trials, as reported in The National Law Journal.
A Chicago Sun Times article attempted to determine, objectively, which firms had tried the largest cases to verdict during that year. The authors went to the Cook County Jury Verdict Reporter. Of the eight total verdicts which were in excess of $5,000,000, our firm had two.
Jim Costello and Paul McMahon obtained a favorable ruling in the nationally recognized case of Miller Parrish v. American Infertility Group. In that decision, the Circuit Court judge ruled that the next of kin of an embryo, conceived by way of IVF, were entitled to bring suit under Illinois’s Wrongful Death Act. That decision was the cover story on The Chicago Sun Times. It received prominent play from all four national networks (Paul appeared on the Today Show), and all of the local news stations. It was then picked up by the wire services and was reported by scores of newspapers, both nationally and even as far away as India and New Zealand.