Why this exists
Someone who has just been hurt, or arrested, or served with papers, is usually handed a phone and a list of names. They call the first one, repeat their story to a receptionist, get told someone will call back, and start again with the next number. Meanwhile the facts that matter most are quietly expiring.
Chicago Legal Connections exists to make the first step once, properly: you describe what happened in your own words, the facts get organised while they are still fresh, and an attorney who actually handles that kind of matter in that county receives something coherent rather than a message slip.
What we are
An intake and attorney-connection service for Chicago, Cook, DuPage, Lake, Kane, McHenry and Will counties. We gather facts, organise them, flag what is time-critical, and connect matters to independently licensed Illinois attorneys.
What we are not
- We are not a law firm, and we are not your attorney.
- We do not give legal advice, and our intake staff are not permitted to.
- We do not tell you whether you have a valid claim.
- We do not tell you what a matter is worth. There is no estimator on this website and there never will be.
- We do not calculate legal deadlines. We will tell you that deadlines exist and that you should move promptly, and that is as far as it is responsible for us to go.
- We do not rank the attorneys in our network, and we do not claim any of them is the best at anything.
- We do not promise that an attorney will take your matter.
That list is longer than most organisations in this field would publish. We think it is the most useful thing on the page.
The investigative background
The organisation behind this service has conducted professional investigations in Illinois since 1991 — accident scenes, liability investigation, witness work, surveillance-video acquisition, evidence preservation and litigation support, for attorneys and for the people they represent.
That is why this intake asks the questions it does. It asks whether you kept the shoes you were wearing, because footwear is argued about in fall cases. It asks whether you believe cameras covered the area, because many commercial systems overwrite themselves within days and that is the single most perishable piece of evidence in the whole matter. It asks whether an insurer has already taken a recorded statement, because that is frequently the most consequential thing that has already happened and almost nobody is asked about it early.
None of those questions exist to make the form longer. They exist because somebody has watched the answer stop being available.
How we handle what you tell us
Narratives, intake answers and uploaded files are encrypted where they are stored. Documents are kept outside the public area of the server and can only be retrieved through an authenticated route that re-checks permission on every request. Photographs are reprocessed on upload to strip the location data phone cameras embed. Every view of a narrative or a document is logged in a record that cannot be edited or deleted.
We measure how this website is used with analytics we host ourselves, which sets no cookies and never sends your data to an advertising company — and which is not loaded at all on the intake pages. A service that asks you for your medical history and then ships your visit to an ad network would be inviting a fair question.
We will not tell you our systems are perfectly secure, because nobody's are. What we will tell you is exactly what we do, which is the paragraph above, and what we keep and for how long, which is in the Privacy Policy.
Where we are
5 East College Drive, Suite 102, Arlington Heights, IL 60004. One office, in the northwest suburbs. We work across the Chicago metropolitan area, but we are not a national brand with a Chicago landing page.