Shelley Smith came to the firm in 2012 with 20 years of experience in the litigation and trial of complex commercial cases. Shelley has gained a reputation among her clients and peers as a highly effective, tenacious and extremely responsive lawyer with a successful track record of representing corporate clients in disputes in numerous areas, including: contract disputes, business torts, federal banking claims, antitrust violations, securities fraud, patent, copyright and trademark infringement, ERISA, and class actions. She has extensive experience defending clients in civil and criminal investigations and prosecutions instituted by the United States Department of Justice and the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. Clients have entrusted this broad range of cases to her care based on their trust in Shelley’s ability, her integrity, her sensitivity to the goals of the business, and her talent in finding solutions to even the most intractable legal challenges by combining creative legal analysis with a complete mastery of the facts.

Her educational background includes a B.A. from State University of New York at Stony Brook with honors (summa cum laude, valedictorian, Phi Beta Kappa), and a J.D. from Columbia University School of Law, where she graduated with honors as a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and Managing Editor of the Law Journal. During law school, Shelley worked as an intern with the Antitrust Division of the New York Attorney General’s Office and with Sullivan & Cromwell, where she was invited to return as an associate.

After graduation, Shelley joined Sullivan & Cromwell, where she worked for several years before moving to Chicago. Four years after joining Jenner & Block in Chicago, she became an equity partner. Shelley has been named as an Illinois Super Lawyer in antitrust litigation and maintains an AV Preeminent Peer Review Rating in Martindale-Hubbell.

Shelley has:

• Successfully defended a multi-national packaging corporation in the jury trial of a $40 million patent and tortious interference suit in federal court in Wilmington, Delaware;
• Obtained a multi-million dollar settlement for a client in a patent infringement case after representing the client in a Markman hearing which led to partial summary judgment on claim construction and validity;
• Represented a prominent real estate developer in a jury trial of claims against the developer for failing to pay an exclusive broker fee of $4.7 million for financing a high-rise office building, where the trial resulted in a partial verdict that saved the developer $3.5 million in broker fees;
• Defended a major Japanese electronics manufacturer in criminal prosecutions for price-fixing in the U.S. and Canada and in four related class actions; negotiating favorable plea agreements and pre-trial settlements in the criminal and civil matters respectively.
• Provided advice and opinions over many years to a state university on issues relating to the Freedom of Information Act, the Open Meetings Act, state and federal procurement regulations, ethics, student lending, and other compliance matters.
• Won a jury verdict of acquittal in a first-degree murder case representing an indigent and mentally impaired defendant on a pro bono basis where the charge was contradicted by evidence of the defendant’s whereabouts at the time of the crime.

Shelley’s clients have been clustered primarily in the banking, leasing, manufacturing and real estate industries. Over the last four years, she has sharpened her substantive knowledge of the law governing banking, contracts, secured transactions and alternative dispute resolution as a professor of commercial law, global and electronic banking, contracts and alternative dispute resolution. Mastery of the law on these subjects will prove particularly useful to the industries she has served, as defaults and near defaults in contract, debt and regulatory obligations become more common.