When he was elected third vice president of the Illinois State Bar Association in 1985, Jerome Mirza set in motion the planning for two of the more significant, lasting bar initiatives in several decades.

They were the establishment for ISBA members of an accessible, affordable series of continuing legal education programs, and the creation of a professional liability insurance company run by lawyers for lawyers.

Mr. Mirza, who was ISBA president in 1988-89, died Oct. 12 in Chicago, three weeks before his 70th birthday. He had been in intensive care at Northwestern Memorial Hospital since suffering a severe heart attack on Aug. 26 in Bloomington.

During his leadership watch 19 years ago, the ISBA Law Ed Series was implemented, and it has developed into the fully staffed CLE Center that now helps members fulfill their minimum CLE standards.

And in the summer of 1988, the captive ISBA Risk Retention Group was capitalized – a venture that required new legislation. Subsequently named the ISBA Mutual Insurance Co., it will celebrate its 20th anniversary of continuous growth next year.

Starting the captive company was the response of Mr. Mirza and the Board of Governors after an affiliated commercial carrier proposed a 300 percent increase in premiums, take it or leave it.

When ISBA ingenuity proved the competition wrong, the market in Illinois was stabilized for all lawyers who sought malpractice coverage ever since.

To communicate his message of growing membership advantages, Mr. Mirza also engineered expansion of the ISBA Bar News into a timely medium of helpful information and features of interest to lawyers throughout the state.

A 1963 graduate of the University of Illinois College of Law, Jerome Mirza had studied theater at Illinois Wesleyan University and had planned to take advanced study toward a theatrical career.

But newly married and a young father as a college junior, he opted for the potential of greater security that a law degree could provide. He set his sights on becoming a trial lawyer and staying in Illinois.

Mr. Mirza's first association was with Bloomington trial lawyer Chester Thomson, who tossed him a case file and sent him to court the next day. He lost that case, but learned some lessons and completed more than 30 jury trials in the next two years.

Thomson took over several cases from Champaign lawyer John Appleman, who had suffered a heart attack, and had Mr. Mirza handle the trial work. His first verdict in Champaign County was a record $115,000.

By the time he started his own practice on Jan. 1, 1973, Mr. Mirza had clients throughout the Midwest. Home base was Bloomington, but he opened a Chicago office during his year as ISBA president and published the second edition of his “Illinois Tort Law Practice.”

Recognized for the theatrical instincts that helped him motivate juries and act creatively in court, he was requested by the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association to start an annual College of Advocacy in 1980.

He was ITLA president in 1981-82 and a board member of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America for 12 years. At the time he was elected to the exclusive Inner Circle of Advocates in 1988, he held the Illinois trial verdict award record of $36 million jointly with Eugene I. Pavalon.

That year, he also won a record Winnebago County judgment of $2 million, and was profiled in Rockford magazine as “The Equalizer.”

“He's in a class by himself,” Lawrence J. Ferolie of Rockford, a colleague on the ISBA board, told a Bloomington reporter. “If there's one weakness he has, it's that he always thinks he's right. But the problem is, he usually is right.”

The Board of Governors resolution presented to Mr. Mirza at the conclusion of his term as president noted that he worked quietly and effectively in asserting ISBA concerns to the Supreme Court, and spoke publicly on matters of vital interest to the bar.

“He diligently attended to the numerous duties of the office of president and guided the association with uncommon wisdom, strength and a certain amount of flair, and in such a way that all Illinois lawyers can be confident and proud of their association.”

Eighteen years later, ISBA members continue to benefit from innovations that maintain the enviable legacy of Jerome Mirza.