Twenty years ago, when the DuPage County Bar Association hired Brenda M. Carroll as a full-time legal aid attorney, 1988 was a year of political intrigue for the 110-year-old organization.
Patrick J. Leston, then vice chair of the ISBA Committee on Membership and Bar Activities, had handed the association president’s gavel to Ross P. Toran, and Robert R. Thomas was the Republican candidate for judge of the 18th Circuit.
The DCBA, citing protection of its tax status, opted not to endorse either candidate and was widely criticized in newspaper editorials for failing to apprise voters of their judicial qualifications.
The bar association also was involved in a lawsuit against DuPage County over a proposed security system in the new courthouse with surveillance that might be able to monitor privileged lawyer-client conferences.
And the DCBA also had gone on record in futile support of a call for an Illinois Constitutional Convention in 1990, because of “a clear and urgent need for a detailed review” of selection and discipline procedures in Article VI.
As controversy swirled overhead, however, the basic work of running a complex legal organization went on in the DuPage Bar Center in Wheaton.
The ongoing program of assistance to under-represented people in DuPage communities got a boost when 39-year-old Brenda Carroll, a lawyer for all of two years, was hired in September 1988 as director of the DCBA Legal Aid Service.
The DuPage bench and bar celebrated a legal aid leadership milestone - Carroll’s 20th anniversary at the helm - on Aug. 22 during a reception in Winfield.
The odyssey of her journey to this responsibility began in London, where she was born on the British army base where her father was stationed. Settling with her family in Oak Park as a teenager, she received a degree in English at Loyola in 1969.
Then Carroll went back across the pond to Dublin, where she wrote for the Irish Times. Returning to the states, she created copy for the Spiegel catalog, became a school teacher in Oak Park, and studied law at Chicago-Kent.
After receiving her law degree in 1986, Carroll began practicing with Renn & High in Lisle and Oak Brook, and volunteering with Chicago Legal Aid for Incarcerated Mothers.
“I’ve always been generally interested in law as a profession of helping,” she told a reporter after taking the DCBA position. “I just thought of law as central to so much of what was going on in this world.”
She said early on that she expected to be legal aid director “forever,” adding that “legal aid is my life.” Still at it almost two decades later, her dedication has not gone unnoticed or unrewarded.
Due to her efforts, the DuPage County Bar has twice been recognized during ISBA John C. McAndrews Pro Bono Service Award presentations, and some individual lawyers were honored along the way.
Carroll herself has received professional service awards from the Lawyers Trust Fund of Illinois, the DuPage YWCA and Family Shelter.
In 2004, she was named DCBA Lawyer of the Year by then-president Kevin Millon, who for several years has directed and acted in the annual Judges Nite bar show, a major fund raiser for legal aid.
A member of the ISBA Assembly for several years and a Fellow of the Illinois Bar Foundation, Carroll served on the host committee for a Fellows reception last year in Wheaton.
Her leadership ability also has benefited the DuPage Association of Women Lawyers, which was only six years old when she joined the DuPage bar staff.
Grace M. Kraus was president in 1988, and Carroll eventually held that office. Several other past presidents attended the reception last month.
Carroll followed a line of DAWL/ISBA exemplars that included Irene F. Bahr, Angela Imbierowicz and Colleen M. McLaughlin, and she supported their efforts in establishing the Child Friendly Courts Foundation.
Now the senior partner in a “law firm” of two legal aid attorneys, Carroll is often seen vacuuming, dusting and tidying up loose ends in the office on weekends.
During the past fiscal year, she and her staff logged 2,658 hours in screening 1,627 individuals for eligibility, accepting 228 of them as clients, and completing 276 cases.
They also referred 151 cases to private attorneys, who completed 130 cases and contributed 2,066 hours of pro bono legal representation.