Best-selling Author to Deliver Keynote

• Publication year: 2011
• Pages: 08
• Citation: Vol. 80 No. 4 Pg. 08

Best-Selling Author to Deliver Keynote No. 80 J. Kan. Bar Assn 4, 08 (2011) Kansas Bar Journal April, 2011

Where are you Perry Mason?" Scott Turow, who is a New York Times best-selling author and practicing attorney, will be discussing the popular images of lawyers and focusing on the dizzying ambivalence that Americans believe about lawyers and tracing the reasons for both their liking and loathing.

Turow was born in Chicago and graduated with honors from Amherst College in 1970. He taught creative writing at Stanford University as a E.H. Jones lecturer from 1972-1975 before going to law school at Harvard University. After graduating with honors in 1978, Turow began work as an assistant U.S. attorney in Chicago and served as lead counsel in a number of prosecutions related to corruption in the legal profession connected to Operation Greylord, a federal investigation of corruption into the Illinois judiciary.

He said his father was a prophet in his own time, in that he disliked lawyers long before that was common.

"My friends went to law school and I was fascinated by them," Turow said. To him, it was either be an academic or do something else. Turow chose to do something else; he chose law school.

Since 1986, he has had an active law practice at SNR Denton in Chicago, where he concentrates on white collar criminal defense and devotes a substantial amount of time to pro bono matters.

Despite his legal background, Turow said he still remains the novelist he is trying to become.

"My mom had literary ambitions," he said. "From 11 or 12 years old, I knew I always wanted to be a novelist. I think I willed myself into that."

Turow is the author of multiple best-selling legal thrillers, such as "The Burden of Proof," "Presumed Innocent," "Pleading Guilty," and "Personal Injuries." Turow also wrote "One L," an autobiographical book about his first year at Harvard Law and...