Fra Noi Embrace Your Inner Italian
With nearly 40 years of experience practicing law, Chicago attorney Karen Conti is also an author and media personality who makes appearances on national and local radio and TV.
Next on her list of goals: finishing her second book, upping her list of visited countries to 62, and hosting her own TV show.
Conti, whose paternal grandparents were born in Italy, grew up in Berwyn, a suburb just west of Chicago. She graduated from Morton West High School and earned an undergraduate degree in political science and a law degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“I was always a person who liked to advocate for the underdog,” she says of her decision to study law. “I was also interested in running for office, something I would never do now in a million years!”
Conti and her first husband, Greg Adamski, ran a successful law firm and hosted a legal radio show together before his death in 2011.
Their resume included handling a successful appeal in a ballot access case before the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of the Cook County Democratic Party against the Harold Washington Party.
Perhaps most memorably, Conti and Adamski represented serial killer John Wayne Gacy during his final death row appeals, an experience she details in the book “Killing Time with John Wayne Gacy.” Gacy was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center in May 1994.
“In a weird twist of fate, my partner and I were called upon to visit him in prison about another legal matter involving the prison,” she recounted. “I was so curious that, even though I had no intention of representing him in anything, I insisted upon driving 6 ½ hours to the prison to meet the most evil man in the world. At that point, I decided that I wanted to represent him in trying to save his life. Ever since I was young, I believed the death penalty was wrong. This was my chance to stand up against it.”
Remarried to a retired businessman and musician, Conti lives in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood and spends half her time at her house in Delavan, Wisconsin. She also has two “exceptionally entitled” cats, she adds.
After handling almost every type of litigation in the last four decades, Conti now focuses primarily on family law.
“It is a fascinating area because people are very emotionally charged and you have to be astute in how to handle people in psychological crises. I find it very rewarding, too,” she says. “In business disputes, the result matters, but money can be re-earned. With your family, more than money is at stake. I am very empathetic and practical and I like using my mediation and collaborative law skills to help resolve people’s problems.”
Conti has taught law at the University of Illinois and DePaul University, and has appeared as a legal expert on programs on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, among many. During a recent week in July, she was on eight radio and TV news outlets commenting on cases involving murder, the Supreme Court, employment law and defamation.
Never knowing when she’ll be called to comment, she prepares by reading at least three newspapers per day. “Sometimes I am given five minutes before I am in front of a camera on my office desk,” she says. “Television is very visual, so you always have to look the part with the right hair, clothes and makeup. I have a full dressing room in my office, car and both houses, just in case!”
Conti has also hosted local radio shows for over 30 years, including “The Karen Conti Show” on WGN Radio. She picks newsworthy topics that she uses to explain the law “in plain English,” as well as “news you can use” topics that can help inform people of law topics relevant to their lives, she explains.
Encouraged by the positive reception of her first book (she won six book awards and an endorsement from noted author Scott Turow), Conti is now writing a novel. “I am halfway finished. It is legal in part, and in part it draws upon my experiences traveling the world and meeting people from all walks of life.”
She is also in talks with a production company to host her own TV show, and wants to travel to 10 more countries, in addition to the 52 she has already visited.
One final goal is knowing what it’s like not to be so busy, she adds. “But my guess is that after about one week of leisure, I would be bored silly.”
