LGBT Legal Advocacy, Social Change and Family Law: Why Lawyers Matter

HLS Lambda is excited to have Richard Wilson delivering the keynote address at our conference this year! Mr. Wilson is a partner at Grund & Leavitt in Chicago, IL and has practiced exclusively in the field of family and matrimonial law for twenty years. His work has emphasized negotiation, litigation and appellate practice in dissolution and related matters, including custody and visitation, complex valuation and division of marital and non-marital assets and interests, pre- and post-nuptial agreements, and domestic violence. Mr Wilson’s practice has particular concentration in the area of same-sex domestic relations law, where he has long and uniquely distinguished himself, with particular emphasis on nontraditional family law and the rights and interests of persons in same-sex relationships, including marriage and its equivalents, dissolution, custody, visitation and access to children, parentage, and domestic partnerships, and recognition of such relationships from one jurisdiction to the other. Mr Wilson has frequently spoken and lectured on these issues both in the US and Canada. He is currently an Adjunct Professor at IIT/Chicago-Kent College of Law, where he teaches in the LLM program on the law of nontraditional families. In addition, Mr. Wilson served as President of the National LGBT Bar Association from 2006-2008.