A Chicago attorney who specializes in personal-injury litigation-and who raises show horses and pilots planes and flies to Los Angeles for her haircuts, who drives a Mercedes 500SL and a Range Rover and has three homes, who is invariably described as flashy, flamboyant, brash, sultry and smart-is being touted as “the next Rush Limbaugh.”
Major Networks, a Chicago-based company that produces nationally syndicated radio talk shows (Bob Costas, Morton Downey Jr., John Madden, Harry Caray), has slotted local lawyer Susan Loggans, 44, opposite the conservative Limbaugh’s highly rated radio program and pitched her as “a refreshing alternative to that windbag and his pompous nonsense.” Major Networks provides programs to 1,130 stations across the U.S. with a potential audience of 65 million people.
The Monday-through-Friday program “Loggans on Law,” launched in late August, is broadcast live from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. (Central time) on a handful of stations as diverse as Palm Springs, Calif., Santa Fe and Carlisle, Pa., and the goal is to have 55 to 60 stations by year’s end. (The show isn’t carried in the Chicago area.)
Chris Devine, president of Major Networks, says Loggans was tapped for the program, the first national radio talk show that focuses on law, because of her “dynamic personality,” her “tremendous credibility” and her “authority.”
Loggans isn’t about to deny a single word he says.
Without hesitation she coolly tells you she is one of the best personal-injury lawyers in the U.S., certainly one of the top five plaintiffs’ lawyers in Chicago; that she is the first woman to specialize in personal-injury plaintiff’s litigation; that she is intelligent, has a photographic memory and has long been on call to guest on TV (including “Oprah”) and radio shows whenever “they need a token woman lawyer.”
With her long blond hair, her perfectly manicured nails, her sleekly tailored suit, sitting in her posh office on the 28th floor of a modern white marble tower with a sensational view of Chicago from wraparound windows, Loggans looks more like a celebrity or a model than the stereotypical attorney.
Referring to Limbaugh’s program, she says: “We will be a competitor. I think the era of the strongly opinionated, one-sided talk-show host is over and that a bipartisan host, like I intend to be, will be more popular.
“Where he is politics, I am current events with a law angle. I read six newspapers a day. Every story you see in the news has a law relationship to it. I intend to express my opinion on all kinds of things, but instead of saying, `This is the answer,’ like he does, I intend to say, `This is my opinion and this is the other side.’
“Anybody who’s going to compete with him has to be outspoken, have opinions, be unabashed in expressing them. And that’s me.”
Though many of her listeners’ calls relate to topical events, Loggans has also responded to a variety of queries-the liability of police in high-speed chases, how to deal with an attorney who provides unsatisfactory service, brain damage in infants (one of her specialties). Recently she took advantage of the opportunity to display her experience (“20 years”) in aviation litigation (“headed nearly every aviation bar association”) by devoting nearly the whole program to the USAir crash near Pittsburgh, offering her opinions on causes and potential lawsuits, and calling the investigation “a total ripoff on the American public.” There’s always time, though, for “A little O.J. every day.”
She talks almost non-stop, sounds vivacious, sympathetic, experienced. She is. She has done this kind of thing before.
She has been a guest on Clark Weber’s show on WJJD-AM, then had her own program on that station, and she has appeared on TV’s WCIU-Ch. 26, and Kevin Matthews’ morning radio show on WLUP-FM.
“The phone lines go crazy when she comes in,” says Mitch Rosen, executive producer of Matthews’ show. “She comes off so confident when she talks about legal matters, we’d have her back any time.”
Loggans says it was alderman-attorney Ed Burke who originally planted the idea of having her own program.
“I’d heard her (on the air) and told her that she did a very good job and probably would be the ideal kind of personality that would be successful in her own radio show,” he says, describing her as a “very talented and energetic person who has carved out a unique niche here in Chicago. She is quite successful in personal-injury litigation and is widely respected.”
Dissenting opinions
Maury Garvey, a medical malpractice defense lawyer, says Loggans is known as “aggressive and very talented. She is a very capable adversary.”
Some colleagues are more reticent. Off the record, nearly a dozen lawyers met word of “Loggans on Law” with assorted swipes, ranging from her efforts at “self-promotion” to questioning whether she could keep up with law in general for a daily program while maintaining a practice in a specialty.
Negative comments don’t come as a surprise to Loggans.
“They call me `dragon lady’ around town,” she says with a shrug, acceding that everybody also calls her “tough,” then acknowledging that she is.
“I am very tenacious. I consider myself an extremely moral person with the highest of ethics. Within the bounds of doing everything ethical, yes, I’m tough because I will do whatever it takes within those boundaries to be successful.”
She says some lawyers feel less than cordial toward her because she’s so successful, because she got where she is on her own.
Loggans was born Dec. 31, 1949, in Clinton, Ill., a small farming community located about halfway between Bloomington and Decatur. Her parents divorced when she was 2. She and her mother, a former Navy lieutenant commander, moved to Decatur, to Ft. Lauderdale, then to Chicago. Along the way she attended a convent finishing school in California and says: “It was a major turning point for me. I hated it. They were all snobbish, well-to-do and stuck up. That’s when I decided I wanted to be a down-to-earth person.”
Her mother, Cleta Glenn, a divorce lawyer who works out of Loggans’ offices, has always been her role model. “She’s the one who convinced me I could do anything I wanted if I’d work for it,” Loggans says.
The only tension in their relationship came during her college years.
Strictly because “Playboy magazine gave it the highest ranking as a party school,” Loggans headed for the University of Arkansas and enrolled in premed.
Calling herself “irresponsible and undisciplined” as a student, she says she almost flunked out. Her mother made her transfer to the University of Illinois at Chicago (“a real culture shock”) and live at home.
“Bottom line,” she says: “Great grades but I decided against medicine. I couldn’t wait 10 years for success.
Choosing a legal career
“I wanted to be a trial lawyer because of the audience factor, because I wanted to do great things and be recognized.”
She entered John Marshall Law School and “immediately started maneuvering myself into greater position” by getting elected to an office in the law fraternity.
In a move that greatly affected her career, she invited Philip H. Corboy, legendary even in the early 1970s as a top personal-injury lawyer, to participate in a fraternity program she was chairing; he accepted. “That’s how I met him,” she says. Later, a meeting at a bar association event led to the offer of a clerking position in Corboy’s firm.
“I worked my brains out. I’d volunteer for everything. I worked 80 hours a week for two years while going to law school full time, and Phil encouraged that.”
She had transferred to DePaul (“the minute I could”) and, after graduating, joined Corboy’s firm as an associate and remained there three years.
With bank loans of $60,000, she opened her own firm in 1977.
She has a thick stack of magazine and newspaper clippings that trace her career through the 17 years she has headed her own office.
There’s one from the December 1985 issue of The National Law Journal: “15 of the nation’s top trial lawyers talk about their winning tips and techniques.” Among them: Melvin Belli, then 78; Philip Corboy, then 61; and, the youngest lawyer and only woman, Susan Loggans, then 35.
A book called “Power! Women,” dealing with “how some women rise to the top,” includes a chapter about Loggans, then 39. In it she talks about her five-year plan and her intention of being at a financial level then that would allow her to do something else, something that would provide her with “ego satisfaction,” such as “the media.” That was five years ago.
There are stories and gossip-column items about her social life, her charity work, her $2.75 million settlement in a malpractice suit in DuPage County, as well as about her biggest verdict ever, a $4.5 million malpractice suit in Will County.
Defending herself
It’s seeing Loggans’ name in print that “drives some of the lawyers crazy,” says one. “She’s outstripped them at marketing and they resent her for it.”
One piece that’s not included in her handout materials is a stinging profile, called “The Making of a Celebrity,” in a 1986 issue of Chicago Lawyer. It details the same criticisms that are lobbed her way today: That she exaggerates, that she uses public-relations agents, that she doesn’t do much trial work.
A lawyer who calls the story “brutally frank but also the most objective description of what Susan is all about,” also says, “She has the intellect and other characteristices that would make her an outstanding trial lawyer, but she hasn’t done what she claims she has.”
“Not much trial work?” Loggans flares. “I do as much as anyone else, probably as many as Phil Corboy. As many as I’d like to? No, because they settle before you can try them.”
Loggans says that she has tried 75 to 100 cases over 20 years; that of the hundreds of cases she’s settled, 75 to 100 have had a value of $1 million or more; and she has about 500 cases pending. Her specialties are “medical malpractice and trying large cases, with a subspecialty, children with cerebral palsy.” She has 37 employees, six of them lawyers.
Loggans says she used to think “it was the age thing” that made people feel the way they do about her, “but now I know it’s that I’m so candid and outspoken.”
“What people think of me doesn’t matter,” she says. “The only thing that counts is what I do for my clients, interpreted through dollars and cents recovered for them. It sounds corny, but if I can make a difference in people’s lives then I’m free to live the rest of my life the way I want and get as much fun out of it as I want.
“From the beginning, I committed myself to work in the fast lane, play in the fast lane,” she says. “A daily talk show will crimp my style. I haven’t worked on a Friday for 10 years.
“I try to do five or six days’ work in four,” she explains, “by working 14 hours a day, from 7:30 to 7:30 in the office, a couple of hours at home at night, some stuff on Sundays.”
Always on the go
For years she has been leaving the city on Thursday nights, flying to her Ft. Lauderdale home during the winter, driving up to her summer house in Lake County in the summer. That’s where she raises American saddlebred show horses (currently 25).
She flies to Los Angeles every six or eight weeks to have her hair cut. She used to fly to Las Vegas to have her nails done, but now has them done in her office.
She shoots golf in the 80s and works out in her mini-gym at home, which is a combination of two apartments on East Lake Shore Drive, where she lives with her second husband, Michael Cox, 28, one of the associates in her firm. He’s writing a novel that she says “will be a best seller.”
She was married for 10 years to Ronald Galowich, a lawyer and real-estate businessman who has offices on the same floor as Loggans at Madison and Wells. “Ron’s a great guy,” she says. “He’s my best friend, next to Michael. We’re totally compatible except in our personal lives. I’m this fun-loving party person and Ron likes to talk business all the time. We parted while we were still great friends.”
Galowich describes Loggans the lawyer as “a woman who is like a man except that she’s a woman and so she is a threat to them. She can keep up with the boys at the golf course, in the courtroom, and she can belt ’em down with the boys. She’s done whatever she could to be part of the good old boys, but the good old boys don’t like it when the person is a woman-in this case, a smart, outspoken woman.”
Corboy, the dean of personal-injury lawyers here and mentor to many now in business for themselves, sees little problem with Loggans’ taking on the talk show program. “The type of questions that would be asked (by the audience) would be capably answered by her because she’s a very quick learn, a very smart person.
“Their issues could not be very significant or they would already have gone to a lawyer.
“They’re not going to be calling from AT&T asking about mergers, are they?”
