Cortland Pinnick was six years old when he saw his mother’s head turned almost all the way around on her neck. They were heading south in a rented car on I-65 near Crown Point, Indiana, on their way back to Atlanta after a family visit to Joliet. Cortland’s mother, Melissa, was sitting in the front seat next to the driver, her cousin Constance McNair. Cortland and his 21-month-old sister, Manna, shared the backseat with McNair’s two children. In the darkness, McNair heard a thump. She lost control and the car left the road. It spun around in the median strip and came to rest straddling the opposite lanes. The lights and radio were off, the car wouldn’t start, and the doors wouldn’t unlock. Within seconds they were struck by a northbound Cadillac going 65 miles per hour. Melissa Pinnick was nearly decapitated and died instantly. McNair suffered a broken jaw and a punctured lung. Manna was badly injured. The passenger in the Cadillac, the driver’s mother, was killed.
Millie Pinnick remembers the day she and other family members visited the Loop offices of Corboy & Demetrio. It was September 1, 1995, two weeks after her stepdaughter was killed. Vincent Cornelius, the family friend they’d retained, took them to Corboy for a consultation, and attorney G. Grant Dixon III, who’s no longer with the firm, “gave us the grand tour, the spiral staircase,” Millie Pinnick says. “The conference room was like a grand ballroom somewhere. There were videos for the kids to watch. Anything you wanted was right at hand.” Corboy & Demetrio took the case, promising Cornelius a standard referral fee of one-third of Corboy’s fee, which would be one-third of any damages recovered.
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Parts of the Corboy firm’s case summary have been redacted in the name of attorney-client privilege. Still, the summary does reveal some of what went on between the family and the firm at this time. It says that on August 18, 1999, managing partner Robert Bingle told the Pinnick family and their original attorney, Vincent Cornelius, “that we felt it was in everyone’s best interest that at this point that we step out of the case and they hire new attorneys to take over.” Bingle told Cornelius that the firm’s malpractice insurance would cover him, should any malpractice action proceed.
Geoffrey Hazard Jr., professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on legal malpractice, testified for the Pinnicks as an expert witness. He says that cases like theirs are difficult to win “for essentially the same reason that medical malpractice cases are not easy. There is a lot of reluctance in both professions [lawyers and doctors] to testify against one another. Lawyers generally are respected people, dealing with a complex art called the practice of law. The law and the courts rightly don’t want to be Monday morning quarterbacks.”
An Irish Catholic Democrat who grew up in West Rogers Park, the senior Corboy is the son and grandson of Chicago police officers. He got his law degree at Loyola in 1948, a time when the corporate bar was almost exclusively a WASP redoubt populated by Ivy Leaguers. Shut out of blue-chip firms, working-class kids from Chicago law schools often launched their careers in the state’s attorney or public defender’s office, eventually becoming plaintiff’s lawyers and, perhaps, Cook County judges. Corboy has observed “when I started the practice of law, all judges came through the political system.”
Yet Dixon himself stated in a 1998 motion in the Indiana case that “it is undisputed that the left tire and/or wheel ‘brake down’ [sic] caused the initial loss of control” by the driver of the Diamante. That damaged left tire was observed by the investigator Corboy & Demetrio had sent to look at the car.
