Taft Chicago partner Derrick Thompson, Jr. is receiving the “My Hero Award” from the Lawyers Lend-A-Hand to Youth group at the Spring Awards Celebration on April 28, 2022. The My Hero Award honors an attorney for his or her contributions to a tutoring or mentoring program.

Lawyers Lend-A-Hand to Youth channels the legal community’s resources to promote mentoring and tutoring programs to support Chicago youth. For more than 25 years, Lend-A-Hand’s focus was on awarding financial grants to one-to-one tutoring and mentoring programs in the Chicago area. In 2016, Lend-A-Hand Tutoring began providing volunteer one-to-one tutoring to students from the Englewood community.

Read about the award and more event details here.

Derrick is a trial lawyer and a member of Taft’s Litigation and Intellectual Property practice groups. He is a member of the Federal Trial Bar and focuses on complex commercial disputes and related negotiations. Derrick was selected as an Illinois Super Lawyer for Business Litigation in 2021 and 2022. He has been recognized as a top lawyer in creative arts earning distinction from Leading Lawyers in the category of Arts, Entertainment, and Sports. Leading Lawyers has also recognized him as a Top Commercial Litigator since 2020, which consists of the top 5% of Illinois lawyers, as selected by his peers. In 2021, he was one of 43 attorneys selected by his peers as a top lawyer demonstrating diversity in the Illinois bar. Derrick was also named to Crain’s Chicago Business’s list of 2020 “Notable Minorities in Accounting, Consulting, & Law”.