Alison Conlon is a partner in the Chicago office of Barnes & Thornburg and is a member of the firm's Litigation Department and the Commercial Litigation Practice Group. She focuses her practice on litigating commercial disputes, toxic tort cases, professional malpractice issues and other matters for companies, municipalities and individuals. Ms. Conlon also uses alternative dispute resolution, including mediation and arbitration, to assist her clients.
Ms. Conlon's experience includes having represented manufacturers, real estate investors and advisors, law firms, insurance companies, and financial services providers. She has helped Fortune 500 companies to win commercial arbitration matters worth millions of dollars, and has defended large class action suits in multiple states brought against a Fortune 100 company.
Ms. Conlon's environmental litigation experience includes defending corporations and municipalities in federal and state courts. Representative cases include litigation where more than 1,000 individual plaintiffs alleged personal injuries and property value diminution arising out of lead dust emissions from the operation of a smelter in Detroit, Michigan; a class action property damage lawsuit alleging the presence of TCE and PCE in a municipal water supply in Ohio; and work as liaison counsel defending multiple cases brought by hundreds of landfill neighbors alleging the presence of vinyl chloride in private drinking water wells and the risk of vapor intrusion.
Prior to joining Barnes & Thornburg Ms. Conlon was a partner at the Chicago firm, Wildman Harrold. She has also served as a law clerk for the Honorable Charles P. Kocoras in the Northern District of Illinois.
Ms. Conlon is a member of the American Bar Association; the Illinois State Bar Association; and the Chicago Bar association, where she is a co-chairperson of the Tort Litigation Committee. She serves on the Northern District of Illinois Local Rules Committee, and is on the ISBA/CBA Joint Task Force on Limited Scope Representation.
Ms. Conlon is admitted to practice in the state of Illinois and before the U.S. District Courts for the Northern and Southern Districts of Illinois, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, and the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Indiana.
Ms. Conlon earned a B.A. cum laude in English from Yale University and an M.A. in English from Georgetown University. She earned her J.D. magna cum laude from Duke University Law School in 2000.