Quinn K. Rallins

Mr. Rallins practices from the firm’s Chicago office and litigates civil rights cases around the country, particularly cases concerning wrongful convictions, police killings, excessive force, deaths in jails and prisons, racial discrimination, and other constitutional violations.  He has helped his clients win more than $75 million in jury verdicts and settlements, including in Seats v. City of Dolton in 2022 ($33 million jury verdict in police chase case) and Weichel v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 2022 ($33 million verdict in wrongful conviction case).

He has long been engaged in the fight for racial and economic justice.  Prior to joining the firm, Mr. Rallins served as the inaugural Director of the Justice, Equity, and Opportunity (JEO) Initiative for the State of Illinois, and Deputy Chief of Staff for the Lt. Governor, where he designed and implemented policies and programs across state agencies, advised decision making across branches of government, and co-managed six governmental agencies.  Most significantly, Rallins helped to advance criminal justice reform policy, including the successful effort to outlaw wealth-based pretrial incarceration in Illinois. and led implementation of the Restore, Reinvest, and Renew Program, which invests 25% of net revenue collected into communities with the highest rates of unemployment, poverty, gun violence, and incarceration.

Mr. Rallins began his career as a community organizer and served as the executive director of a non-profit organizing residents in the Deep South to advance racial and economic opportunity on fair housing, voting rights, adequate schools, and safe neighborhoods. Rallins then went to study law at Northeastern University School of Law, where he researched cases of anti-civil rights violence between the 1930s and 1960s in the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Clinic.  Rallins also worked on racial discrimination cases as a law clerk with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., wrongful convictions in Alabama as a law clerk at the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama, and externed for Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.  Rallins then became a staff attorney fellow at the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law, where he advised policymakers on the expansion of Medicaid and other public benefits, diverted youth with mental health conditions from the juvenile justice system, and passed legislation to curtail the use of excessive force by law enforcement on youth in schools.

For his commitment to justice, Mr. Rallins has received numerous awards, including recognition as a Harvard Galbraith Inequality Scholar, Economic and Political Studies Scholar at Cambridge University, and 2021 Leadership Greater Chicago Fellow.

Mr. Rallins has been a professor and visiting lecturer, and is on faculty at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.

He serves on various boards and advisory committees, and is the President of the Board of Directors for the Chicago Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights.

Bar Admissions

• Illinois
• U.S. District Court Northern District of Illinois
• U.S. District Court Central District of Illinois
• U.S. District Court Eastern District of Wisconsin
• U.S. District Court Western District of Texas
• U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit