Lucille Zielinski
Founding partner
Force, false arrest and unlawful searches. Lucille founded the firm to take on the cases other offices send away.
Civil rights, Chicago
Institutions have lawyers.
So do the people they hurt.
Zielinski & Prasad is a Chicago firm of four civil rights lawyers. We represent people harmed by police, jails, schools and public agencies.
What we say, and the matter behind it
Four sample matters in outline, one for each kind of case we take. Every case turns on its own facts, and none of these predicts yours.
- Force and false arrest
A police report is a claim, not a fact.
Sample matter: body-camera footage, requested and obtained, showed a different order of events than the incident report. The complaint quoted the footage.
- Public bodies
Public money does not buy an exemption from equal treatment.
Sample matter: a school district’s discipline records, read line by line, showed one group of students sent home far more often than another. The case began with those pages.
- Disability access
A building no one can enter is a closed door.
Sample matter: a county office with no step-free entrance and no way to ask for help from the sidewalk. A demand letter named the barrier, and a visit with an access consultant confirmed the repair.
- People in custody
A sentence has an end date.
Sample matter: a person held in a county facility after a court ordered release, because two offices never compared notes. The claim was built on the timeline, hour by hour.
The lawyer you call is the lawyer who signs.
Four lawyers, each with a kind of case. You meet the one who will work on yours at the first conversation.
Sunil Prasad
Partner
Discrimination by schools, agencies and other public bodies, and by employers that answer to the public.
Hadley Tamayo
Partner
Disability access: buildings, transit, websites and the people who run them, from a first letter to a courtroom.
Emmanuel Deverell
Associate
People in custody: medical care, over-detention, conditions and appeals from the courts that rule on them.
Start with what happened.
You will talk to a lawyer, not an intake script. Nothing you say makes us your lawyers until we agree in writing, so please do not send confidential details by email.