We are slow catching up on recent news in the Drendel & Jansons Law Group. The New Year brings a new member to the Firm, Edward J. Boula, III. Ed comes to us via Downers Grove, where he was born and raised, DeKalb, where he graduated from Northern Illinois University Summa Cum Laude and with University Honors from the NIU College of Law Magna Cum Laude and Jacksonville, IL where he began his legal career working for the Rammelkamp Bradney firm.
Ed was an exceptional student, as can be seen from his performance noted above. He was also the Lead Articles Editor of the Northern Illinois University Law Review, a prestigious and significant position with the law school’s scholarly publication. Ed also had the honor of having his own article published.
During his law school, Ed clerked for the Honorable Donald Hudson in the Second District Appellate Court and the Judge Frederick J. Kapala in the United States District Court, Northern District of Illinois. He also worked for the DuPage County State’s Attorney prosecuting misdemeanor offenses and published an article in the Journal of the DuPage County Bar Association, Taking Flight or Landing: Implied Field Preemption Under the Federal Aviation Act of 1958 and Wyeth v. Levine in the DCBA Brief, Vol. 24 (2011-12).
Ed played soccer for Downers Grove South in high school on a team that went 23-1-1 and won the State Championship in 2004.
Ed was the President of the Morgan County Bar Association before leaving Jacksonville to join the Drendel & Jansons Law Group. He is admitted to practice in all Illinois state courts, the Northern and Central District of the United States District Courts of Illinois, and is a member of the American Bar Association, Illinois State Bar Association, and the Kane County Bar Association.
Ed will be doing a little bit of everything with the Firm, but he desires to focus on transactional work, including corporate and business law, estate planning, elder law, probate and trust administration, municipal law and commercial litigation.
While we are excited to welcome Ed and introduce as a new member of the Firm, we are sad to say goodbye to Tyler Stevenson, who left us to move back to his home town where he will take over the position of loan officer and sometime in-house legal counsel for First National Bank. Tyler will be missed by us and our clients, but his wife and children appreciate that he was willing to return with them to the friends and family of their home town. He is that kind of guy.
In fact, Tyler was the one to remind us of Ed, who we actually interviewed when we hired Tyler to clerk with us over the summer five years ago. Ed and Tyler were the two finalists for the position at the time, and we might have taken them both on if we had the space and the work, as they were both exceptional candidates. We were fortunate to have had Tyler for five years and even more fortunate to be the reason for Ed to return to the Chicago suburbs to become a member of Drendel & Jansons.