Alumni Spotlight: Timothy M. Schank, BA'98 JD'01
After finishing a clerkship for a federal judge, Tim Schank knew that when he started at the Chicago office of Vedder Price, P.C., he would be getting what he had always wanted in a law firm.
Now in his fifth year as an associate in the firm’s commercial litigation group, Schank ’98 B.A. ’01 J.D. works mostly on construction, officer and director liability, and white collar/corporate governance matters. “I enjoy the fact that I’ve had a chance to work on a variety of cases. Notre Dame Law School taught me the importance of being a well-rounded attorney, with a more extensive and varied core curriculum than other law schools that made us think about how all those subjects fit together.”
Another reason Schank joined Vedder Price is that he sensed right away that his colleagues had more in common than work. “During that half-day of interviews, as I went from person to person, I could tell that these people all had personal connections outside of work. That was important to me,” he remembers. “It’s the nature of the profession today that people spend a lot of time at work. If you’re going to have a legal career, you should pay attention to the people you’ll be spending all that time with. Do you like them? Do you share their values? Do you respect and trust those people?”
Shared values have always been essential for Schank and his wife Bridget ’99. In 2005, the couple helped found a youth ministry group at Old Saint Patrick’s Church in Chicago and participate in leading its activities two Sunday mornings each month. They have helped organize and chaperone summer service trips with the teens to the Gulf Coast of Mississippi the year after Hurricane Katrina, and to Gary Bottom, West Virginia, the poorest county in the United States. This summer, they’ll build houses on an Indian reservation in Eagle Butte, South Dakota.
Both in the classroom and working at Notre Dame’s Legal Aid Clinic during law school, Schank says he found many role models among his professors. “They taught me the need to have a personal touch in the law, whether they practiced as a partner at a major firm or as a client counselor in a legal aid clinic,” he says. “They taught me how to be a professional and how to live out the ideals and values of a Notre Dame lawyer.”
