Katie Hill, '07: Overseeing all 15 Divisions of the City of Chicago's Law Department
New lawyers at City Hall to help steer police reform
Two fresh hires at City Hall will help steer Chicago through the most momentous legal issue the city has faced in decades: reforming the Chicago Police Department.
Tyeesha Dixon and Katie Hill this summer joined Chicago's 280-attorney Law Department. Hill, 39, who most recently was policy director for Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx, will hold the department's No. 2 job and report directly to Corporation Counsel Ed Siskel.
Hill, who oversees all 15 of the department's divisions, has dealt with criminal justice issues for much of her career, including as a litigator at Loevy & Loevy, a plaintiffs firm that rose to prominence winning multimillion-dollar verdicts against the city for police misconduct.
Neither Hill nor Dixon planned to be a lawyer. Raised in Winnetka, Hill taught fifth grade in San Jose, Calif., after college graduation as part of Teach for America. She saw students who qualified for free lunches but refused them for fear of immigration authorities; in other cases she saw school administrators call police on misbehaving students, something that bothered her and that, "as a very young teacher, had a significant impact on me," she says.
Hill decided to become a lawyer, planning to move into education policy. But while she was at the University of Chicago Law School, volunteering with the Criminal & Juvenile Justice Project of the Mandel Legal Aid Clinic changed her trajectory.
She worked for a year at Loevy & Loevy in Chicago, then a couple of years as a public defender in Illinois' appellate courts before joining Emanuel's administration in 2014 to advise on public safety. She left in 2016 to join Foxx.
Read more at Crain's Chicago Business