About Robert
Robert Shipley began his academic path in history before turning to law. He attended the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1971 and earned a B.A. in History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1973. He completed his J.D. at Northern Illinois University in 1978.
After law school he entered private practice and, by the early 1980s, was working as an associate at Baskin Server Berke & Weinstein. That role was an early step in a steady progression into leadership positions. Over the next decade Shipley moved into firm management, taking on a series of managing partner and managing lawyer roles that shaped the rest of his career.
In 1989 he became a managing partner at Shipley & Wilner, Ltd. He led Shipley & Associates, Ltd. as managing lawyer starting in 1994, and then Franklin & Shipley, Ltd. as managing partner in 1999. He spent part of the 2010s as a partner at Quintairos, Prieto, Wood & Boyer, P.A., beginning in 2013. A year later he established Shipley Law Group Ltd., where he serves as managing partner.
Shipley has been a member of the Illinois State Bar since 1979. He is admitted to practice in Illinois, before the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. He is a certified mediator and serves as a panel arbitrator for the American Arbitration Association. He also sits on the panel for the Cook County Mandatory Arbitration Program.
His professional memberships run across a range of local and national organizations. He holds current memberships in the American Bar Association, the Illinois State Bar Association and the Chicago Bar Association. He is listed with the Defense Research Institute and the Illinois Association of Defense Trial Counsel. He has served on the Interdisciplinary Cooperation Committee and the Civil Practice and Procedure Section Council, and he has been involved with the American Institute for Paralegal Studies as a faculty member in earlier years.
Colleagues and opposing counsel have encountered Shipley most often in managed litigation and alternative dispute resolution settings. He combines courtroom admission across state and federal venues with ongoing work as a mediator and arbitrator. He now concentrates his practice on litigation management, mediations and arbitrations at Shipley Law Group Ltd.
