Banahan & Haas

Focus and practice areas

Banahan & Haas works across two related bodies of law: what happens to property during life, and what happens to it after death. The firm handles probate, estate planning and elder law on one side, real estate and business matters on the other. Civil litigation runs alongside both.

The estate side covers wills, trusts, powers of attorney, guardianships, advance medical directives, Medicaid planning and probate administration. That is a working list, and the range of it matters. Guardianship petitions and Medicaid planning pull in different bodies of rules than a straightforward will does.

The firm also represents clients in probate and trust disputes. The site names three kinds: will contests, undue influence claims and breach of fiduciary duty. These are contested matters that go before a probate judge, and they tend to arrive after a family disagreement has already hardened.

The real estate and business work

The real estate practice covers residential and commercial transactions plus the litigation that follows them. Those are two fairly different jobs under one heading. A residential closing runs on deadlines and documents. Commercial work brings in lease terms, title questions and financing conditions that take longer to negotiate.

On the business side, the firm handles entity formation, corporate compliance, contract drafting, negotiations and litigation. Formation work is front-loaded: choosing a structure, filing with the Illinois Secretary of State, drafting the operating or shareholder agreement. Compliance work then continues year after year for the same client.

The firm also takes personal injury, workers' compensation, nursing home negligence and wrongful death cases. Nursing home negligence sits close to the elder law work, and the overlap is a practical one. A lawyer who has handled guardianships knows how those facilities are structured and who holds decision-making authority.

Who practises here

The site names two attorneys, Brian J. Banahan and Christopher L. Haas. Both began their legal careers in 1997. The firm reports more than 40 years of combined courtroom and transactional experience.

Brian J. Banahan

Banahan started in 1997 as a full-time 711 prosecutor with the Cook County State's Attorney's Office. Illinois Rule 711 lets supervised law students and recent graduates appear in court, so this was courtroom work early.

He went on to spend 17 years as chief legal counsel and Deputy Public Administrator for DuPage County. In that role he managed, administered, litigated, settled and closed hundreds of decedents' estates and related matters. In my opinion that is the single most useful line on the firm's website. A Public Administrator's office handles estates where nobody else steps forward, which means missing heirs, disputed assets and files that other lawyers turned down. Seventeen years of that is a lot of probate.

Christopher L. Haas

Haas began in 1997 clerking for Judges John Roe and Stephen Pemberton in Illinois' 13th Judicial Circuit. His work there involved legal research, attending hearings and trials, and preparing memoranda for the court.

The subject matter he saw as a clerk was broad: real estate, contracts, probate, estates, torts, family law, workers' compensation appeals and criminal law. A clerkship gives a lawyer a view of how judges actually decide things, including which arguments land and which ones read well on paper but fail in a courtroom. It shows up later in how motions get written.

Where the firm practises

The firm has offices in Geneva and Naperville, and says it has served the greater Chicago area since 1998. It works with individuals and businesses across seven counties: DuPage, Kane, Cook, Will, Lake, Kendall and DeKalb.

That footprint has some logic to it. Probate is filed in the county where the person lived, so a probate practice needs to be comfortable in several courthouses at once. Kane County sits around Geneva, DuPage around Naperville, and the other five ring them. Each circuit has its own local rules on notice, accountings and guardian appointments.

Two offices across that spread also cuts down travel for clients. Estate and guardianship matters often need signatures from people who are elderly or unwell, and the distance between a client's home and a lawyer's conference room becomes a real factor.

What the record shows

The verifiable facts here are limited to what the firm publishes, and as a reviewer I'd rather say what they are than stretch them. The firm dates itself to 1998. It names both attorneys and describes both careers with specific employers, courts and dates. It lists its practice areas in detail.

The site does not list law schools, bar admission years or attorney titles. It gives no case results or settlement figures. For a firm doing this kind of work, that reticence is unremarkable. Probate and guardianship outcomes are often confidential, and much of the estate planning work never produces a public result at all.

How these matters usually proceed

Some general context helps in reading the practice list. Illinois probate opens with a petition in circuit court, and the judge appoints a representative to gather assets, notify creditors and pay claims. Independent administration lets that representative act without a court hearing at each step. Supervised administration requires court approval, and contested estates usually end up there.

Will contests run on a tight clock. An Illinois petition to contest a will must be filed within six months of the will's admission to probate. Undue influence claims turn on the relationship between the person who made the will and the person who benefited from it, and they lean on medical records, witness accounts and the drafting attorney's file.

Guardianship follows a different path. A petition, a physician's report, an appointed guardian ad litem to interview the person, then a hearing. Medicaid planning runs on a five-year lookback for asset transfers, which is why the timing of gifts matters so much in that work.

None of that describes Banahan & Haas specifically. It describes the terrain the firm's stated practice areas sit in, and it explains why the combination of a long-serving Deputy Public Administrator and a former circuit court clerk is a coherent pairing for a firm built around probate and real estate. The firm has been operating under this name since 1998.