Laurie E. Leader joined the IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law faculty in 1999. Professor Leader previously worked in private practice, specializing in labor and employment law. From 1995 until she began work at Chicago-Kent, Professor Leader was the principal of Leader & Associates Ltd. Previously, she had been a partner in several other Chicago law firms.
From 1995-97, she was the chair of the Gender Bias in the Court Room Committee of the Chicago Bar Association's Alliance for Women, and from 1988-89 she was co-chair of the Chicago Bar Association's Young Lawyer Section Labor and Employment Law Committee. She speaks regularly on a variety of employment-related topics and represents both employers and management employees in all aspects of labor and employment law.
Between 2006 and 2008, Professor Leader was the co-host of "The Employment Hour," which appeared on Comcast cable. In November 2006, she was regional co-chair of the first ABA Labor and Employment Law Committee's Trial Advocacy Competition in Chicago. In November 2007, she helped draft the materials and problem used in the 2008 national competition and served as one fo the judges.
She has authored several articles and two treatises: Drafting Employment and Termination Agreements (Matthew Bender & Co.) (1993) and Wages and Hours: Law & Practice (Matthew Bender & Co.) (1990). She was also contributing author to two other Matthew Bender & Co. treatises: Labor Law (1983-86), which analyzed wage-hour and federal and state employment discrimination laws, and Business Organizations (1992), for which she contributed chapters analyzing Title VII, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, the Equal Pay Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1866. From 1985-87, she was a regular contributor of legal articles to the Woman in Direct Response Newsletter, and she was the revision author for Current Legal Forms--Vol. 13 on Employment and Termination Agreements (Rabkin & Johnson) (Matthew Bender & Co. 1998). She published a book chapter titled How to Evaluate and Investigate a Plaintiff's Employment Discrimination Case in IICLE's Employment Discrimination Handbook.
Professor Leader earned an A.B., magna cum laude, from Washington University in St. Louis and received a J.D. from Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, Cleveland State University.
She is an Executive Editor of the 2014 Supplement to the Bloomberg BNA treatise Employment Discrimination Law.