Our Attorneys

George F. Galland, Jr.

Contact George
  • Miner, Barnhill & Galland, P.C.
    325 N. LaSalle St. Suite 350
    Chicago, IL 60654
  • (312) 751-1170
  • Fluent in Spanish

Education

  • University of Chicago Law School, J.D. (1973) – Honors: Order of the Coif
  • Princeton University, B.A. (1967)

Over his five decades of practice at MBG, George Galland has been a civil trial lawyer and counselor in many different areas of the law. He has represented hundreds of individual clients and many for-profit and not-for-profit corporations. He has had an active class action practice representing both plaintiffs and defendants. He has tried dozens of jury and bench cases to verdict in state and federal courts in Illinois and other states on behalf of both plaintiffs and defendants, and has handled numerous cases in arbitrations or administrative hearings before various bodies. George also has been responsible for briefing and arguing more than 50 decided appeals in federal and state appellate courts. In 2024, George became “of counsel” to MBG but continues his active legal practice.

The following is a summary of the areas in which George has concentrated his practice.

  • Healthcare Litigation

    George has represented both plaintiffs and defendants in this area. He has served as outside counsel for many hospitals and clinics, including two of Chicago’s largest teaching hospitals and a number of major institutions in downstate Illinois. In this capacity he has been involved in some of these institutions’ largest and most complex legal matters, including the following:

    • Insurance Coverage. George has advised his hospital clients in a wide range of insurance disputes arising from the hospitals’ self-insurance programs and their relation with excess insurers, and has handled a number of large-scale lawsuits arising out of such matters. These cases have involved issues across the gamut of insurance law, including notice issues, bad-faith-denial claims, insurance contract interpretation matters, contribution disputes among co-insurers and many other areas.
    • Medical Malpractice Defense. George has defended hospitals, hospital-owned HMOs, and attending physicians and residents insured by the hospital’s self-insurance programs, in a large number of medical malpractice cases in numerous areas of medical practice, including general surgery, neurosurgery, internal medicine, pediatrics, radiology, obstetrics and gynecology, psychiatry, anesthesiology, cardiology, genetics, pulmonology and other areas. He has extensive and successful jury trial experience in these cases and extensive appellate experience as well. The cases George has defended for these hospital clients have involved the entire range of medical malpractice issues, not only on substantive medical matters but on actual and apparent agency issues, staff-model and contract-model HMO liability issues, contribution and indemnification issues, and the like. He has also defended cases under the federal “anti-dumping” law, EMTALA.
    • Affiliation and Disaffiliation Issues. George has advised hospital clients in disputes arising from affiliation and disaffiliation agreements with other hospitals and has represented them in litigation arising out of those agreements.
    • Third-Party Payor Litigation. George has represented hospitals, hospital-owned HMOs and in some instances hospital patients in disputes with third-party payors over coverage of procedures, including attempted denials of payment for supposedly “experimental” procedures.
    • Class Action Defense. George has successfully represented hospitals in private class actions brought against them in connection with their charity care policies, pricing of services to uninsured patients and other financial practices. He also has represented several hospitals in dealing with investigations by the Illinois Attorney General into such practices and policies. He successfully represented a hospital-owned HMO in a major class action accusing the HMO of violating the Illinois Consumer Fraud Act and other legal doctrines as a result of failure to disclose supposed conflicts of interest.
    • Staff Privilege Disputes. George has represented hospitals in a number of matters involving revocation or restriction of staff privileges of attending physicians, or termination or other discipline of residents. Before he began representing hospitals in this area, he handled a number of significant lawsuits for attending physicians who were expelled from their medical staffs.
    • Relations with Practice Groups. George has represented hospitals in contract litigation brought by physicians and has advised hospital clients in complex contract negotiations with outside practice groups, including disputes over termination of such contracts.
    • Medical School Matters. George has advised Rush Medical College in numerous issues involving medical students, including defense of several major lawsuits in state and federal court involving terminated medical students.
    • Hospital Governance, Intra-hospital Grievance Procedures and Due Process Matters. George has advised hospitals on staff by-law revisions. He advises hospital committees charged with hearing internal complaints from attending physicians or faculty members in order to assure that the matters are resolved fairly and in compliance with applicable by-laws and due process requirements.
    • Physician Disciplinary Matters. George has represented physicians in licensure proceedings instituted by the Illinois Department of Registration and Education.
    • Other Medicolegal Claims. George has defended hospital clients in a number of claims under federal and state employment discrimination laws. He has defended hospital officers and employees in several major libel and slander lawsuits arising out of public commentary on issues of medical importance.
    • Affirmative Litigation. George has successfully represented hospital clients as plaintiffs in major lawsuits, including a claim against an engineering design firm’s insurer arising out of faulty air conditioning systems installed in a new hospital, a claim against a supplier of a computerized medical record system arising out of alleged defects in that system, and other major matters.
    • Property Taxation Disputes. George has counseled and represented not-for-profit hospitals in matters relating to ongoing challenges to their tax-exempt status.
  • Legal Professional Liability

    George has counseled individual attorneys and law firms in ethics matters and has defended them in civil litigation in which they have been accused of malpractice and breach of fiduciary duty. He has also represented plaintiffs in legal malpractice litigation.

  • Employment Law

    From the start of his career, George has represented both plaintiffs and defendants in employment disputes. He has tried a large number of these cases for both plaintiffs and defendants. George has expertise in the federal employment discrimination laws, including sex discrimination, age discrimination, race discrimination, disability discrimination, religious discrimination, sexual harassment and retaliation cases, and in claims of wrongful discharge under Illinois law. He has been principal counsel for plaintiffs in several of the largest employment cases of their kind, including several race discrimination class actions and the sexual harassment litigation against Mitsubishi Motor Manufacturing of America. George currently has a substantial practice representing high-level executives in severance negotiations and litigation arising out of their terminations.

  • Service as a Neutral

    George has a substantial practice as a mediator and arbitrator. He has successfully mediated a number of large-scale employment-discrimination class actions, including the settlement in 2007 of a widely publicized age discrimination lawsuit against a major national law firm.

    George has served four times as a monitor to oversee compliance with consent decrees in major litigation brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against companies that were accused of plantwide sexual harassment. In this capacity, he was responsible for overseeing compliance with the decrees in question, deciding claims against a large damage fund, hearing appeals from company decisions on sexual harassment claims, and proposing and implementing improvements in the plants’ policies to control and reduce sexual harassment.

  • Internal Investigations

    George has been retained by various organizations as an outside investigator to conduct internal investigations of alleged wrongdoing by officers or employees.

  • Municipal Law

    George served as lead counsel for Mayor Harold Washington of Chicago and his aldermanic allies in the extended 1986 litigation over control of the Chicago City Council and its Committees. During 1986 and 1987, he served as Acting General Attorney of the Chicago Park District, serving as its chief legal officer in all phases of the District’s operations and dealing with matters of governance, taxation, labor relations, civil service employment, inter-governmental affairs, public relations and other areas.

  • Labor Management Law

    George has extensive experience in this field for both labor and management. For many years he represented a major state employee union in a full range of labor law issues, including unfair labor practice litigation, arbitrations over contract issues, employee termination hearings and lawsuits, and related class action work over employee benefits and salary levels. As the Chicago Park District’s chief legal officer in 1986 and 1987, George was responsible for the District’s labor relations in all respects, and continued to handle legal matters for the District in this area for some years thereafter.

  • Other Litigation

    George has represented clients in a broad range of other legal areas during his career, including major legal malpractice litigation (for both plaintiffs and defendants), litigation under the federal securities and antitrust laws, environmental cleanup disputes, insurance litigation over environmental cleanup costs, Lanham Act and other unfair competition litigation, First Amendment and other federal and Illinois constitutional matters, condominium litigation, and many other kinds of business litigation raising contract and tort claims of various kinds. George currently represents, along with his fellow MBG attorneys, the Attorneys General of seven states in Average Wholesale Price litigation against pharmaceutical manufacturers. In this capacity, George has tried jury cases to verdict and has represented these states on appeal.

Community Service Activities

George was President of the Chicago Council of Lawyers for two terms, from 1983 through 1985, and held many different posts in that organization, including being the head of its state judicial evaluation process from 1981 through 1983. He has served on the boards of a number of not-for-profit legal and community organizations.


Bar Admissions

Illinois Supreme Court (1973)

U.S. Supreme Court (1978)

U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit (1974)

U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois (1973)

U.S. District Court for the Central District of Illinois (1986)

Judicial Panel for Multidistrict Litigation (1976)

Pro hac vice admissions in state and/or federal trial and/or appellate courts in Alaska, California,Colorado, the District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, New Jersey, Tennessee and Wisconsin





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