Distinguished Service Award
Recognizes an individual who has made a significant financial or volunteer contribution to the law school.
Amy Cobb Curran ’01
Amy Cobb Curran is a member of Chapman and Cutler’s National Public Finance Department and the ESG Finance and Impact Investing cross-disciplinary team. Curran’s practice centers on social finance across multiple sectors, including public finance for nonprofit hospitals, health care systems, senior living communities, continuing care retirement communities, universities, and infrastructure projects, ESG finance, and impact investing for both non- and for-profit clients in a variety of impact areas. She has served as bond counsel, underwriter's counsel, and borrower's counsel in dozens of financings and related transactions and has structured, negotiated, drafted, and implemented fixed-rate, variable-rate, multimodal, and put bond financing structures.
Curran has made socially conscious lawyering an integral part of her career. For the past decade, she has represented social service providers and municipalities in “Pay for Success” financings (an innovative financing mechanism for supporting social improvement efforts) in support of early childhood education, reduction in homelessness, juvenile services, and other initiatives. She has also authored several articles on impact investing, and she was featured in a 2020 ABA Journal article about lawyers engaged in working with the business sector on impact investing.
Through the Curran Family Impact Fund, Curran and her husband Scott support numerous educational, religious, and philanthropic organizations. They are actively involved in dog rescue and have a soft spot for special needs rescue dogs.
Scott M. Curran ’01
Scott M. Curran is an attorney, entrepreneur, and trusted adviser to some of the world’s most visionary social innovators in philanthropy, business, government, and law. As founder and CEO of social impact consulting firm Beyond Advisers, he counsels the world’s leading change agents to better design, build, and grow social impact organizations and initiatives. From global nonprofit leaders to private sector executives, law firm leaders, and everyone in between, Curran helps to create impact beyond belief through his simplified framework and toolkit for success, which has supported some of the greatest, most dynamic, and innovative social impact initiatives in modern history.
Curran serves as a member of the Chicago-Kent College of Law Alumni Board, the Imagination Foundation Board, and the U.S. Soccer Foundation Chicago Leadership Council. He has been dedicated to nurturing the next generation of legal professionals and regularly mentors students and shares wisdom and experiences. For the last five-plus years, Curran and his wife Amy have hosted a group of Chicago-Kent students for the annual ConneKtions @ Dinner program, which pairs alumni and current students for an opportunity to learn more about the various legal careers and pathways to success. They start with 1L students and build a cohort of students that they track until they graduate and transition into successful members of the law community. They still meet regularly with many of those students.