Grace O'Donnell

Grace's story

Grace is a third-generation South Sider from Beverly, where her grandfather was a Chicago police sergeant and her mother a court reporter. She grew up hearing testimony read aloud at the dinner table and developed an early, slightly alarming ability to remember exactly what people said.

She studied English at Loyola and worked two years as a paralegal in a probate firm before going to law school at Chicago-Kent. She took every real-estate and estate-planning course offered, because she had already seen what happens to families when nobody does the paperwork.

Her defining matter was a 2025 estate for a widowed client in Beverly whose house, bought in 1962, had never been retitled after her husband's death. Grace untangled forty years of records, cleared the title, and the client sold the house to her granddaughter at a price that let both generations stay in the neighbourhood. Grace joined Hale & Mercer in 2023.

Grace lives in Beverly, four blocks from the house she grew up in, with her husband Patrick, a high-school history teacher. She is on the organising committee of the South Side Irish Parade and considers that her most demanding client.