Hannah Weiss

Hannah's story

Hannah grew up in Skokie, the daughter of a tax accountant who did the returns of half the neighbourhood from the kitchen table every spring. She was helping with data entry at twelve and preparing simple returns under supervision at sixteen, which she describes as both illegal-sounding and excellent training.

She studied accounting at Illinois, qualified as a CPA, and spent nine years at a Big Four firm auditing professional-services businesses, including several law firms. She saw how opaque legal billing could be and decided she would rather fix it from the inside.

She joined Hale & Mercer as controller in 2017 and became CFO in 2021. Her signature project was the 2023 redesign of the firm's invoices, which now show every entry in plain language with the name of the person who did the work. Client billing disputes fell by 80 per cent in the first year, and two other Chicago firms have since copied the format.

Hannah lives in Skokie, three streets from her parents, with her husband David, a cantor, and their two daughters. She serves as treasurer of her synagogue and of a food pantry in Evanston, and has never once let either run a deficit.