Clashes between tenants and landlords are common. For ages, disputes between these two parties have been common, and that is where a landlord-tenant attorney comes in. Most landlords and tenants do not know their rights, responsibilities, and the legal aspect of their terms because the real estate laws are quite complex for a layman to comprehend. Landlords and tenants fail to realize their legal responsibilities, creating chaos between the two. To help both parties, a landlord-tenant attorney needs to come in between; one such renowned landlord-tenant attorney based out of Chicago, IL, is Melvin L. Sims III.
In today’s fast-paced era, no one has time to learn about real estate laws, especially when each county and state has different laws. A landlord-tenant attorney makes things easier for you and utilizes his experience and expertise to help both parties. According to a study by Crosstown, there were more than 1,223 reports of landlord-tenant disputes from Jan 2022 till May 2022 only. A landlord-tenant attorney is like a property manager who gets everything done to minimize the contention between the two parties.
Melvin L. Sims III is a renowned landlord-tenant attorney and real estate lawyer. Born on 25 July 1974, Sims was reared in Cook County, Illinois, in Chicago’s Beverly Hills neighborhood. Sims matriculated at Whitney M. Young Magnet HS, the same high school that First Lady Michelle Obama attended, where he captained the junior varsity football team and excelled in the Center and Nose Guard positions. For his postgraduate year, Sims attended Northfield Mt. Hermon School in Western Massachusetts, where he lettered as the varsity heavyweight starter on the NMH wrestling team. In 1996, Sims was accepted into the University of Fort Hare in Alice, South Africa, where once again, his love for competition spiked, and he began playing rugby. In 1997, he completed a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Amherst College, where he played at the number 12 inside center position on the college’s rugby football team. In 2002, Sims completed his Juris Doctorate from Howard University School of Law. Always a fierce competitor, he maintained a striking balance between his studies and contact sports throughout his academic years.
In 2006, Sims was appointed Young Lawyers Section Chair of the Cook County Bar Association bar year, where his motto was “Leadership and Accomplishment.” Then, from 2005-2010, he served as the National Coordinator of The Affinity Group of African-American Attorneys (“A+”) as a Staff Attorney at Seyfarth Shaw LLP, his first position out of law school as a lawyer in Big Law. His cycle of achievements initiated; he was elected as Region VII Director of the National Bar Association (“NBA”), and he was accountable for NBA membership and business in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin.
Sims has held many novel positions on several different boards of directors in his legal career. He was one of twelve members of the Regional Directors on the NBA’s Board of Governors. Sims was also a member of the Board of Directors and Treasurer of the Cook County Bar Association (“CCBA”) and served as Chairman of the CCBA Young Lawyers Section. Attorney Sims also served on the Board of Directors of the former Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago (“LAF”) and the LAF Board’s Labor Relations/Personnel Policies sub-committee.
A visionary in the legal field, Sims has served in almost every prestigious position in a law firm, from project assistant to paralegal to partner. In keeping with his well-established history of taking on the mantle of leadership positions, in 2012, Sims decided to start his real estate law firm, The Tenants Rights Group LLC (“TRG”). The law firm’s mission is to preserve and protect landlords’ and tenants’ rights and establish equitable relationships and resolutions between the two factions in Northern Illinois and beyond. TRG, a boutique law firm, operates in the seven most populous counties in Northern Illinois, rendering TRG one of the widest-reaching landlord-tenant law firms operating out of Chicago.
Currently, Sims serves as the Managing Partner of TRG. He is a member of the Living Word Christian Center in Forest Park, IL, the National Association of Realtors, and the Chicago Association of Realtors, and he is the founder of the Chicago Tenants Union.
The importance of a landlord-tenant attorney cannot be neglected in any commercial or residential landlord-tenant dispute, as time is almost always of the essence. With nearly two decades of experience in litigating and navigating legal disputes and conducting transactional real estate deals in Illinois, Attorney Melvin L. Sims III is a stand-out practitioner in his field. There is no question as to why many of Sims’ clients label him as “the BEST in the business.”
