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Karol Sparks, J.D. ’79, received the ABA’s Business Law Section’s Jean Allard Glass Cutter Award for 2024. The honor is presented annually to “an exceptional woman business lawyer who has made significant contributions to the profession and the Business Law Section.”

“The Glass Cutter is particularly meaningful to me because glass was shattering around me for many years as I was the first woman associate and then partner at Krieg DeVault and then the first woman chair of the ABA Banking Law Committee,” Sparks said. “It’s been an extraordinary career.”

Sparks is senior counsel in the financial institutions group of Barack Ferrazzzano Kirschbaum & Nagelberg in Chicago. She previously practiced with Krieg DeVault in Indianapolis from 1979 to 2001. Sparks has been an active member of the ABA’s Banking Law Committee of the Business Section since 1984, eventually entering into its leadership and chairing the committee from August of 1998 until August of 2002. Following her term as chair of the committee, she was appointed to a four-year term on the Section Council, where she served on the Finance Committee. Thereafter, she served on the Publications Board of the Business Section and chaired it for a two-year term that ended in August of 2014.

“As I look back, it is Professor R. Bruce Townsend who made a significant difference in my legal education,” Sparks said. “I took all three of his classes and wrote for him in my third year on UCC Article 9. Over the years, as we moved around, I was able to teach at a number of outstanding law schools and one of the courses I taught repeatedly was Secured Transactions, his signature class.  I can’t tell you how many times I would channel him with a smile when I would use his terminology or express his concepts.”

Sparks is the author of three legal texts. Her most recent book, Banking Law Essentials, was published by the American Bar Association in 2022.  She also authored The Keys to Banking Law, A Hand Book for Lawyers (now in its third edition), published by the Business Law Section, and the legal treatise Insurance Activities of Banks (now in its second edition), published by Wolters Kluwer. 

In addition, Sparks taught as an adjunct professor at three law schools: the University of Iowa College of Law from 2001-2007; Wake Forest University School of Law from 2009 until 2013; and from January of 2014 until she retired in April of 2018, the Graduate Program in Banking and Financial Law of the Boston University School of Law.  She is a member of the founding faculty of Banking Law Basics, an ABA-CLE course offered in June and October of each year from 1998-2011, and its successor course, Banking Law Fundamentals, which began in 2012 and continues twice annually, sponsored in June by Boston University School of Law and in October by Chicago-Kent Law School.