Karol Sparks

Partner

Barack Ferrazzano LLP, Chicago

KAROL K. SPARKS is Senior Counsel in the financial institutions practice group of Barack Ferrazzano Kirschbaum & Nagelberg LLP, Chicago, Illinois. Her practice concentration relates to general bank regulatory matters and mergers, acquisitions, and corporate activities of financial institutions, with special emphasis on non-traditional bank products and services, including insurance and broker-dealer activities, licensing, and acquisitions, and commercial and consumer deposit and payment products. Karol attended Sweet Briar College, holds a B.A. degree from Butler University and a J.D. degree (1979) from Indiana University School of Law. She is a member of the Illinois, New York, Indiana (inactive), and California (inactive) Bars.

An active member of the Banking Law Committee of the Business Section of the American Bar Association since 1984, Karol entered into its leadership and chaired 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 Council of the Business Section of the ABA in 2004, where she served on the Finance Committee. Thereafter, she was appointed to the Publications Board of the Business Section.  She served as its vice chair in 2010-2011 and, for a two-year term that ended in August of 2014, she chaired the Publications Board.

Karol’s most recent, and most basic, book, Banking Law Essentials, was just published by the American Bar Association in 2022.  She is also the author of 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 1998 and updated annually, as well as numerous articles on bank acquisitions and activities.  From 2009 until 2013, she was an Adjunct Professor at Wake Forest University School of Law, having previously taught at the University of Iowa College of Law as an Adjunct from 2001-2007.  From January of 2014 until she retired in April of 2018, she was a Lecturer in Law in 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.