Robert’s first work in the law was not personal injury. In law school he worked at the Missouri Attorney General’s office prosecuting crimes against children. The job meant interviewing very young victims and going out to investigate the worst things adults do to kids. He second-chaired the trial of a St. Louis police captain charged with breaking his daughter’s leg, against a prominent and combative defense lawyer whose own son sat in Robert’s law school class, with the local press in the hallway every morning. They won a guilty verdict.
Two things came out of that work. Robert did not want to spend a career living inside those crimes, going to those scenes and carrying them home. And he saw how much he still had to learn before he would be the trial lawyer he wanted to be. In 2009 he came back to Peoria to learn it, joining his father Drew Parker’s firm, then Parker & Halliday.
His father and the firm’s senior partner, Doc Halliday, put Robert on serious cases right away. His first was a wrongful death: four teenagers killed in a crash in Chillicothe, Illinois. Robert went to the coroner’s inquest in person and sat through it with the families, asking his own questions on the record. He drove out and photographed the scene himself. He drafted the lawsuit, filed it, and built the discovery. He has said he did not realize then how far above his pay grade that was. He just did it.
The deep end came fast. When his father was hospitalized for two months by a sudden illness, Robert, eighteen months out of law school, took over Drew’s active trial docket: the largest and most contested divorce cases in Peoria at the time, including matters for Caterpillar executives, with expert witnesses on business valuation, finances, vocational capacity, and health. He tried one to three of them a week. At the same time he was preparing a murder case for trial.
In 2012, another firm sent Robert a nursing home case for a second opinion. The client was the parent of one of Drew’s neighbors. The resident had died of extreme neglect, the facility had offered $40,000, and the statute of limitations was days from running. Robert worked through the day and all night writing the lawsuit, drove to Galesburg the next morning, and filed it in person with one day to spare. It settled for $600,000, a Knox County record for a nursing home injury case, and the facility changed how it operated. That case started the firm’s nursing home work. Results like it now happen routinely. (Past results do not guarantee future outcomes.)
Today Robert leads Parker & Parker’s personal injury and wrongful death practice: car and truck collisions, nursing home neglect, premises liability, catastrophic injury, and wrongful death claims across Peoria, Tazewell, Woodford, McLean, Knox, McDonough, Marshall, Stark, and surrounding counties. The firm is plaintiff only. It does not represent insurance companies or corporate defendants, and every injury case is built for trial whether it settles or not. Injury and wrongful death matters are handled on a contingency fee, with free consultations and no fee unless the firm recovers.
Robert also leads one of the most experienced adoption practices in Illinois. He came to it when his mother, attorney Theresa Hardesty, retired and asked him to carry it on. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Adoption & Assisted Reproduction Attorneys, a national group of roughly 470 attorneys vetted for competence and ethics, and he has authored continuing-legal-education materials on Illinois adoption law. With paralegal Beth Flores, he has guided more Illinois families through foster-care adoption than any other attorney in the state, and he is a licensed Illinois DCFS Panel adoption attorney. There are not many lawyers in the country who handle both serious injury work and adoptions. Robert has found that in central Illinois the two fit together.
Peoria is home. Robert grew up here, doing farm work in Brimfield, pouring concrete in Pekin, and working at Biaggi’s in Champaign while he was in college. He is a husband and a father, and he brings that to every case he takes.