Ex-GOP Attorney General Candidate DeVore's Law License Suspended For Affair With Client

SPRINGFIELD, IL — The law license of Tom DeVore, a failed GOP candidate for Illinois Attorney General, had his law license temporarily suspended after a disciplinary board found him in violation of several Illinois Supreme Court ethics.

The Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission found there was clear evidence that DeVore engaged in an inappropriate relationship with a client from May 2020 to February 2023 while representing her in legal matters.

DeVore, a downstate attorney, gained notoriety in 2020 for filing hundreds of pandemic-related lawsuits challenging Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s COVID-19 mitigations. He also represented then-state Rep. Darren Bailey, a vocal Pritzker critic, in a lawsuit challenging the governor’s stay-at-home order. DeVore later ran unsuccessfully in the Illinois Attorney General race, alongside Bailey’s failed bid for governor on the Republican ticket in the 2022 election.

According to the disciplinary committee report from a hearing last December, DeVore was retained May 11, 2020, by Springfield salon-owner Riley Craig, to write three letters on her behalf to government agencies so she could reopen her business during the pandemic. However, the letters became moot when Pritzker ordered the reopening of all businesses statewide later the same month.

DeVore claimed his attorney-client relationship with Craig ended May 27, 2020, freeing him to pursue a romantic relationship with the salon owner. He proceeded in representing her in further legal matters — including her divorce in June 2020, when both are alleged to have begun a sexual relationship, according to disciplinary panel documents.

In addition to Craig’s divorce, DeVore is said to have represented her in other legal matters, including debt collection and orders of protection in June 2020.

The ARDC opened an investigation into DeVore a year later in June 2021. Craig stated at the hearing that she had not been DeVore’s client when their sexual relationship began.

During his run for attorney general in 2022, Craig went on social media in response to an article criticizing their relationship, that her attorney-client relationship ended with the letters to reopen her salon. Craig proclaimed that she was “NEVER a client while having sexual relations with him,” the disciplinary panel said in its report.

DeVore was also accused of going into business with Craig to start a company selling salon products, in 2021 and 2022, a possible conflict of interest, according to the report. The report stated that DeVore helped Craig obtain business loans of $250,000 each, and a third and final loan in October 2022, for a total principle of $600,000 without client safeguards.

The ARDC report says the pair’s relationship ended in February 2023, when the business started failing. Later, when the two got together to discuss how to pay off the failing business’s debts, DeVore claimed Craig threatened that if he didn’t keep putting money into the company, she would change her story to the ARDC. DeVore also claimed that Craig threatened to ruin his political career, his law license, destroy the company and declare bankruptcy, leaving him with all the business’s debts, according to the report.

Craig testified that the only threat she recalled was telling DeVore “that if he didn’t stop acting the way he was acting at that time, she would make sure people knew she was his client first,” the disciplinary panel report said.

Following her ultimatum, DeVore sent Craig an email on May 11, 2023, outlining her “three options,” that she would pay him back half of the business investment and drop her membership interest in the company, the report notes. DeVore, in turn, would seek judicial dissolution of the company, leaving both with half the debt and cause her to file bankruptcy.

The next day, Craig filed a complaint with the ARDC, eventually recanting her story that their attorney-client relationship ended before they became romantically involved.

On June 22, 2023, when the ARDC notified DeVore that it had opened an investigation, DeVore filed for an order of protection in Boone County against his former lover the same day, alleging harassment, stalking and interference with his personal liberty.

Following the years-long dispute, the ARDC recommended that it found “clear and convincing evidence” that DeVore had acted imprudently both by having a sexual relationship with her and in his actions after their relationship ended, violating Illinois Supreme Court ethics.

The disciplinary committee also concluded, “a reasonable client in Riley Craig’s position would have thought [DeVore] was her lawyer at the time, when [DeVore] continued to as her lawyer in four distinct legal matters between May 11 and June 16, 2020.”

In an order handed down Wednesday, the Illinois Supreme Court suspended DeVore’s license to practice law for 60 days, effective Oct. 10, 2025. DeVore is also required to reimburse the Client Protection Program Trust Fund.