Karol K. Sparks is a partner in the financial institutions group of Barack Ferrazzano, LLP, Chicago, Illinois. She practices from a satellite office in Greenville, South Carolina. Her practice concentrates on corporate activities and regulatory issues of financial institutions, about which she has counseled banks for over 40 years. Karol is a member of the Illinois, California (inactive), New York, and Indiana (inactive) bars. A past chair of the Banking Law Committee of the Business Law Section of the American Bar Association (1998-2002), she has been an active member of the committee since 1985. She was a member of the Council of the Business Law Section of the ABA, the governing body of that organization, for a term ending in August 2008. She chaired the Publications Board of the Business Law Section of the ABA for a term that ended in August 2014 and served as the Business Law Section's liaison to the ABA Standing Committee on Publishing Oversight. Karol is the author of The Keys to Banking Law, published by the ABA and now in its third editon (2020), and the legal treatise Insurance Activities of Banks, published by Aspen Law & Business in 1998 and updated annually. The second edition of the book was published in early 2012. She is a frequent lecturer on issues relating to the regulation of financial institutions and is one of the founders of Banking Law Basics and its successor course Banking Law Fundamentals, a three-day primer on banking law, presented twice annually. From 2009-2013, she was an adjunct professor at Wake Forest University School of Law, having previously taught at the University of Iowa College of Law from 2001-2008. She joined the adjunct faculty of the Graduate Program of Banking and Financial Law at the Boston University School of Law in 2013, retiring in 2017. Karol is a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Banking and Finance, University of North Carolina Law School at Chapel Hill.
