Matthew Tully Selected by Crain’s Chicago Business as 40 Under 40 Honoree for 2026

Matt Tully learned the family business early. After his father, Tom Tully, founded the firm in 1978, weekends and holidays were working days for all five Tully children. They sorted mail and made copies, and when their father asked “What do we do?” they shouted back “We work!” Today Matt is the managing partner of Tully & Associates, and Crain’s Chicago Business has named him to its 40 Under 40 class of 2026.

Matt is the only one of the five who made the firm his career, but first he spent 14 years in Washington. Among other roles there, he worked for President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. “I learned that policy is never merely technical,” Tully says of that time. “It ultimately lands on a family, a business or a community.”

That view shapes his property tax practice. Cook County’s property tax system, he told Crain’s, “is one of the largest and least predictable costs of owning real estate in Cook County, and helping clients navigate makes me a little cog in the wheel for moving Chicago forward.”

Curt Bailey, president of Related Midwest, has relied on Tully for tax counsel on many projects, including The 78, the megaproject in the South Loop. Bailey says Tully “is doing the projections of the value of that project to the city and the state.” He adds: “He’s been a tireless advocate for getting reason inserted into a system that has been clouded with subjectivity, and that’s a great thing for a land and property owner to have.”

Tully also played an influential part on the team advocating for HB 2621. The law gives Illinois portfolio owners and developers tax incentives to preserve existing affordable rental housing and build more. In his letter nominating Tully for the honor, Bailey called it “one of the most pro-development, pro-affordability tools to come out of Chicago in recent years.”

The honor follows Tully’s selection by Chicago Lawyer as a 40 Under Forty honoree in 2023.

Read the full profile in Crain’s Chicago Business.