‘It still haunts me to this day’

On the fifth floor of a 122-year-old South LaSalle Street building, the door opens to the office of Allan Ackerman. It’s a one-room, paper-filled cave that is testimony to how lawyers used to work.Perhaps that should come as no surprise. Ackerman is 77, after all. But the place, like the man, seems trapped in a much earlier time.Hundreds of law books line the walls. There is a dictation …