Recently, after extensive oral arguments, HeplerBroom Partner Josh Schumacher convinced the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin to bar several Plaintiffs’ experts from offering specific causation or industrial hygiene opinions pursuant to Daubert v. Merrel. Dow Pharmaceuticals, 509 U.S. 579 (1993) and its progeny. The Daubert hearing was conducted by United States District Court Judge Pamela Pepper.
In Ahnert v. CBS Corporation, et al., Plaintiff alleged that toxic exposure to asbestos at numerous locations and to a multitude of products ...
It used to be in Illinois that an insurance broker could be sued for breach of fiduciary duty for just about any policy-related misdeed. See, e.g., Faulkner v. Gilmore, 251 Ill.App.3d 34 (3d Dist. 1993) (alleging breach of fiduciary duty for a broker’s failure to advise insureds to terminate their master surety agreement.) The fiduciary-duty claim did not need to involve the actual handling of client monies; the counts were essentially repackaged negligence or breach of contract allegations, labelled with a seemingly-heightened sense of breached duty.
But in 1997 the Illinois ...
The Madison County Circuit Court recently held that a distributor has a duty of care/duty to warn a secondary exposure plaintiff in the matter of Iben v. A.W. Chesterton Company, et al. In reaching this conclusion, the Court denied defendant Graybar Electric Company’s Motion for Summary Judgment. Iben is a wrongful-death claim arising from allegations that Mrs. Iben developed and died from mesothelioma caused by her exposure to asbestos fibers carried home on the clothing or persons of her husband. A pivitol issue is whether Graybar Electric Company, as a distributor of ...