- Posts by Robert E. Elworth
PartnerRobert E. Elworth focuses his practice on the defense of liability claims, including:
- Insurance producer and insurance coverage litigation
- Commercial litigation
- Appellate practice
He has represented clients in litigation ...
HeplerBroom boasts several of Illinois’ premier environmental-law lawyers, and recently those colleagues were asked to prepare an amicus brief on behalf of the Illinois Environmental Regulatory Group in an appeal pending in the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, Prairie Rivers Network v. Dynegy Midwest Generation LLC, No. 18-3644. The matter involves the non-profit Network’s assertion that Dynegy’s Vermillion, Illinois, power station was releasing contaminants into groundwater.
Specifically at issue is the Clean Water Act’s forbidding of “any addition” of ...
Not long after governors and mayors issued orders shutting down non-essential businesses as a safeguard against the spread of COVID-19, we read countless emails and blog posts about how those entities’ business interruption coverages might apply to businesses shut down by the pandemic. Most writers conclude the ISO forms almost certainly will not indemnify the insured for those costs, and while there undoubtedly will be exceptions, I won’t muck about trying to add to that consensus here.
Instead, I’m curious about what happens next, when the owner of a restaurant or plastics ...
HeplerBroom has a long history of defending insurance producers across Illinois, with a strong appellate record on the ordinary-care duty and statute of limitations issues in particular. Western Cons. Prem. Properties, Inc., v. Norman-Spencer Agency, Inc., 845 F.3d 313 (7th Cir. 2017) (duty); RVP, LLC, v. Advantage Insurance Services, Inc., 2017 IL App (3d) 160276 (statute of limitations). We’re seeing new cases in which the producer defendant is alleged to owe a duty not only to its client to procure the policy he requests, but also to an additional insured on that policy.
The ...
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 ...