On November 4, 2015, the Illinois Supreme Court reversed the decision of the Appellate Court of Illinois, for the First District in Folta v. Ferro Engineering. The Supreme Court held that the Workers’ Compensation Act and Workers’ Occupational Diseases Act provides the exclusive remedy for an employee’s injury arising out of and in the course of his or her employment, even when the employee first learns of the injury after the expiration of the applicable statutes of repose. Folta v. Ferro Eng'g, 2015 IL 118070, ¶ 52, 43 N.E.3d 108, 120
In Folta, the plaintiff’s decedent was ...
The federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (“RCRA”) authorizes a citizen suit against “any person” who has violated “any permit, standard, regulation, condition, requirement, prohibition, or order which has become effective pursuant to this chapter,” or “who has contributed or who is contributing to the past or present handling, storage, treatment, transportation, or disposal of any solid or hazardous waste which may present an imminent and substantial endangerment to health or the environment.” 42 U.S.C. § 6972(a)(1). Disputes between private ...
This is not about restrictions on how you cook your eggs or hunt game out of season.
But read on if you are an employer and want to know about a serious and growing antitrust risk, heightened by federal and state antitrust enforcement as well as private litigation. Agreements to refrain from soliciting another company’s employees (“no poaching” agreements) face increased scrutiny — with potential criminal consequences. In close alignment, there is a spate of new “wage-fixing” cases, a variant of price fixing.
It all started with three cases brought by antitrust ...
February 20, 2019 - On February 15, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published increased reporting thresholds under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976, as amended (HSR Act). The new thresholds represent an approximate 6.6 percent increase over last year’s thresholds. They are expected to be published in the Federal Register during the week of February 18, 2019, and they will become effective 30 days after the date of their publication. This year’s revised thresholds were delayed due to the government shutdown in January. The revised thresholds will ...
The Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) establishes safeguards and procedures relating to the retention, collection, disclosure, and destruction of biometric data. Passed in October 2008, BIPA is intended to protect a person’s unique biological traits—the data encompassed in a person’s fingerprint, voice print, retinal scan, or facial geometry. This information is the most sensitive data belonging to an individual. Unlike a PIN code or a social security number, once biometric data is compromised, “the individual has no recourse, is at [a] heightened risk for ...
Recently, the Illinois Supreme Court held that the City of Danville, Illinois, was not entitled to immunity from a negligence lawsuit brought by a citizen who tripped and fell on a crack in a city sidewalk. The court essentially held that in order for a city or public entity to be immune under the discretionary immunity statute, it must specifically analyze the sidewalk at issue and decide that the crack at issue was not a big enough problem to warrant fixing.
Stepping on a crack in a sidewalk is a common occurrence and lawsuits to recover injuries that result from it are not rare. In Barbara ...
On January 19, 2018, the Illinois Supreme Court issued its opinion in Bogenberger v. Pi Kappa Alpha Corp., et. al., 2018 IL 120951. The tragic case arose from the alcohol-related death of David Bogenberger, a Pi Kappa Alpha pledge at Northern Illinois University, who died from alcohol intoxication at a fraternity party in November 2012. The Bogenberger decision established, for the first time, a cause of action in negligence for victims of alcohol-related hazing. In so doing, the Supreme Court affirmed the dismissal of the Pi Kappa Alpha Fraternity national organization. It also ...
Practitioners usually face cases where they reasonably expect the health of a party to remain the same throughout the pendency of a lawsuit. An important, and sometimes overlooked, aspect of a litigation strategy is the long-term health of a party, or a key witness, which is a significant factor when considering both discovery and trial strategies.
The first strategic aspect to consider is the type of claim filed and how it may change moving forward, as it may affect the applicable statute of limitations or the damages available. A cause of action that begins as a claim for medical ...
Are you at home in the jurisdiction where you are being sued? Did the cause of action arise from your contacts in that jurisdiction? If you are a corporate defendant in a lawsuit and neither applies to your company, you should probably at least raise an objection to Personal Jurisdiction in your initial response to preserve it, if for no other reason. Once you have done that, there is a decent chance the other side will serve you with discovery relating to Personal Jurisdiction. That discovery may be directly related to whether you are “at home” in the forum state, it may contain requests ...
Every day, at sites across the United States, federal agents search container ships, trucks, cars, and aircraft entering the country. Now, increasingly, federal agents are also searching the electronic devices of the individuals entering the country – from citizens to permanent residents to tourists. See United States v. Cotterman, 709 F.3d 952, 956 (9th Cir. 2013) (en banc) (“Every day more than a million people cross American borders [and] . . . they carry with them laptop computers, iPhones, iPads, iPods, Kindles, Nooks, Surfaces, tablets, Blackberries, cell ...
