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 ...
In Campbell v. General Electric, 2018 IL App (1st) 173051, the Appellate Court of Illinois, First District, recently reversed the Cook County Circuit Court’s finding of personal jurisdiction over General Electric (“GE”) in an asbestos case. In directing that GE be dismissed from the case due to a lack of personal jurisdiction, the court struck down the plaintiff’s claims of general jurisdiction, specific jurisdiction, consent jurisdiction and jurisdiction by necessity. And in so doing, the Court followed the principles set forth by the United States Supreme Court ...
Are you considering retaining an expert, in a medical malpractice case, who has a history of medical malpractice suits being filed against him or her? Have you just deposed an expert in a medical malpractice case and learned that they have been previously sued for medical malpractice? In either situation, you will likely have to determine whether the expert’s prior lawsuits will be admissible at trial. A recent Illinois appellate court ruling, Swift v. Schleicher, suggests that circuit courts should bar any evidence of medical malpractice lawsuits filed against the expert.
The ...
Illinois hospitals and the lawyers that represent them breathed a collective sigh of relief recently after the Illinois Supreme Court reversed the First District’s decision in Yarbrough v. Northwestern Memorial Hospital. 2017 IL 121367. Under traditional laws of agency, a principal can be held liable for the negligent acts of its agent under the doctrine of respondeat superior. This is most commonly seen in the employer/employee context, in which the employer controls and supervises the work of its employees and can therefore be held liable for such work. However, in certain ...
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 ...
Environmental contamination lawsuits frequently involve polluting activities which took place decades ago – long before the advent of computers and before it was possible for businesses to store information in an electronic format. When these lawsuits arise and a claim is tendered to an insurance carrier for defense and indemnity, the parties often struggle to verify the existence and terms of any applicable insurance policies in light of the ease with which paper documents can be misplaced over the years. The inability of the parties to locate complete copies of all potentially ...
In a recent decision, the Illinois Appellate Court, Third District, considered what should and should not be considered by a trial court when making a determination on a motion to stay a declaratory judgment action on insurance coverage pending resolution of the underlying litigation. Pekin Insurance Company v. Johnson-Downs Construction, Inc., 2017 IL App (3d) 160601. The underlying suit in Johnson-Downs concerned an injured employee of a subcontractor who sued the general contractor. Originally, the plaintiff employee alleged negligence and premises liability theories ...
