Have you ever seen a corporation walk down the street? Or maybe you’ve shaken hands with a corporation lately? Perhaps you’ve witnessed a corporation do The Wiggle? Over two hundred years ago, Chief Justice Marshall wrote that a corporation is “an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law.” More recently, Justice Stevens wrote in dissent that “corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires”. Others disagree.
For example, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney famously told a crowd of ...
The backbone of insurance is risk. It is assessing risk, allocating risk, pricing risk, and insuring risk. The insurance industry is – in a word – one of risk.
To help calculate risk, the industry has built sophisticated models and algorithms, designed to measure the likelihood of certain events and scenarios. These predictive models quantify the odds of your car getting wrecked, your home being damaged, or – as Nationwide so morbidly reminded us – the odds that your child might die from a preventable accident.
The insurance industry, of course, insures risks beyond the home ...
Illinois’ former eavesdropping law was unconstitutional because it was too broad to protect the fundamental interest in conversational privacy. When the former law was held unconstitutional, many wondered how the General Assembly would respond. By enacting this new law on December 30, 2014, Illinois made clear that it was going to stay the course and protect its citizens’ private conversation.
The cornerstone of Illinois’ eavesdropping law is the policy that the people of Illinois should not fear that what they believe to be private conversations are being recorded. That ...
The Missouri Court of Appeals recently rendered unenforceable employment contracts seeking to bind “at-will” employees unless there is consideration from the employer beyond an offer of employment. In Kathryn Jimenez v. Cintas Corporation, et al., No. ED101015 & ED1011241 (Mo. App. E.D. Jan. 13 2015), the Eastern District held that an offer for at-will employment, regardless of whether the offer from the employer was for new employment or continued employment, does not constitute sufficient consideration to form a binding employment contract.
Kathryn Jimenez began ...
Thirty-six billion dollars. That's the value of assets in all asbestos-related bankruptcy trusts, according to the United States Government Accountability Office (and that's 2011 numbers!).[1] With so much money sitting idly by, as the old adage goes, the money is talking. When money talks, the United States Congress listens (that should be another adage).
"Asbestos litigation has been the longest-running mass tort litigation in U.S. history and arose out of millions of Americans' lengthy and widespread occupational exposure to asbestos[.]"[2] As asbestos litigation enters ...
St. Louis area employers with employees in Illinois should be aware that, on January 1, 2015, Illinois joined the ranks of a dozen or so other states around the country that “ban the box.”
The Box
The “box” is that section of many standard employment application forms that asks applicants whether they previously have been convicted of a crime. In Illinois, employers are now prohibited from considering or inquiring about an applicant’s criminal record until the applicant has been determined qualified for the position and notified of an impending interview, or, if the ...
As defense counsel in the trucking industry have seen in recent years, broker liability is a burgeoning area in which plaintiff’s attorneys are beginning to explore as a means to reach the elusive “deep pockets” of many of our broker clients. Much of the lure of broker liability began with the $23.8 million judgment against a freight broker that was upheld by an Illinois appellate court in Sperl v. C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc., 946 N.E.2d 463 (Ill. App. Ct. 2011). At the most surface level of the issue, the court’s decision in Sperl rested primarily upon the significant ...
Although it might seem like a clear-cut argument—“my client cannot be bound to a contractual provision when it was not a party to the contract”—courts have routinely rejected it. In doing so, these courts have often ordered that a defendant is then bound to a forum selection clause found in a co-defendant’s agreement with the plaintiff. In order to reach this result, however, the court must conclude that the nonsignatory defendant is sufficiently “closely related” to the dispute in the underlying action, such that it was foreseeable that the nonsignatory defendant ...
The Illinois Supreme Court recently reiterated its position that common law retaliatory discharge claims should be treated the same as any other tort claim when it comes to the issue of causation. In Michael v. Precision Alliance Group, LLC, 2014 IL 117376, the state’s high court reaffirmed its prior rulings on the elements of retaliatory discharge, and again declined to apply the burden-shifting framework used for other employment cases to a claim of retaliatory discharge. The Court also drew an important distinction between proving a “causal nexus” for purposes of ...
Password protection may not sustain confidentiality
Passwords aren’t just for email these days. From jumping on a wi-fi network, to making a phone call, to downloading a song, everything electronic now seems under the proverbial lock and key, albeit a digital one. One recent decision from the Delaware Court of Chancery confronted this reality, holding that “merely password protecting” certain information did not constitute “reasonable efforts to protect the confidentiality of that information” and therefore, the information at issue could not be considered a trade ...
