On March 18, 2014, District Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh, Jr. issued a Memorandum and Order dismissing the former Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer of Patriot Coal Corporation in a stock drop securities class action filed in the Eastern District of Missouri. Glenn E. Davis, Partner in HeplerBroom LLC’s St. Louis office assisted Sidley Austin LLP with the decisive analysis and briefing under the Securities Exchange Act and Private Securities Litigation Reform Act (“PSLRA”).
The Court found that the defendants lacked scienter to sustain federal securities ...
"Hello, Mr. Jones. Did you just try to make a $10,000 jewelry purchase in Brazil?" To put it mildly, that is not the type of question that want your customers-- or as an insurance company, the customers of your policyholder-- to receive. All too often, however, despite the best security efforts, data breaches of sensitive personal information, like credit card data, do occur.
The insurance industry sells a variety of differing products designed specifically to provide coverage for these types of claims and losses. But, would liability for such a data breach be covered by the backbone of ...
Free Speech Trumps Conversational Privacy
In a recent pair of decisions, the Supreme Court of Illinois resolved the tension between freedom of speech and privacy in favor of freedom of speech. In People v. Clark, 2014 IL 115776 the Court held that Illinois’ eavesdropping statute was so overbroad it violated the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, thus finding the statute unconstitutional. And, in People v. Melongo, 2014 IL 114852, the Court held that the eavesdropping statute’s prohibition on publishing any information obtained through an “eavesdropping ...
Klehr v. Illinois Farmers Ins. Co., No. 121843, 1st Dist. No. 1-12-1843
The plaintiff was a passenger in a car hit by an uninsured driver. She suffered substantial injuries. And, the driver of the car in which the plaintiff rode was underinsured. Thus, her medical costs were not fully covered by insurance from either of the drivers of the vehicles in the collision.
In 2007, the plaintiff (“insured”) filed a claim for the remainder of the costs under her personal insurance policy issued by the defendant insurer. She also invoked the policy’s arbitration clause to adjudicate the ...
The Joint Tortfeasor Contribution Act (the Act), 740 ILCS 100/0.01, et seq., codified the Illinois Supreme Court’s opinion in Skinner v. Reed-Prentice Division Package Machinery Co., 70 Ill. 2d 1 (1977), and created a right of contribution among joint tortfeasors. BHI Corp. v. Litgen Concrete Cutting & Coring Co., 214 Ill. 2d 356, 363 (2005). Since its inception, the Act’s application has been the subject of hundreds of Illinois appellate court and supreme court opinions. Despite this abundance of jurisprudence, many questions remain unanswered when addressing the ...
Stratus Building Solutions faced a business challenge on a bet the company scale. Despite winning many franchise awards, five franchisees charged that its entire system imposed a fraud on franchisees. The plaintiffs sued 179 defendants, including the system franchisor, master (regional) franchisors, and over 70 individuals associated with the franchise system of violating §§ 1962(c) & (d) of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (“RICO”). They claim the Defendants collectively operate the Stratus franchise system through a massive, but vaguely ...
In Parko, et al. v. Shell Oil Co. et al., Nos. 13-8023 & 8024 (7th Cir. Jan. 17, 2014), Judge Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit recently reversed an order from the United States District Court for the Southern District of Illinois granting class certification to a group of plaintiffs who alleged that an industrial site leaked benzene and other contaminants into the groundwater under the proposed class members’ properties, thereby damaging the value of these properties. Judge Posner distinguished the case from an opinion he authored in Mejdrech v ...
Judge John Tharp of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois recently granted a motion for summary judgment in favor of Ameren Illinois in the case of Peter Stanley v. Ameren Illinois Company, et al., 1:12-cv-06073, involving a 76-year-old engineer who died of mesothelioma.
Peter Stanley spent his career as a boiler engineer for Babcock & Wilcox. From 1961 to 1967, he worked as a field start-up engineer, commissioning new boilers at numerous industrial sites throughout the Midwest. No defendant disputed that Peter Stanley was exposed to asbestos from thermal ...
Commercial adversaries are often tempted to transform breach of contract or warranty matters into negligence or negligent misrepresentation claims. Or fraud or other intentional tort claims. The lure of a more flexible claim before a jury can be hard to resist. Or the governing contract may have limitation of liability restrictions that make warranty and contractual claims unavailing. Nevertheless, The Eighth Circuit, interpreting Missouri law, strongly reaffirmed its view that tort claims cannot be substituted for matters of contractual risk allocation unless very narrow ...
In many commercial contexts an agreement includes a provision that selects a forum for future dispute resolution. Frequently, when conflict arises, a party may try to avoid the selected forum and file the first case on their home turf. The other party to the contract has to respond, but how?
Atlantic Marine Construction Co., a Virginia corporation, faced this issue in a construction contract dispute on a Texas project. Despite a standard forum-selection clause requiring litigation of disputes in state or federal court in Norfolk, Virginia, a subcontractor filed a preemptive suit ...
