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The Illinois Supreme Court’s recent decision in a foreclosure action could have far-reaching implications for litigations within the state. In a 5-2 decision, the Court ruled that anyone seeking to serve a defendant in Cook County via special process server must first secure a Cook County judge’s authorization for the summons to be valid.

The case arose from a foreclosure action in Kankakee County. In the underlying case, the plaintiff Municipal Trust and Savings Bank filed a complaint for mortgage foreclosure against defendant Dennis J. Moriarty in December 2016 and issued summons from Kankakee County, where the mortgaged commercial properties are located. A special process server ultimately served the defendant at Rush Hospital in Chicago, which is located in Cook County. Upon the plaintiff’s motion, the circuit court entered a judgment for foreclosure and sale. Following entry of the foreclosure judgment, a sheriff’s sale was held on the property, and plaintiff was the successful bidder. The bank then filed a motion for confirmation of the foreclosure sale.

The defendant filed a Section 2-1401 petition challenging the judgment as void arguing that the circuit court was without personal jurisdiction to enter the default judgment in the foreclosure proceeding. The Defendant asserted that under section 2-202 of the Code, a special process server cannot serve process on a defendant in Cook County without first being appointed by the circuit court. The circuit court denied the defendant’s section 2-1401 petition finding that the special process server was not required to be specially appointed to serve process on the defendant. The appellate court affirmed. The defendant petitioned for leave to appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court, which granted his petition. Continue reading ›

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The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) gives consumers crucial protections against predatory debt collection practices, such as calling late at night, using harassing language, pursuing individuals for debts they don’t owe, and using misleading communications in debt collection attempts. The FDCPA governs the practices of third-party debt collectors, those who buy a delinquent debt from original creditors, like medical providers or credit card companies.

A common practice of these third-party debt collectors is to outsource parts of its debt-collection operations to various vendors. In an apparent issue of first impression, the Eleventh Circuit considered whether the FDCPA applies to communications between a third-party debt collector and its vendors. The FDCPA prohibits debt-related communications about a consumer with third parties without the consumer’s consent or a court order. Thus, the issue for the Eleventh Circuit was whether communications between a debt collector and its vendors constituted debt-related communications about a consumer in violation of the FDCPA. In a decision that has the potential to upend the debt collection industry, the Eleventh Circuit ruled that such communications were in fact governed by the FDCPA. A likely result of this decision will be a wave of FDCPA class action lawsuits, particularly in the states within the Eleventh Circuit (Alabama, Florida and Georgia). Continue reading ›

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An Illinois Appellate Court recently considered a putative class action lawsuit alleging that a senior housing community operator violated several consumer protection statutes in connection with its contracts with residents. The First District affirmed the trial court’s dismissal of the claims finding that the trial court properly concluded that the contracts did not violate the statutes and granted summary judgment to senior housing community operator.

The defendant is an Illinois not for profit corporation that operates an independent living senior housing community for persons 55 years and older in Glenview, Illinois. The plaintiff filed the lawsuit as the executor of the estate of Marjorie Hamilton and sought to represent a class of other similarly situated individuals. Hamilton entered into a “Residency and Services Agreement” with the defendant for an apartment at the senior living facility Chestnut Square. The Agreement provided for an initial deposit that was to be paid by Hamilton to reserve a residence in Chestnut Square which would bear interest at the passbook savings rate established by Bank One.

In February 2013, Hamilton notified the defendant of her intent to terminate her residency. The defendant did not refund her entrance fee until July 2014. When it did, Hamilton did not receive any interest with her entrance fee refund. Even before the refund, the plaintiff filed a class action complaint against the defendant asserting claims of unconscionability; breach of contract; and violations of the Illinois Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act, the Security Deposit Interest Act and the Security Deposit Return Act. The trial court subsequently dismissed the unconscionability claim with prejudice, dismissed the Consumer Fraud Act claim without prejudice, and denied the defendant’s motion to dismiss the Deposit Return Act and Interest Act claims.

The trial court ultimately granted class certification for the Deposit Return Act and Interest Act claims but denied class certification for the Consumer Fraud Act and breach of contract claims. After class notice had been provided to the class members, the defendant filed for summary judgment as to all claims and plaintiff filed a cross-motion for partial summary judgment on liability under the Interest Act and Deposit Return Act claims. After hearing the arguments of both parties, the trial court granted summary judgment in favor of the defendant on both the class claims and the plaintiff’s individual claims. The plaintiff subsequently appealed these rulings to the First District Appellate Court.

As the Court noted, the crux of the plaintiff’s case depended on whether the Court found the Agreement to be a lease or a services agreement. A secondary issue in the case was whether the entrance fee could constitute a security deposit. Turning to the first question, the Court identified the requisite elements for an agreement to be considered a lease: (1) it must delineate the extent and bounds of the property; (2) it must identify a rental price and time and manner of payment; and (3) must set forth the term of the lease. After reviewing the terms of the Agreement, the Court determined that it could not be considered a lease under Illinois law. Continue reading ›

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 The vast majority of breach of contract lawsuits in commercial litigation involve one party to a contract suing the other party to the contract for failing to perform. Recently, an Illinois Appellate Court was forced to address a less common scenario where the plaintiff alleging a breach of contract was not a party to the original contract. The court ultimately ruled that a non-party property owner could not assert breach of contract or negligence claims against parties to various construction contracts between the tenants of the property and the contractors and architects. The Court based its conclusion on the determination that the property owner was not an intended beneficiary of the contracts at issue.

Navigant Development, LLC owned a restaurant property on Wells Street in downtown Chicago. After two separate tenants completed two separate renovations at the property, defects in the trusses supporting the property’s ceiling were discovered. Further investigation revealed extensive damage to several of the trusses forcing Navigant to shut the building down and make repairs costing nearly a million dollars to fix the structure. Navigant’s insurer paid Navigant for the cost of these repairs and for the income lost during the time the restaurant was closed. As the owner’s subrogee, the insurer then sued various contractors and architects involved in the renovation projects, alleging multiple counts of breach of contract and negligence. In its complaint, the insurer alleged that Navigant was an intended third-party beneficiary because the defendants knew the work was to be performed at a property owned by Navigant.

The defendants sought dismissal of the claims arguing that Navigant was not an intended third-party beneficiary of the contracts at issue. The defendants also argued that the negligence claims were precluded by the economic loss doctrine. The trial court ultimately granted the defendants’ motions with prejudice finding that Navigant could not be an intended third-party beneficiary to the contracts between defendants and Navigant’s tenants. The trial court also found that the negligence claims were barred by the economic loss doctrine and that none of the exceptions to the doctrine applied to the case. After the court denied the insurer’s motion to reconsider the dismissal, the insurer appealed. Continue reading ›

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The restaurant industry has long been famous for chefs who yell, insult, and throw things at their staff. Various reality TV shows, such as Hell’s Kitchen, have even glorified celebrity chefs throwing temper tantrums when something comes out of the kitchen with minor imperfections, and even targets of such abuse often say it’s just part of the job: you put up with the abuse, you get better, and you move up the ladder until you’re head chef at your own restaurant … if you’re a man.

Recent movements, including #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, have called for society to stop enabling the toxic behavior of white men in power, including chefs. Change doesn’t happen overnight, but the call has been heard and the tide has shown signs of turning, however slowly.

One of the most recent chefs to come under fire for creating a toxic work environment, as well as for allegedly violating various labor laws is Blaine Wetzel, head chef and co-owner of the Willows Inn. The inn is located on Lummi Island near the San Juan archipelago in Washington State and is only accessible by ferry. People come from all over the country to stay at the inn and eat at the restaurant, all while enjoying the rustic scenery of the island, but the employees allege the true story of the inn is much uglier.

Many former employees of the Willow Inn allege Wetzel used sexist, racist, and homophobic slurs with his staff. Wetzel also allegedly used a slur to suggest some of his staff members were mentally challenged when he didn’t consider their work to be up to par.

According to several employees, the abuse wasn’t always verbal, especially when it came to the girls and women who worked at the Willows Inn. Wetzel and other male employees allegedly plied them with drugs and alcohol (including underage employees), often to the point of unconsciousness. The toxic behavior started at the top with Wetzel who at one point allegedly offered a girl a ride home after work, then drove to his house and refused to take her home until after she’d taken shots with him. He then allegedly drove her home while drunk. Continue reading ›

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As we previously covered here, an Illinois appellate court revived a lawsuit filed by Chicago Bears legend Richard Dent which seeks to learn the identity and addresses of unidentified individuals who published allegedly defamatory statements about Dent which allegedly cost him several lucrative marketing contracts. Following the ruling in Dent’s favor, the respondents in the case sought to challenge the First District’s ruling and requested a review of the case by the Illinois Supreme Court. Recently, the Illinois Supreme Court granted the petition for leave to appeal and will hear arguments in the case later this year.

For background, the case dates back to 2018 when energy supplier Constellation NewEnergy terminated various energy supply and marketing contracts with Dent and his company RLD Resources, LLC. Dent met with the energy company’s attorneys during which the attorneys informed Dent that the company had received complaints about him from multiple individuals accusing him of inappropriate comments and conduct at several Constellation-sponsored events. The attorneys refused to identify the complaining individuals. Shortly after the meeting, Constellation terminated its contracts with Dent. Continue reading ›

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On April 5, 2021, the United States Supreme Court issued its much-anticipated decision in the long-running case of Google v. Oracle, a case that we have been following for nearly five years. In its long awaited decision, the Court held that Google’s copying of the “declaring code” from the application program interface (API) of Oracle’s Java SE platform when creating Google’s Android operating system constituted fair use under copyright law. By deciding the case on these grounds, the Court managed to sidestep the issue of whether the software code at issue was copyrightable in the first place. Instead, the Court simply assumed that it was, virtually guaranteeing that it will be forced to address the issue in a future case.

Background

The saga that culminated in the Court’s decision dates all the way back to 2005 when Google acquired Android and began creating its now-famous Android software platform for mobile devices. Google’s goal was to create an open platform that would allow software developers to build mobile applications to run on it. The Java programming language, originally invented by Sun Microsystems which was later acquired by Oracle, was an obvious candidate for use in the Android platform as it was a popular programming language among software developers.

Shortly after Google’s acquisition of Android, Google began talks with Sun to explore the potential for licensing the entire Java platform. However, negotiations broke down after it became apparent that Sun’s requirement of interoperability was not compatible with Google’s vision for the Android platform. This left Google to build the Android platform on its own.

Creating the Android platform required roughly 100 Google engineers working for more than three years and required writing millions of lines of new code. Google did not write the entire platform from scratch, however. Instead, it copied roughly 11,500 lines of code from the Java SE program, consisting of 37 Java API packages. APIs are used by software programmers to simplify the creation of complex computer programs by allowing two programs to communicate with each other. Java’s API provides access to a collection of prewritten software programs that carry out a large number of specific tasks.

When Oracle Corporation acquired Sun in 2010, Google’s Android platform had been completed for several years and was already a notable success. Oracle promptly filed suit against Google alleging infringements of Oracle’s patents and copyrights. The first trial ended in a victory for Google when the district court ruled that the API packages were not copyrightable as a matter of law. That decision was overturned on appeal and remanded further proceedings on Google’s copyright infringement defense of fair use. Following a second trial, a jury found that Google’s copying constituted fair use, but this verdict was overturned on appeal when the Federal Circuit found that Google’s use of the declaring code was not a fair use as a matter of law. The Supreme Court then agreed to consider both the copyrightability and fair use questions. Continue reading ›

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Midwest grocery giant, Jewel-Osco, is seeking dismissal of a potentially massive putative class-action lawsuit filed against it alleging violations of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). The grocery chain is accused of running afoul of the Illinois BIPA in connection with the technology used by the company to scan fingerprints of certain employees. The company has shot back against the complaint arguing that the suit should be thrown out because it is “conclusory and speculative” and is based entirely on “bald information and belief,” without hard facts.

In 2018, a former Jewel-Osco pharmacist, Gregg Bruhn, filed a putative class action lawsuit against New Albertsons Inc., the parent company of Jewel-Osco, alleging various violations of the Illinois BIPA. Albertsons operates nearly 200 stores located throughout Illinois, Indiana and Iowa, but mostly in the Chicago area. The plaintiff was employed by Jewel-Osco from 1989 to 2018.

In his complaint, Bruhn alleges that he and other employees had to scan their fingerprints in order to gain access to the pharmacy’s computer system for more than a decade beginning in 2006 until at least 2018. Bruhn further alleges that his former employer violated the Illinois BIPA in connection with these fingerprint scans by passing his prints to out-of-state third parties and by failing to give him and the other employees notice concerning how their prints were to be used, stored, shared and ultimately destroyed. He also alleged that Jewel-Osco failed to secure the consent of the employees before acquiring their prints. Under the Illinois BIPA, an employer can be found liable and made to pay damages for each time an employee scanned their fingerprints when verifying their identity. He is seeking to represent both himself and a class of similarly situated employees and has requested as much as $5,000 in statutory damages per violation, per employee. Continue reading ›

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On March 18, the Illinois Supreme Court issued a much awaited opinion finding that private investigator Paul Ciolino’s defamation lawsuit against Chicago attorney Terry Ekl among others was not filed too late. In their briefs before the Court, the parties framed the question in terms of whether or not the discovery rule delayed the beginning of the one-year statute of limitations. The Court held that Ciolino’s action was timely but based its decision not on the arguments proffered by the parties either side or on the reasoning of the appellate court.

The case centers on a book titled Justice Perverted: How the Innocence Project of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism Sent an Innocent Man to Prison and a later documentary titled “Murder in the Park.” The subject of both the book and the documentary was the effort to convict Alstory Simon of a 1983 double homicide on Chicago’s southeast side, one of the most famous murder cases in Illinois’ recent history. Ekl, an attorney who represented Simon in his post-conviction proceedings, is among those whose comments are featured in the documentary.

The book and documentary posit the theory that Ciolino and others framed Simon in order to secure the exoneration of Anthony Porter, who was originally targeted for the murders, and to ultimately bring about an end to the death penalty in Illinois. They claimed that Ciolino and a Northwestern journalism professor coerced Simon into confessing to the crimes for which Porter had been earlier convicted. Simon’s conviction was later overturned and he was ultimately cleared of the murders in 2013, after Ciolino was accused of impropriety in obtaining the confession. Continue reading ›

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For years people used the term “in a Swiss bank account somewhere” to refer to money that had been hidden overseas where the IRS couldn’t reach it. Taking advantage of offshore bank accounts has long been (and still is) a way for rich people to avoid paying taxes on large portions of their wealth, and Swiss banks provided one of the most popular safe havens from American taxes. In theory, that all should have changed in 2014, but according to a whistleblower who used to work for Credit Suisse, a major Swiss bank, the reality is that many Americans are continuing to hide millions of dollars from the IRS with help from Credit Suisse.

Congress and the IRS spent years in the early 2010s investigating Credit Suisse and its involvement in helping American citizens hide their wealth from the IRS. The result was that Credit Suisse ended up pleading guilty and reaching a settlement agreement with federal prosecutors in May of 2014, in which they were fined $2.6 billion. That sounds like a lot, but given how much money they were allegedly helping Americans hide from the IRS, they got off lightly, and that was only because they told the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Senate they wouldn’t do it anymore, and that they would close all the accounts whose holders were in violation of American tax law.

But now the whistleblower is stepping forward claiming Credit Suisse violated its plea deal and has continued to shelter American funds from the IRS. Continue reading ›

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