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It is common for public figures to put their name on various products, even when they’re seemingly unrelated to that person’s career. Just seeing a celebrity’s name, face, or logo on a product is frequently enough to tempt people into making a purchase, but that alone is not always enough.

When celebrities put their name on a product, it’s usually in their best interest to help promote that product. Seeing a celebrity’s face or name on a product is one thing, but hearing that celebrity talk about that product is another. In return for using their name and likeness and/or their promotional efforts, celebrities with their own product lines usually receive a cut of the profits from that product.

Jay Z, whose real name is Shawn Carter, partnered up with Parlux Fragrances in 2013, to create Gold Jay Z, a signature fragrance line. The product was projected to do $50 million in sales, and in return for his participation in the deal, Jay Z received $2 million in royalties and 300,000 shares in Perfumanisa, the parent company of Parlux Fragrances. Continue reading ›

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Our Chicago car fraud and Lemon law attorneys near Oswego and Sandwich bring individual and class actions suits for defective cars with common design defects and auto dealer fraud and other car dealer scams such as selling rebuilt wrecks as certified used cars or misrepresenting a car as being in good condition when it is rebuilt wreck or had the odometer rolled back. We also see cases where new car dealers conceal that the car has been in accident while in their possession or used car dealers who put duck tape in back of the check engine light to conceal serious engine or emission problems.  Super Lawyers has selected our DuPage, Kane, Kendall, Lake, Will and Cook County Illinois auto-fraud, car dealer fraud and lemon law lawyers as among the top 5% in Illinois. We only collect our fee if we win or settle your case. For a free consultation call our Chicago class action lawyers at our toll free number 630-333-0333 or contact us on the web by clicking here.

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The drastic advances in technology that have happened in recent years make many aspects of modern living much easier, but they have also put certain aspects of our lives at risk that were never at risk before. For example, as people use cash less and less and increasingly rely on their credit cards to pay for their everyday purchases, more and more people have had their credit cards compromised and used to pay for purchases they never authorized. It is now common for credit card companies to offer credit card protection, in which users won’t be made to pay for purchases they did not authorize, but credit card companies usually charge an extra fee for that protection.

Data security is doing its best to keep up with the hackers, but that’s not always possible. Many companies, especially large chains, have suffered data breaches in which hackers illegally gain access to customers’ credit card information. Since it is often very difficult, if not impossible, to locate and prosecute the hackers themselves, the company that suffered the data breach is often faced with a class action lawsuit from customers who had their credit card information exposed as a result of the company’s failure to have the proper protections in place. Continue reading ›

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MANIPULATED MILEAGE: ODOMETER ROLLBACKS INCREASING

The ABC7 I-Team is exposing the increase in odometer rollbacks.
ABC7 I-Team Investigation
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Current and former California employees of Time Warner Cable LLC got a Christmas present in the form of an announcement that Time Warner has agreed to settle their wage and hour lawsuit for $1.25 million.

The class action lawsuit was filed in June 2010 and alleged the cable company failed to pay its call center employees minimum wage and overtime when they worked more than eight hours a day or forty hours a week.

California labor law sets the state minimum wage at $9 per hour, which is higher than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. Cities also have their own wage and hour laws, so employers conducting business in the U.S. need to make sure they’re abiding by all relevant labor laws. The law with the highest minimum wage takes precedence over the others. Continue reading ›

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In order to file a lawsuit against an individual or organization alleging violation of the law, the plaintiff must be able to allege specific and clear violations of the law, as well as actual damages the plaintiff suffered as a result of the alleged violation. This is as true of defamation lawsuits as it is of any other law.

Although the First Amendment protects every citizen’s right to free speech, it does not allow public statements about other people who are public figures that are intentionally or deliberately false and accuse of them of certain types of misconduct and prohibits false statements against ordinary people that wrongly accuse them of certain types of misconduct. In order to be considered defamatory, a statement has to be made publicly, and with the result that the target suffered damage to their public reputation and/or career. Opinions and general rhetoric do not qualify as defamation. Continue reading ›

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The federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) protects all employees working throughout the United States. It guarantees things like a minimum wage (which is currently set at $7.25 per hour) access to social security, and premium compensation for all overtime worked. The FLSA also defines overtime as all overtime spent working after eight hours a day or forty hours a week.

The FLSA does allow certain workers to be held exempt from these protections, but it is very specific about the qualifications workers must meet in order to be held exempt. The Act provides employees with these protections because employers generally have much more leverage than their workers, especially workers earning minimum wage. The Act therefore withholds these protections only from employees that have sufficient leverage to negotiate their own terms of work. These employees include salaried administrative assistants, executive employees, professional employees, and independent contractors. Continue reading ›

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Gift cards can be a big money maker for some businesses. They rely on some the gift cards going unused until they expire, in which case the company gets to keep the money spent on the gift card without having to cough up the product or service it was meant to pay for. Sometimes these gift cards go unused as a result of customers receiving them for things they don’t want, they forget about them, or they are simply too busy to use them before the expiration date, but sometimes the company influences the outcome to significantly decrease the likelihood that gift cards will be used before they expire.

According to a recent class action lawsuit against SoulCycle, the fitness chain allegedly issued class passes that expired in an unreasonably short amount of time. The consumer class action lawsuit was filed in August 2015 by the lead plaintiff, Rachel C., who alleges she was unable to use her single-class pass before it expired. Continue reading ›

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Employees who notice something illegal or immoral going on at work are often made to choose between their conscience and their jobs. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform act prohibits employers from retaliating against whistleblowers (those who bring illegal practices to the attention of a regulatory authority), but in practice, these laws rarely have any effect.

An example of this is the case of Johnny Burris. Mr. Burris worked as a broker for JPMorgan’s office in Sun City West, Arizona as a top producing broker and earned glowing performance reviews, at least for his first few years of employment there.

Most of Mr. Burris’s clients consisted of retirees who knew very little about the complicated financial markets, so Mr. Burris considered it part of his job to avoid any investment products which might be unsuitable for his clients, expensive, and/or underperforming. Some of these investment products that Mr. Burris considered allegedly unsuitable included products that JPMorgan offered, and his refusal to promote them to his clients started to draw some criticism from his superiors. Continue reading ›

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When a group of plaintiffs file a class action lawsuit, the class needs to be defined. If the judge is not comfortable with the parameters of the class as laid out by the plaintiffs, the judge can deny class certification until the plaintiffs come back with parameters the judge agrees with.

In the case of the class action lawsuit against Uber, the judge eliminated two groups of drivers from the class: those who were hired for Uber through a limo service and those who signed up to drive for Uber using corporate or fictitious names. The judge deemed the claims of these drivers to be too different from the claims of the drivers who signed up as drivers for Uber under their own names to justify allowing them to join the class. Part of the judge’s reasoning for this was that Uber was not technically the employer of these drivers – the third party Uber used to hire the drivers was the legal employer of these drivers. Continue reading ›

Contact Information
Chicago Office
19 S LaSalle St #702
Chicago, IL 60603
Phone: 630-333-0333
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Phone: 630-333-0333 Please direct all mail correspondence to our Oakbrook Terrace address.
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