Practice News

Although Illinois caselaw appears to suggest there is no duty to defend an insured (including an additional insured) before a suit, an insurer has a good-faith duty to its insured to respond to a demand made before suit and will often rely on two “black letter” rules to determine their responsibility. One rule is that they have no obligation to pay defense costs incurred before the insured tenders the claim to the insurer; the other rule is that the insurer owes no duties to the insured until the insured is sued. In his January 2020 Illinois Bar Journal article, “Tender-Hearted Insurers,” Scott O. Reed explains that while both rules are a rough approximation of the limits Illinois courts have placed on a liability insurer’s early-stage duties in a claim, caselaw contains exceptions and qualifications to those rules. Reed suggests that knowing the contours of these guides to an insurer’s early-stage duties will allow counsel for insureds and insurers to make informed recommendations to their respective clients about how to resolve conflicts over early-stage costs and settlements.

The Illinois Supreme Court handed down eight opinions on Friday, January 24. Full summaries of the opinions are available below.

The question facing Illinois courts interpreting the state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) has been how best to interpret the meaning of “aggrieved.” Was an individual aggrieved if the defendant violated the statute or did the individual need to have sustained “some actual injury or harm, apart from the statutory violation itself, in order to sue under the Act”? Illinois appellate courts had reached conflicting decisions on this question, but on Jan. 25, 2019, the Illinois Supreme Court resolved this split and held, in Rosenbach v. Six Flags Entertainment Corp., that a person is aggrieved in the legal sense “when a legal right is invaded by the act complained of ….” In his January 2019 Illinois Bar Journal article, “Still a Wild Ride,” Charles N. Insler, a partner in the St. Louis office of HeplerBroom LLC, where he concentrates on complex commercial litigation matters, follows BIPA litigation developments after Rosenbach.

Dr. Hanif Nu’Man with Resci Consulting, LLC, discusses the causes of lawyer burnout, and how attorneys and firms can avoid this issue.