Articles Posted in Uncategorized

A settlement of a class-action lawsuit that took more than seven years was recently settled in Madison County, Illinois after Tyson Foods agreed to donate chickens to various food banks around Illinois. The poultry donation will equal a retail value of up to $2.3 million. In addition to the donations to Illinois food banks, Tyson will donate over $1 million worth of products.

The lawsuit against Tyson alleged that the company had inflated the weight of its poultry products between 1997 and 2003. The claimants alleged that Tyson participated in a process of chilling the chickens which resulted in the absorption and retention of water under the poultry’s skin and muscle tissues and thereby increased the bird’s weight.

When questioned about the settlement Tyson spokespersons stated that while Tyson denies the allegations, its aim was to avoid additional costly litigation. That they were able to help feed thousands of Illinois residents in need was an added bonus.

And according to spokespeople at Feeding Illinois, a coalition of food banks that distributes food throughout all of Illinois’s counties, the Tyson donations could not have come at a better time. The need for food at U.S. and Illinois food banks has increased almost 20%.

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Chicago is one of the nation’s trucking hubs. Chicagoans are used to seeing tractor trailers on area highways and roads at any time of the day. But these trucks are becoming a less common sight as lags in the economy are forcing more Chicago and Illinois trucking companies to close. And while this might decrease the number of Illinois trucking accidents, it does not bode well for the state of the current economy.

Over the last year, more than 3,000 trucking companies went out of business, which translates to about 7 out of every 100 trucks that were taken off of the road. And while economic analysts assure us that the economy is slowly recovering this trend is not apparent when we look at the frequent closing of trucking companies in Illinois, Chicago, and nationwide.

In just the first quarter of 2009 about 480 trucking companies closed nationwide. While this only impacts less than 1% of our nation’s total freight capacity it still leaves too many trucks competing for too few shipments.

If the economy continues to be weak, more trucking companies could go out of business. Experts predict that the pace of closures will continue to increase until supply is more aligned with demand. However, when trucking business begins to increase again this trend should be mimicked in the rise of other economic factors, such as employment rates and gross domestic product.

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If the Chicago Cubs do win the 2009 World Series, it might have been predicted by a computer simulation which explores baseball strategies and their effect on the game’s outcome. In 1958 a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed a program to investigate whether the sacrifice bunt was a wise play. At the time the program required a huge IBM 704 mainframe to run.

Advances in technology have come so far that there is now a simulator available to the public called Diamond Mind that runs on only a laptop and can even consider the affects of wind on plays at individual ballparks. Other possible simulations include whether stealing a base would increase or decrease the chance of scoring, or if a sacrifice bunt gives your team an advantage. A computer program is ideal for working out these sort of problems that involve millions of fact items; the program smooths out the peeks and random valleys to come up with a reliable approximation.

Known among formal statisticians as the Monte Carlo method, the approach takes spectacularly complex phenomena like weather patterns and stock performance and allows their behavior to be approximated, if not determined.

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Two families brought a lawsuit on behalf of oil refinery workers killed in a 1995 fire at the Clark oil refinery in Blue Island, Illinois. Each decedent’s estate received payment from Clark Refining under the Illinois Workers’ Compensation Act. The current case involves a liability suit the decedents’ widows filed against the parent corporation, Clark USA, Inc., of the subsidiary refining corporation. Forsythe, et al. v. Clark USA, Inc., 224 Ill.2d 274 (2007).

The plaintiffs in Forsythe alleged that cost-cutting by the parent company, Clark USA, resulted in dangerous conditions at the refinery that led to the deaths of the two workers. Specifically that the deep budget cuts resulted in improper training of workers, and that two untrained workers began dismantling a pipe without determining whether it was pressurized caused the explosion that killed their husbands.

When the case was in the trial court, the court granted a motion for summary judgment. Plaintiffs appealed this motion at the Illinois appellate court level, and the appellate court reversed and remanded. The defense petitioned the Illinois Supreme Court for leave to appeal the appellate court decision.

The Illinois Supreme Court granted defense’s petition to consider whether a parent company can be held liable under a theory of direct liability for the manner in which it controls its subsidiary’s budget, and if so, then whether the Workers’ Compensation Act’s exclusive-remedy provision immunizes that parent company from liability.

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In a case involving injury to a 7 year-old who was kicked in the back by a horse, the Illinois Appellate Court decided the question of whether contributory fault was a valid defense to the lawsuit.

The plaintiff brought this personal injury case seeking compensation under the Illinois Animal Control Act which provides:

If a dog or other animal, without provocation, attacks, attempts to attack or injures a person who is peaceably conducting himself or herself in any place where he or she may lawfully be, the owner of such dog or other animal is liable in civil damages to such person for the full amount of the injury proximately caused thereby. 510 ILCS 5/16.

In this case, the trial judge allowed the defense of contributory negligence. But the court looked to the case of Johnson v. Johnson, 2008 WL 4830822 (1st Dist., Nov. 5) to reverse the trial court’s judgment. Johnson found that “A plaintiff’s contributory fault is only relevant to the extent that it relates to the element of provocation. It is not a defense in and of itself.”
The Animal Control Act is a derogation of common-law and is not a strict liability statute. Therefore it does not impose strict liability on animal owners whose animal inflicts injuries upon others.

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In Illinois and other states, the collateral source rule is a much debated legal issue and deals with whether or not a plaintiff in a personal injury case can recover money for their medical bills, including those paid by their insurance. The Illinois Supreme Court’s recent decision in Wills v. Foster (2008 WL 2446696 (Ill. June 19, 2008), has not only established a clear interpretation of these issues, but also laid out how the rule applies to individual personal injury cases in Illinois.

The collateral source rule’s initial purpose was to ensure that a plaintiff’s medical bills in a personal injury case are not diminished by the court or jury because of evidence that those bills were paid by a collateral source, such as an insurance company. For example, if a person was injured and his insurance paid part of his or her bills, that information could not be presented to the jury in order to argue that the plaintiff should then receive less.

However, the rule wasn’t that simple. Questions arose, including whether a plaintiff could recover for free medical services, if Medicare and Medicaid were governed by the rule, and if the amount refers to the initial bill or only to the amount the insurance company paid.

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On June 26, 2008 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the District of Columbia’s total ban on handguns violates the Second Amendment and its protection of an individual’s right to possess firearms.

D.C. law bans handgun possession by making it illegal to carry an unregistered firearm and prohibits registration of handguns. It also states that no person may carry an unlicensed handgun, but police are allowed to issue 1-year licenses. Residents who lawfully own firearms must keep them unloaded and disassembled, or bound by trigger lock or similar device.

The case was brought by Heller, a local policeman who was denied a license to keep his handgun at home. He hoped to enjoin the city from continuing its bar on handgun registration which prohibits carrying an unlicensed firearm in the home and also from its trigger lock requirement prohibiting the use of functional firearms in the home.

The ink on the opinion was not dry before Second Amendment groups filed suit in the federal court in Chicago challenging the city’s handgun ban. Lawsuit challenges to the local ordinances of other city gun bans are planned or filed for Evanston, Oak Park, Wilmette and others.

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