A year after the tragic mass shooting at the 2022 Highland Park 4th of July parade, the state of Illinois has decided to address some of the vulnerabilities faced in securing the safety of large public gatherings at parades and events.

An amendment to 725 ILCS 167, also known as the Freedom from Drone Surveillance Act, now allows law enforcement agencies to utilize drones as a way to oversee the well-being of Illinois residents and their friends and families, as well as tourists and other visitors at events. With public notice, police can now fly drones to monitor any potential breaches to ...

Companies with Illinois employees have been targeted in recent years with class action lawsuits under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). These lawsuits generally allege that employers have not and are not in compliance with BIPA’s notice and consent requirements before collecting or disclosing employees’ biometric information, including fingerprints, retina scans and facial recognition scans.

One of the defenses has been that such claims are preempted under the Illinois Workers’ Compensation Act as workplace injuries and, therefore, cannot be ...

Have you ever been fingerprinted or had your face scanned without signing a consent form?  At work, do you ever use a fingerprint or retina scanner to clock in or access part of a building? Has personal information you’ve provided ever been stored on an unsecure computer system? 

If you’ve been in any of these situations, your rights may have been violated because, in Illinois, your biometric information belongs to you and only you.

Illinois was the first state to regulate the collection and storage of biometric data. Generally, the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA ...

While many companies, industries, and individuals have suffered because of the COVID-19 pandemic, personal automobile insurers have reported large windfalls. The reason is simple. In response to the threat caused by COVID-19, governors from across the country issued unprecedented executive orders wisely mandating that individuals stay at home unless they were engaging in specified essential activities. State-wide social distancing and stay-at-home measures led to a drastic reduction in driving and, when you extend this to its logical conclusion, decline in ...

In recent weeks, our team at Romanucci & Blandin filed a lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson (J&J) and its subsidiary, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, for permanent damage to our client’s vision caused by the prescription medication, Elmiron (pentosan polysulfate sodium or PPS). It is just the latest of lawsuits against one of America’s most notorious lawbreakers and its subsidiaries, like Janssen Pharmaceuticals, whose products have caused cancer (Talc), addiction (Opioids), bleeding events (Xarelto), kidney damage (Invokana), metal poisoning (hip implants), and male breast ...

At Romanucci & Blandin, we have the distinct privilege of representing clients in some of the most significant and most devastating cases from around the world: the Boeing 737 MAX 8 crash in Ethiopia, mass shootings in Las Vegas and Orlando, and claims nationwide for cancer caused by products like Roundup and Zantac. These cases bring together individuals who have all been injured, sickened, or otherwise harmed or killed by a common cause. Our firm is proud to not only seek justice for those people but lead groups of law firms in that pursuit in such other high-profile cases as:

• COVID-19 ...

So much has changed since March 2020 – the world around us, our neighborhoods, gathering spaces, our jobs, our schools, and homes. Life in the midst of COVID-19 has sparked fear, frustration, and anxiety, as well as an onslaught of litigation.

One notable area litigation related to the COVID-19 pandemic is disputes about whether commercial insurance policies cover business interruption losses.  Businesses across the country have sued their insurance companies arguing that their insurance policies should cover losses incurred as a result of the presence and spread of SARS-CoV-2 ...

You have suffered an unjustified wrong, and after researching, you find: “I’m not the only one.” Immediately, the phrase “class action” comes to mind. However, that is not the only legal path to justice, and in some cases, a class action does not make sense; a mass tort does, instead. So what is a class action, and why do some cases get filed as class actions while others do not?

A class action is a type of lawsuit where one person or group of people (the class representative(s)) represent the rights of others (the class members) who were victims of a similar wrong and suffered ...

The economic devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic is cratering the restaurant and retail sectors, where the necessary government shutdown for non-essential businesses has quickly crippled thousands of companies. Unlike many other businesses that have a robust online component, restaurants, of course, are an in-person experience and are all about sharing: sharing a physical space, being served by a wait staff that handles your plates and beverages, and eating food prepared by other people. The social distancing guidelines have made all of that impossible, and even those ...

I write to let you know about a positive development for many workers who have been on the front lines of COVID-19 and have contracted the virus in the current pandemic. For many of those COVID-19 first responders and front-line workers, there is the real possibility that they could have been exposed to the virus in the course of their work, and now the Illinois Workers’ Compensation Commission has acknowledged that risk and will allow those workers to more easily obtain benefits under the IL Workers’ Compensation Act (the Act). It’s important to note that in this pandemic the ...