Medicare and Medicaid funding (or potential lack thereof) has been one of the more prominent topics this election season on both national and local levels. In Illinois, and many other states, advocates on behalf of nursing homes and management companies have cited to dwindling Medicare and Medicaid funding as justification for their inability (or perhaps unwillingness) to meet proper staffing requirements and provide Read More
Chicago Trial Attorney: Personal Injury & Business Litigation: Nursing Home Abuse and Neglect Law — Liability for Owners and Operators
As the recent news stories popping up around the state have made clear, the way in which nursing homes are customarily owned and operated has become an extremely contentious topic. We've discussed the way that nursing homes often set up different legal "entities" that shuffle around ownership of the physical building, while others, for instance, own the furniture or run the staffing, but at the end of the day, actual Read More
Chicago Trial Attorney: Personal Injury & Business Litigation: Auto Accident Law — Public Opinion puts Chicago Speed Camera Bill on the Ropes (and Why it Matters)
In the past we've discussed proposed auto safety measures, such as Chicago's proposed speeding camera bill, which would post cameras in designated "safety zones," track speeding cars and issue automated tickets similar to those by red light cameras. An earlier report, however, indicates that this particular proposal may wind up dying on the vine for one primary reason -- a seemingly significant lack of public Read More
Chicago Trial Attorney: Personal Injury & Business Litigation: Auto Accident Law — Lawmakers Seek to Close Helmet Loophole
New traffic safety laws went into effect last year that had lawmakers turning their focus to those proposals. Many of those proposed regulations were discussed at a meeting of the Secretary of State's Advisory Committee on Traffic Safety, which outlined the general direction that the legislature sought to take. While we previously reported on several of these, such as the proposed ban on all handheld devices while Read More
Chicago Trial Attorney: Personal Injury & Business Litigation: Nursing Home Abuse and Neglect Law — California Lawsuit Targets Nursing Home Management Structure
We've often discussed the difficulties that arise when filing suit against a nursing home stemming from the complex nature of how the "behind the scenes players" structure the corporate entities behind these facilities. As a recent article out of California suggests one recent lawsuit is looking at this issue from a different and unique vantage point. One common perception is that nursing home ownership groups set up Read More
Chicago Trial Attorney: Personal Injury & Business Litigation: Nursing Home Abuse and Neglect Law — California Residents Die After Poisoning from Wild Mushrooms
In a very bizarre and tragic story out of California 2 nursing home residents have died and 4 others have been hospitalized from alleged food poisoning after a caregiver placed what turned out to be poisonous wild mushrooms into a soup that was then served to residents. As the article suggests, an initial investigation into the situation has concluded that no foul play was involved and that the caregiver didn't know Read More
Chicago Trial Attorney: Personal Injury & Business Litigation: Nursing Home Abuse and Neglect Law — Nursing Home Workers Stage Candlelight Vigil in Protest of Nursing Home Conditions
As we've recently discussed, there seems to be a growing dissent amongst the ranks of nursing home employees about the conditions in many local nursing homes, and many groups of nurses, caretakers, and other employees have begun to vent their frustrations with the very facilities they work for (and the ownership groups behind them) in increasingly public displays. This has included several of the visible protests Read More
Chicago Trial Attorney: Personal Injury & Business Litigation: Auto Accident and Class Action Law — Toyota Settlement Has Consumers Asking Questions
Yesterday, we discussed early reports of the landmark proposed settlement of a class action brought against Toyota stemming from the widely-reported 2010 alleged defect that caused vehicles to unexpectedly accelerate. The problem with the early reports, however, is that some of them painted the story with too broad of strokes, and now, as subsequent articles suggest, many Toyota owners aren't quite sure what this Read More
Chicago Trial Attorney: Personal Injury & Business Litigation: Auto Accident and Class Action Law — Toyota Agrees to “Landmark” Settlement Relating to Acceleration Cases
As multiple news outlets are reporting, Toyota has agreed, in principal, to settle a class action lawsuit in California stemming from the highly-publicized dispute that arose in early 2010 after a number of complaints were logged that the auto giant's vehicles were accelerating unintendedly. It should be noted that there have been several different "groups" of litigation that have arisen from this dispute and, as the Read More
Chicago Trial Attorney: Personal Injury & Business Litigation: Nursing Home Abuse and Neglect Law – Watchdog Agency Warns Families of Nursing Home Patients to Look Out for Sepsis
We’ve spent a good deal of time discussing the persistent problem of nursing home under-staffing and the wide range of effects it has on all aspects of a nursing home. Decreased attentiveness, and under-qualified (and over-worked) staffing has a pretty straightforward effect on the health and safety of residents. Now even the nursing home employees themselves are starting to raise their voices for patients’ Read More
