New Laws, New Year Part 2 Illinois small businesses need to get up to speed on a variety of state legislation passed in the previous session that came online on January 1. We covered several new provisions in a post last week, including a higher state minimum wage and legislation…
Illinois Employers Face New Laws 2025 Guest Author: Kelsey Feucht, Associate Attorney with Bellas & Wachowski Illinois small businesses need to get up to speed on a variety of state legislation – particularly employment laws – which became effective on January 1. Key new laws (or amendments to existing legislation)…
Insurance Coverage for BIPA violations. Businesses across Illinois are facing serious challenges in securing insurance coverage for lawsuits brought under the Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). And a recent decision by the federal court in Chicago – Westfield Insurance Company v. UCAL Systems, Inc. – dealt yet another blow to…
Non-Competes Now a Nonstarter This is really big news! Businesses that have entered into non-compete agreements with current or recently departed employees will need to come up with other ways of achieving the investment-protecting goals those non-competes were designed to accomplish. That’s because the Federal Trade Commission has issued a…
Corporate Transparency Act While Congress might have had worthwhile purposes in passing the Corporate Transparency Act, a section of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, it’s nonetheless unconstitutional, according to a federal judge’s summary judgment ruling in an Alabama case brought by the National Small Business Association (NSBA). The Act…
Long-Term Temps to be Paid Like Employees Both Illinois employers that contract with temporary labor service agencies, and those agencies themselves that do business in the state, should review staffing contracts and ensure compliance with relevant policies and procedures under amendments to the Illinois Day and Temporary Labor Services Act…
Buyer of Nontraditional Legal Services, Beware All kinds of business forms are offered online, and many of them for free. Stand-alone paralegal services are offering various sorts of assistance to small businesses for significantly less than lawyers generally charge. Accounting and bookkeeping services that organize businesses are increasingly positioning themselves…
Texts can be held against you in court. Alex Jones lawyers (perhaps inadvertently) turned 2-years of texts to the lawyers for the Sandy Hook families. What would be the repercussions for the disclosure if the trial were in Illinois? The parents of a 6-year-old child that was killed in…
The City of Chicago’s newly amended sexual harassment ordinance, which takes effect July 1, will bring an enhanced definition of the term, new written policy and notice requirements, new training requirements for employers, additional safety measures, a longer statute of limitations—and heftier penalties for those found guilty. Every Chicago business…
Subchapter V for Small Business Owners For the past two years, small businesses whose bottom lines were impacted by the onset of COVID-19 enjoyed greater protections while going through Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganizations in the form of higher debt limits under the Small Business Reorganization Act. That act, passed in…