9:35 a.m. Restrictive Covenants in Physician Contracts, with Andrew B. Cripe of Hinshaw & Culbertson, Chicago.
10:05 a.m. Antitrust Developments, with Richard D. Raskin of Sidley, Austin, Brown & Wood, Chicago.
10:45 a.m. Hospital Medical Staffs, with section council and ISBA Assembly member Gerald G. Goldberg of Goldberg & Frankenstein, Chicago, and Michael R. Callahan of Katten Muchin Zavis Rosenman, Chicago.
11:30 a.m. Physician Competition with Hospitals, with Scott Becker of McGuireWoods, Ross & Hardies, Chicago.
1 p.m. Ex Parte Communication, with Jason A. Parson of Anderson, Bennett & Partners, Chicago.
1:30 p.m. Discovery, with section council member Judy L. Cates of Cates, Kurowski, Bailey & Schultz, Belleville, and Dawn A. Sallerson of Hinshaw & Culbertson, Belleville.
2:30 p.m. Provider Liens, with Margaret P. Griffiths of Katten Muchin Zavis Rosenman, Chicago.
3 p.m. Litigation Against Manager Care Organizations, with Leonard A. Nelson of Chicago, counsel to the American Medical Association Health Law and Litigation Division.
Board reappoints LLLAF board members
Seven members of the board of directors of Land of Lincoln Legal Assistance Foundation have been reappointed by the ISBA Board of Governors to two-year terms that will expire Dec. 31, 2005. They are:
Region I Gerald S. Reed, representing the Murphysboro Service Area (Gallatin, Hardin, Jackson, Perry, Randolph, Saline and Williamson Counties).
Region III Russell K. Scott, representing the East St. Louis Service Area (Monroe and St. Clair Counties).
Region IV Leo H. Konzen, representing the Alton Service Area (Bond, Calhoun, Greene, Jersey, Macoupin, Madison and Montgomery Counties).
Region V Robert John Kane, representing the Springfield Service Area (Cass, Christian, Logan, Mason, Menard, Morgan, Sangamon and Scott Counties).
Region VI Susan W. McGrath, representing the Champaign Service Area (Champaign, DeWitt, Ford, Piatt, Macon and Vermilion Counties).
Region VIII James A. Rapp, representing the Quincy and Cairo Service Areas (Adams, Alexander, Brown, Hancock, Johnson, Pike, Pope, Pulaski, Massac, Schuyler and Union Counties).
At Large Jack Carey, representing the 65-county service areas.
Russell Scott, a member of the ISBA Assembly and vice president of the Illinois Bar Foundation, chairs the LLLAF board and serves on the Illinois Coalition for Equal Justice.
Lois Wood recently succeeded Joseph R. Bartylak as LLLAF executive director. Call (618) 462-0036 for more information.
Get quick answers via ISBA e-mail discussions
Unlike their large-firm counterparts, small-firm lawyers and solos often lack a colleague down the hall to query about law, ethics, practice management, client relations, and the like. But technology has given ISBA members from firms large and small something just as good, if not better - an electronic network of colleagues stretching from Rockford to Carbondale and all points in between.
ISBA's five discussion groups give lawyers around the state a way to pose questions and share information at Internet speed. And the messages are archived for key word searching, so you can resurrect past wisdom on the topic of your choice.
ISBA member Gregory Catrambone of Villa Park puts it this way: "As a solo practitioner, being able to post various scenarios and issues that come up in the day to day practice of transactional law and reading the helpful responses has proved invaluable to me."
In addition to the transactional-law discussion that Gregory refers to, there's one for family, litigation, and general legal topics. And then there's the ISBACafe, where lawyers can talk politics, current events, or just about anything on their minds.
To sign up, go to <www.isba.org> and click on "Discussion Groups" under E-mail Services on the maroon navigation bar, or go straight to <http://www.isba.org/Discussions/>.
Director of Legislative Affairs
As the General Assembly awaits the primary election, the following bills are alive in the process that may be of interest to ISBA members.
Disconnection of a "split lot." Senate Bill 2175 (Link, D-Vernon Hills; Rutherford, R-Chenoa) and House Bill 4498 (Davis, D-Chicago) amend the Municipal Code to allow the owner or owners of a "split lot" to disconnect a portion of the lot so that a single municipality or county governs the entire lot. A "split lot" is defined as a single residential lot that is located in and governed by two municipalities or that is governed by one municipality and one county. A petition seeking to disconnect the lot must proceed under Sec. 7-3-6 of the Code. It is on first reading in the House after passing the Senate 49-0-0.
Mechanics Lien Act. House Bill 3994 (Ryg, D-Vernon Hills) amends the Mechanics Lien Act to treat contractors the same way the current Act treats subcontractors. Contractors must give the owner of an owner-occupied single-family resident notice before filing a lien against any property of the owner. It is on second reading in the House
Open meetings and verbatim record. House Bill 4247 (Black, R-Danville) amends the Open Meetings Act to modify recent Public Act 93-523 that requires a verbatim recording of closed meetings. House Bill 4247 does the following: (1) Requires public bodies to keep written minutes of closed (as well as open) meetings. (2) The new public act requires that a public body periodically meet to review minutes and recordings of all closed meetings to determine the continuing need for confidentiality of those minutes and recordings. House Bill 4247 deletes the "recordings" from this mandate. (3) Exempts the verbatim recording from being subject to discovery in any judicial proceeding other than to enforce the Open Meetings Act. In such an enforcement action, if the court finds an examination of the verbatim record is necessary, it must (now, may) conduct it in camera. (4) Requires the court's initial inspection in a criminal proceeding to be in camera as well. On second reading in the House.
Juvenile justice. House Bill 4610 (Annazette Collins, D-Chicago) amends the Juvenile Court Act of 1987 and the Unified Code of Corrections to provide that persons under 18 years of age (rather than under 17 years of age) who commit offenses are subject to the juvenile justice proceedings for delinquent minors. On second reading in the House.
Respondents in discovery. House Bill 6846 (Hoffman, D-Collinsville) amends the respondents in discovery statute to give the trial courts discretion for good cause to extend the six-month period of discovery for persons or entities named as respondents. Good cause includes but is not limited to a failure or refusal on the part of the respondent to comply with timely filed discovery. It has an immediate effective date and would apply to all pending actions. On third reading in the House.
Underinsured motorists. Senate Bill 2830 (Roskam, R-Wheaton) deletes provisions in current law that prohibit motorists from collecting money from their underinsured coverage if it does not exceed the amount of liability coverage they have. It allows injured drivers to receive the full amount of their underinsured insurance for collisions that are not their fault when they involve underinsured motorists. If the damages exceed the amount of liability coverage that the negligent driver has, it would allow those with underinsured motorist coverage to bridge the gap with their underinsured motorist coverage to pay for most if not all of the damages. On first reading in the House after passing the Senate 55-0-0.
"The sacrifices and sudden answer to the call of duty made by citizen soldiers like my dad can often never be truly appreciated by those outside of the armed forces. As his son, I will soon recognize all I took for granted, and his big shoes will be hard to fill at home where my mother, sister and I will miss his presence."
Springfield high school senior Ed McMenamin
writing about his father, Joe, who closed his
law practice in January when called to
Guard duty for 18-24 months in Afghanistan
* * *
"Detroit's largest firm has swept into the Windy City to pick up 78-lawyer Rooks Pitts ... The deal, which goes live April 1, could ignite a Chicago price war, as Dykema Gossett says it plans to keep average partner rates near $300 an hour - about half of big firm rates."
From a news release posted on
ISBA's on-line discussion group
* * *
"Gee, I wish they would sweep into Monticello and suppress our rates to $300."
ISBA member John Foltz of Monticello in a
Editor
Nothing butts the truth
What didn't they know and why didn't they know it? Chilled by an ill wind of recantations and revisions of judgment that painted us into confounding corners of hostility and desolation, the incumbent president seeks a moment of truth.
A commission has been established to, quote, study our military intelligence capabilities and the assessments that seem to have overstated the imminent threat of mass destruction. In other words, to weave the whole truth from some tatters of whole cloth.
The nine-member panel has not been given an acronym, but it portends to spread a dense cloak over the stratified daggers of the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency, the Secret Service, the military, the Congress, the Cabinet and whatever other finders of fact are out there.
No report from the commission is expected until March 31, 2005 long after the next election so few can harbor much hope that the endangered truth will come suddenly flouncing out from extinction like a whooping crane.
These things take time. Congress has just extended until July 26 the deadline for a report from the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States, which was created more than two years ago in response to the 9-11 disaster.
Coincidentally, the FBI has decided to hire about 900 intelligence analysts to help stop terrorism before it happens. They will join the 1,200 analysts who heretofore have been derided by the agency's elite. An estimated two-thirds of them were said to be unqualified for the task.
The head of this beefed-up FBI intelligence venture says that its biggest challenge is the proliferation of information technology. More data is being produced than can reasonably be assimilated and assayed with current staffing.
Carl Sandburg, in his late-life epic, "Timesweep," described telling the elephant and the flea that "Each of us makes his life in what to him is known and for each of us there is a vast unknown and farther beyond the vaster unknowable and the ignorance we share alike is immeasurable."
That bears uncanny resemblance to the rhetoric that earned Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld the 2003 Foot in Mouth Prize last December from a Plain English Campaign jury in London.
As Rumsfeld observed, "Reports that say something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns the ones we don't know we don't know."
Two years ago, Rumsfeld was ordered by the president to shut down the Pentagon-based Office of Strategic Influence (OSI), which had been created after 9-11 to leak dribbles of misinformation to the foreign press. With a straight face, Rumsfeld agreed that the credibility of OSI had been badly damaged by disclosures of its proposed activities.
Later in 2002, however, the existence came to light of a Total Information Awareness (TIA) office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the Department of Defense.
Its stated purpose was to "imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness" (New Yorker, Dec. 9, 2002).
Translated, that involved merging personal data from every available public or private source into one huge database that the government could probe arbitrarily for patterns of terrorism and profiles of possible terrorists. One might call it making known knowns out of unknown unknowns.
Congress reacted badly to the inevitability of putting innocent constituents under suspicion. The agency's funding was terminated, and its impresario, the somewhat infamous John Poindexter, quit.
But Congress preserved a $64 million program known as Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA). Funding also was allocated to undesignated software research for a National Foreign Intelligence Program (NFIP), which may include previous TIA projects called Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery (EELD).
Even without TIA and DARPA, our supersnoops have high hopes that ARDA, NFIP and EELD will ferret out more valuable anti-terrorism data than whether you lied about your weight on your driver's license, or what flavor toothpaste you use, or what kind of books you buy.
Whether the president's newest certitude-seeking commission can find out who knew what about who and when in regard to WMD in Iraq, however, will depend on someone's definition of reality an elusive concept during an election year.