The Illinois Supreme Court Judicial College (Judicial College) Committee on Guardian ad litem Education (GALE) and Committee on Judicial Education (COJE), will host a one-hour live webcast on April 17 at noon titled Conducting Remote Hearings in Child Protection Cases. Registration is available at https://www.pathlms.com/aoic
Join us online from 11 a.m. until noon on Wednesday, May 6 to learn how to build a law firm financial crisis game plan.
Your first objective as an attorney is to help your firm survive, and then you can move toward the efforts that will make it thrive. Attorney and Atticus Practice Advisor Steve Riley reviews how to assess your practice’s financials and recognize traps to avoid in a cashflow crunch. He’ll share strategies to help you protect and manage your firm’s assets, such as lines of credit, cash on hand, and outstanding collections. You’ll learn how to triage your caseload so that you’re always moving your firm’s most profitable, fast cash-producing casework forward and not wasting precious time on work that could be placed on a back burner. The goal of this discussion is to help your law firm be in a great position after the financial crisis and know how to prepare for and benefit from deferred demand.
The ISBA has launched a new video series to help educate members affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The videos, which are available on YouTube and the ISBA’s COVID-19 resources page, provide practice information and tips from expert attorneys throughout the state. The videos focus on how to advise clients and meet their needs during this emergency.
Restorative justice offers a method of discussing, coming to terms with, and resolving differences using a voluntary, common-sense approach. It brings people together in various ways depending on the nature of the problem, the needs of the participants, and how or where the process takes place. In their April Illinois Bar Journal article, “The Virtuous Circle,” Illinois Appellate Court Justice Michael B. Hyman and Judge Martha A. Mills (ret.), suggest that since lawyers have embraced arbitration and mediation, it’s now time for them to consider how to incorporate restorative justice into their practices.
Voting is now underway in the 2020 ISBA Election. The last day to request a paper ballot is April 15, 2020.
ISBA's election provider Election America emailed e-ballots to members with valid email addresses on March 26. All members of the Association (except non-lawyer members) with dues paid by March 1, 2020 are eligible to vote. The deadline for voting is Thursday, April 30, 2020 at 4:30 p.m.
The Illinois State Bar Association invites Young Lawyers Division (YLD) members to establish yourselves as experts in your practice area and compete for $3,500 in prize money by entering the Annual Lincoln Award Legal Writing Contest.
Submissions should be useful, practical articles on topics important to practicing lawyers. Submissions will be considered for publication in the Illinois Bar Journal.
What should you do if your counterpart calls you “honey” or “sweetie”? How should you deal with a colleague who has a reputation for treating women (or men) in a demeaning way? While many CLE programs praise the value of diversity and inclusion, this program will help you do something to change the status quo in your negotiations as attorneys. Join us online from noon until 1 p.m. on Friday, May 8 to examine your techniques for unconscious bias and learn ways to make the profession more inclusive by countering the gender biases that may be negatively impacting your negotiations.
In times of crisis, people come together in numerous ways. One is by sharing stories. The ISBA's publications team is interested in your coronavirus experience-whether funny, sad, inspiring, or eye-awakening. Submit your coronavirus story and we will select standouts to run in ISBA publications, including the Illinois Bar Journal's May 2020 issue. A story can pertain to your personal life or your law practice, as long as the coronavirus plays a central role in the telling.
A notice of appeal is a very simple pleading and in most instances may be as short as one page. All that is required for a notice of appeal to be effective is that it be timely filed, name the party who is appealing, specify the judgment or parts of the judgment being appealed, and describe what relief the party appealing is seeking from the Illinois Appellate Court. However, as past ISBA President J. Timothy Eaton notes in his April Illinois Bar Journal article, “The Timely and Properly Filed Notice of Appeal,” its simplicity should not overshadow its importance. Many appeals have been lost before they could be heard on the merits, Eaton writes, because the appellate court lacked jurisdiction. The appellate court’s jurisdiction is dependent upon a proper notice of appeal being timely filed. Without it, only extraordinary remedies by the Illinois Supreme Court can save the appeal. Eaton, partner at Taft Stettinius & Hollister in Chicago, walks through the ins and outs of a notice of appeal properly and timely filed.
The Illinois Supreme Court handed down two opinions on Thursday, April 2. In People v. Brown, the Supreme Court found that a circuit court unnecessarily reached a constitutional issue in its determination that requiring someone to have a FOID card for an in-home weapon is unconstitutional. In Crim v. Dietrich, the Court addressed post-trial motions and remanded for a new trial de novo on only the issue raised in the post-trial motion.