Your hiring process probably uses artificial intelligence right now, whether you know it or not. The applicant tracking system that ranks resumes before a human reads them. The assessment platform that scores candidates on a video interview. The scheduling tool that screens out applicants who cannot work certain shifts. Vendors sold these tools as efficiency. Illinois law now treats them as a compliance obligation with teeth.
On January 1, 2026, Public Act 103-0804 took effect. It amends the Illinois Human Rights Act, 775 ILCS 5, to regulate the use of artificial intelligence in employment decisions, and it applies to recruitment,…
Continue Reading Illinois Now Regulates AI in Hiring: What Employers Must Do Under the Amended Human Rights Act

The offer to buy your shares arrives as a single page. You built a quarter of the company over fifteen years, and the letter values your stake at a number that would not cover two good years of the distributions you used to take. The controlling owner calls it generous. His accountant has trimmed it once for your lack of control, trimmed it again because the shares are hard to sell, and used a valuation date that happens to fall right after the worst quarter in the company’s history. The message is that this is the market speaking, and that…
Continue Reading Being Bought Out of Your Illinois Company? Why the “Fair Value” of Your Shares Is Higher Than the Offer

You own thirty percent of the company, and for the first ten years that felt like a partnership. Then the managing member stopped returning your calls. The distributions shrank and then stopped, though the company is plainly doing well. You are no longer copied on decisions. The manager’s salary has grown to a number that happens to absorb most of the profit you used to share. You are still a member on paper, but you have been pushed to the door without anyone touching the lock.
This is a freeze-out, and the Illinois Limited Liability Company Act gives a minority…
Continue Reading Frozen Out of Your Illinois LLC? What the LLC Act Lets a Minority Member Do

You find it by accident. A vendor mentions a company you have never heard of, and a week of digging shows that your co-owner has been routing the business’s best work through a second entity he owns alone. Or the bank statements show payments to a relative for work no one did. You are furious, and you are ready to sue. Then your lawyer asks a question that changes everything. Is this your claim, or the company’s?
That question is not a technicality. In Illinois, getting it wrong can end a meritorious case before it is heard. Some wrongs done…
Continue Reading When the Wrong Done to Your Company Is Yours to Fix: Illinois Derivative Lawsuits Explained

You asked a simple question. Where did the money go? You own a piece of the company, the profits that used to reach you have thinned, and you want to see the financials that would explain why. The controlling owner’s answer is a wall. He tells you the records are confidential, or none of your concern, or available only if you drop your objections first. He is betting that you do not know the law gives you a key to that door.
It does. Illinois grants shareholders and LLC members an enforceable right to inspect the books and records of…
Continue Reading Illinois Minority Owners: How to Force a Company to Open Its Books

Your partner started a second company. You learned about it from a customer, not from him, and now you notice that the easy jobs still come to your shared business while the lucrative ones quietly go to his. He says there is nothing wrong with a little outside work. You suspect he has been competing with the company you own together, using its people and its relationships to do it. The question is whether the law sees a betrayal or just ordinary business.
In Illinois, partners and co-owners are not strangers dealing at arm’s length. They stand in a fiduciary…
Continue Reading What Your Business Partner Owes You Under Illinois Law, and What Happens When He Breaks That Duty

You and your partner built this together, fifty-fifty, on a handshake and a shared idea of where the company was going. The split worked until it didn’t. Now you disagree about everything that matters, the strategy, the money, whether to sell, and neither of you can outvote the other. Decisions stall. Good employees notice. The company that took years to build is freezing in place while the two of you stare across the table, each certain the other is the problem.
A deadlock feels like a trap because the thing that made the partnership fair, equal ownership, is now the…
Continue Reading Deadlocked With Your Co-Owner? How Illinois Resolves a 50/50 Business Divorce

The cease-and-desist letter gives you ten days. You wrote a review, or warned a customer, or told an unflattering truth about a former vendor in a way that cost him a sale, and now his lawyer calls it defamation. The letter demands that you retract the statement, take down the post, and apologize, or face a lawsuit seeking damages it sets in the six figures. It is printed on heavy letterhead and written to make you reach for the delete key before you reach for a lawyer. The threat is designed to make silence look like the cheapest path.
Before…
Continue Reading Served With a Defamation Cease-and-Desist? Why Illinois Law and the First Amendment Often Protect What You Said