By Peter S. Lubin and James V. DiTommaso
You own half of a company you helped build, and the other owner has turned on you. The distributions stopped, but the salary he pays himself did not. You asked to see the books and got silence. Maybe he changed the password on the shared drive, put his brother-in-law on payroll, or started a side venture that looks a great deal like yours. You do not know whether you are about to lose the business, your investment, or both, and every day you wait feels like a day he is using against…
Continue Reading Business Partners at War in Illinois: What a Chicago Commercial Litigator Actually Does to Protect You

By Peter S. Lubin and James V. DiTommaso
A process server hands your company a class action complaint late on a Friday. By Monday you are reading a theory that turns one disputed
charge or one form document into a claim brought on behalf of thousands of people. The instinct is to wait, to answer the complaint, and to see how bad it gets. That instinct is a mistake. What a defendant does in the first thirty days often decides the case, because the early choices
about where the lawsuit is heard and whether the plaintiff can clear the threshold…
Continue Reading Served With a Class Action in Illinois? The First Moves That Decide the Case

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

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

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

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 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

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 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 demand letter usually starts with a fingerprint. Your employees clock in and out on a biometric time clock, the way millions of workers do, and a plaintiff’s lawyer has noticed. The complaint says the company collected those fingerprints without the written consent the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act requires, and then it multiplies. Every scan, by every employee, on every shift, across years, becomes a separate violation, each one tagged at $1,000 or $5,000, and the spreadsheet at the bottom of the letter reaches a figure that looks like the entire value of the company. The message is the…
Continue Reading Sued Under BIPA? After the 2024 Amendment, the Demand Letter’s Damages Math No Longer Adds Up

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

The certified letter arrives on a Tuesday, and it is written to sound like a verdict. Your minority shareholder, the one who stopped coming to work two years ago but never stopped cashing distributions, now says you have frozen him out. His lawyer accuses you of oppression, breach of fiduciary duty, and self-dealing, and demands that the company buy back his quarter of the business at a price his accountant built by taking last year’s best month, annualizing it, and ignoring every liability on the books. The letter closes with a deadline and a threat to ask a judge to…
Continue Reading Accused of Freezing Out a Minority Owner? How Illinois Law Defends the Majority in a Shareholder Oppression Case

The complaint reads like an indictment of your marketing department. A national class. Allegations that a label, a website disclosure, or a price representation deceived consumers. A nationwide class period stretching back five years. A demand for restitution, actual damages, punitive damages, and a permanent injunction against your business practices. The Illinois Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act, 815 ILCS 505, is one of the broadest consumer-protection statutes in the country, and the plaintiffs’ bar treats it that way. The complaint is written to make a settlement feel inevitable long before discovery starts.
The complaint is doing what it…
Continue Reading The Illinois Consumer Fraud Act Class Action You Were Just Served: Five Defenses That Decide Whether the Class Ever Gets Certified