A clinic across town conducts pre-employment physicals for your company. The clinic’s intake form asks routine medical questions, including a section on family medical history. Two years later a class action arrives, naming your company under a statute most Illinois employers had not heard of three years ago. The complaint says you required disclosure of genetic information by asking, through the clinic, about heart disease, diabetes, and cancer in the applicant’s parents and siblings. The demand letter multiplies $15,000 per intentional violation by the number of applicants over the last several years and arrives at a number that looks like…
Continue Reading GIPA Is the New BIPA, and the Damages Are Higher: How Illinois Employers Defend the Genetic Information Privacy Act Wave

The warranty rate has been the same for so long that nobody in the store questions it anymore. The service department books warranty labor at a number the factory set years ago, posts parts at the manufacturer’s cost-plus formula, and moves on to the next repair order. Customer-pay work runs at the dealer’s real retail rate, the one the market actually supports, and warranty work runs at something lower because that is simply how it has always been done. Across a busy fixed-operations department, the gap between those two numbers, repeated over thousands of repair orders a year, is not…
Continue Reading Leaving Money on the Service Drive: How Illinois Dealers Get Paid Retail for Warranty Parts and Labor

The complaint usually arrives with a number attached, and the number is designed to take your breath away. A former employee, now a class representative, says your company scanned her fingerprint every time she punched the clock. Multiply one finger scan by every shift, by every worker, across several years, and the demand letter floats an exposure figure that looks less like a lawsuit and more like a going-out-of-business sale. The message is not subtle. Settle now, settle big, and do not ask too many questions.
That message is a negotiating tactic. It is not a legal conclusion. The Illinois…
Continue Reading Sued Under BIPA? An Illinois Biometric Class Action Is Not the Catastrophe the Demand Letter Wants You to Believe

The resignation lands on a Friday and feels routine until Monday. Your top salesperson is gone, and so, it turns out, is the customer list, the pricing model, and the quarterly pipeline she pulled the week before she left. By the following week your best accounts are getting calls from her new employer, the one across town that competes with you for the same business, and the quotes coming back are suspiciously well aimed. You signed her to an agreement years ago, but you are not sure it still holds, and you do not know whether what she took counts…
Continue Reading When a Key Employee Walks Out With Your Customers: Trade Secrets, Non-Competes, and the Duty of Loyalty in Illinois

The summons rarely feels proportional to what happened. You left an honest review of a contractor. You warned a colleague about a vendor who had burned you. You answered a reporter’s question, or posted what you believed was true, or simply repeated what half the industry already knew. Now a process server is at the door and a complaint accuses you of defamation, demands a sum with a lot of zeros, and frames your words as if they were a calculated act of malice. The plaintiff is betting that the cost and fear of litigation will make you apologize, retract,…
Continue Reading Sued for Defamation in Illinois? The Defenses That Can End the Case Before It Gains Momentum

Every data incident in 2026 produces the same playbook. A plaintiffs’ firm files a class action. The complaint pleads breach of contract. It pleads invasion of privacy. It pleads a federal statutory claim. And, almost always, it pleads negligence.
The negligence count usually says some version of the same thing. The defendant owed a duty to safeguard the plaintiff’s personal information, the defendant breached that duty by allowing the data to be exposed or transmitted, and the plaintiff suffered damages including diminished data value, anxiety, lost time, and lost benefit of the bargain.
Illinois law has a problem with this…
Continue Reading Illinois Has No Common Law “Duty to Safeguard Data,” and the Moorman Doctrine Closes the Door on Most Negligence Damages

A new wave of class action lawsuits is sweeping into the Northern District of Illinois. The defendants are not telecom companies. They are healthcare practices, retailers, fintech companies, telehealth platforms, employers running candidate portals, and any business with a website that uses analytics or advertising tools.
The legal theory is the same in almost every case. The plaintiff alleges that a tracking pixel, often the Meta pixel, the TikTok pixel, or the Google tag, captured information the user typed into the defendant’s website and quietly transmitted that information to a third party advertising platform. The plaintiff then alleges that this…
Continue Reading When Your Own Website Becomes the “Wiretap”: Defending Illinois Businesses Against Pixel Tracking Class Actions Under the Federal Wiretap Act

If you operate a healthcare practice, a telehealth platform, a behavioral health clinic, a fertility center, an addiction treatment facility, a dental or optometry chain, or any consumer facing business that handles sensitive information online, you have probably heard about the new generation of class action lawsuits over tracking pixels.
The lawsuits target businesses that embed third party tools like the Meta pixel, the TikTok pixel, or Google Analytics on their websites. The complaints allege that the tools captured information about a user’s interactions and transmitted that information to advertising platforms without consent.
In most of these cases, the defendant…
Continue Reading The Tracking Pixel Lawsuit Wave Hits Illinois: Why the “Crime or Tort” Exception Argument Is Splitting the Federal Courts

The deal closed on a Friday. The selling dealer went to Naples. The buyer took the keys on Monday, and by Wednesday was staring at a floor plan audit showing twenty units short, a used-car inventory valued two hundred thousand dollars below the closing schedule, and a working-capital adjustment the seller’s accountant had, in the buyer’s view, quietly gerrymandered. The buyer calls us. So does the seller, a week later, demanding the earn-out the buyer now refuses to pay.
This pattern repeats across Illinois dealership deals. Our earlier post on the five critical clauses every Illinois dealer needs in a…
Continue Reading After the Ink Dries: Post-Closing Buy-Sell Disputes That Drain Illinois Dealership Deals

The phone call comes on a Sunday afternoon. The F&I director has resigned, effective immediately. On Monday, she starts at the crosstown competitor. By the following week, three F&I products the dealer offered her team are discounted next door, customers are calling to cancel service contracts, and the general manager notices her laptop was “imaged” the week before she left. The dealer principal wants to know two things. Can he stop her? And can he recover what she took?
Illinois law gives dealers real tools here, but the rules changed in 2022, and the rules for dealership employees are not…
Continue Reading When Your F&I Director Walks Out with the Customer List: Illinois Dealers, Non-Competes, and Trade Secret Theft After 2022

The allocation spreadsheet arrives on a Monday morning. Two crosstown competitors received the inventory the dealer ordered months ago. The factory’s stair-step bonus program pays a per-unit kicker the dealer cannot possibly hit because the dealer cannot get the cars to sell. Then the region manager calls to explain that the dealer’s “minimum sales responsibility” number is slipping, and unless volume climbs, the incentives the dealer does receive will be clawed back.
Illinois dealers should not accept this as the cost of doing business. The Illinois Motor Vehicle Franchise Act does not tolerate arbitrary allocation, price discrimination across dealers, or…
Continue Reading When the Factory Plays Favorites: Illinois Dealers and the Law of Stair-Step Incentives, Allocation Favoritism, and Sales Performance Games

A facility demand from the factory usually arrives dressed up as a business plan. The renderings look polished. The timeline looks urgent. The number looks painful. Sometimes the message is explicit. Rebuild the showroom. Replace the signs. Rework the service drive. Carve out exclusive space. Use our vendor. Do it now or your renewal will become a problem. Dealers hear that kind of message and often conclude the fight is over before it starts.
That is a mistake. Illinois law does not turn every manufacturer preference into a legal obligation. Some facility demands are legitimate. Some are commercially sensible. But…
Continue Reading Factory Image Program or Seven-Figure Renovation Demand? Illinois Dealers Should Not Assume They Have to Say Yes

When a manufacturer announces a new point or a relocation, the first reaction inside most dealerships is frustration. The second is resignation. The factory says the market can support another store. The decision must already be made. There is no point in fighting it. That reaction is exactly what gets dealers hurt. In Illinois, a proposed additional same-line franchise or a relocation into the relevant market area of an existing dealer is not supposed to be a fait accompli.
The Illinois Motor Vehicle Franchise Act gives dealers a real protest process, and that process has teeth. If a manufacturer wants…
Continue Reading A Same-Line Store Around the Corner? Illinois Dealers Have a Real Protest Right