The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit recently put the kibosh on the proposed mega merger between health insurance giants Anthem, Inc. and Cigna Corporation, two of the nation’s four largest insurers. The court concluded that Anthem failed to show how proposed cost efficiencies would offset…
Getting taken to the cleaners by a dishonest employee or contractor is headache enough for any business, but having no fraud coverage insurance coverage is a world of hurt. Businesses are well advised to analyze their policies carefully to make sure they have proper coverage. In the case of an…
Stock options exercised by railroad employees are a form of monetary compensation taxable to the employer and employee under the Railroad Retirement Tax Act, according to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals (Wisconsin Central Ltd., et al. v. United States, No. 16‐3300 (7th Cir. 2017)). In 1996, three Midwestern railroad…
A recent shareholder suit challenging the sale of a Chicago-based company to IBM was dismissed by a Delaware chancery court because the merger was supported by an informed and uncoerced vote of 80% of stockholders. When IBM acquired healthcare software developer Merge Healthcare, Inc., in 2015 for $1 billion, a…
Peter Doig isn’t exactly a common name, but the world-famous painter of that name had the bad fortune of bearing a similar name to that of Peter Edward Doige, who is apparently the true creator of a landscape painting at the center of a highly unusual lawsuit that was recently…
When billions of dollars are on the line, the end of a personal friendship can jeopardize business investments, as well as personal relationships, especially when one party’s mental competence is called into question. That’s exactly what happened when Sumner M. Redstone, the head of a media empire that includes Viacom…
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit recently held that client victims of a lawyer’s fraud take precedence over a commercial lender in being paid out of funds owed to the lawyer’s firm. Attorney William C. of Indiana-based Conour Law Firm, LLC is serving a 10-year prison term…
A corporate defendant waives the right to enforce an arbitration clause in an employment agreement if it asserts an affirmative defense to a complaint that is unrelated to arbitration. So ruled the First District Appellate Court of Illinois in a recent breach of employment contract case called Koehler v. Packer…
A Cook County judge on June 3 in the case of Robert Buono v. Intelligentsia Coffee, Inc., Emily Mange, and Doug Zell gave the green light for this lawsuit to proceed against the founders of Chicago-based Intelligentsia Coffee, Inc. for allegedly withholding more than $15 million in profits from the company’s…
An employment agreement that sets out a specific term of employment may not protect an employee from being terminated at any time. The Fifth District Appellate Court in Wessel v. Greer Management Services, Inc., 2016 IL App (5th) 150259-U recently ruled against a plaintiff who brought a breach of contract…