John Hundley

It’s a common practice in transactions involving big corporations and large sums of consideration.
To alleviate concerns about whether a party has authority to conduct the transaction, sophisticated
parties often ask for an opinion of counsel that the opposing entity has such authority and that all
required prerequisites have been met.

The bona fide error defense – a long standing but rarely successful part of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (15 U.S.C. §§ 1692 et seq.) – had new life breathed into it by the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last month.

Seemingly settled practice regarding the interplay of bankruptcy and foreclosure law was turned on its head late last month when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit held that a state court in a foreclosure case has jurisdiction and authority to enter a deficiency judgment against a debtor with a pending bankruptcy.

The wage deduction provisions of the Illinois Code of Civil Procedure leave a circuit court with no discretion to deny a request for a wage deduction order on grounds of extreme hardship, a panel of the Appellate Court in Chicago held recently.

Just as decades of apparently settled law governing post-judgment collection methods were turned on their heads by a decision of the Appellate Court in Chicago last fall (see Sharp Thinking No. 160 (Oct. 2018)), decades of apparently settled law governing eviction jurisdiction were upended by that same court just as fall turned to winter last month.

A circuit court has jurisdiction to enforce its discovery orders despite the case having been closed and the usual 30-day jurisdictional period having passed, a panel of the Appellate Court’s Second District ruled recently.

The use of course-of-dealing practices to define contractual commitments is statutorily established in sales-of-goods cases governed by the Uniform Commercial Code (810 ILCS 5/1-303(d)-(g)), but may a party rely on such evidence in a case involving services not covered by the UCC?