Chicago Business Litigation Lawyer Blog

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By: Lubin Austermuehle, P.C.

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Patrick Austermuehle
Peter S. Lubin

Latest from Chicago Business Litigation Lawyer Blog

We often hear people talk about private companies going public, but it’s not as often that it goes the other way around – from a public company to a private one. There’s a lot of paperwork involved either way, but unless you have a plan for repaying your investors, going from public to private also means you are denying your shareholders (especially minority shareholders) the stake in the company for which they have already paid.…
Maryland’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, recently settled a longstanding question regarding whether Maryland law recognized an independent cause of action for breach of fiduciary duty. With its opinion in Plank v. Cherneski, the Court resolved an area of confusion that has troubled Maryland courts for more than 23 years since the Court’s 1997 opinion in the seminal case of Kann v. Kann. In 1997, the Kann court held: There is no…
Investing is supposed to be a long-term strategy to build wealth, but expecting shareholders to wait more than 60 years before they can get a fair return on their investment is far beyond what any investor would consider reasonable. That was allegedly the case for the minority shareholders of Promega Corp., the biotechnology company based in Fitchburg, Wisconsin. According to a lawsuit filed by shareholders back in 2016, Bill Linton, Promega’s founder and CEO, allegedly…
Depending on the state in which they live, consumers sometimes have a hard time recovering the money they may have been deceived into giving to scammers who take their money and disappear, or to buy products that turn out to be harmful. Sometimes they can’t sue because they signed away their right to sue a company in their purchase agreement, or the amount spent is too small to justify the costs of an individual lawsuit.…
Having a bad credit score can negatively impact your life in a big way. It can prevent you from getting loans for things you need – everything from buying a car to getting repairs done on your home can become difficult, if not impossible when you have a low credit score. When you are able to obtain a loan, a low credit score can mean you have to pay a much higher interest rate than…
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AbbVie, a pharmaceutical company headquartered in Illinois, was sued by a trading firm after it conducted a Dutch auction to determine the price for its tender offer to repurchase shares of its own stock. Shareholders participated in the auction, offering to sell their stock back to AbbVie, and the lowest offered prices were selected by AbbVie until AbbVie had reached $7.5 billion worth of repurchases. AbbVie hired a company to receive bids and determine the…
We previously wrote about ex-Google engineer Anthony Levandowski, the former head of Google’s self-driving division, who was charged criminally for misappropriation of trade secrets prior to his departure from Google. Levandowski ultimately pleaded guilty to stealing a confidential document related to Google’s self-driving technology. Levandowski’s attorneys had requested that he be let off without any prison time, arguing that a year of home confinement, a fine, restitution, and community service would be sufficient punishment for…
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A manufacturer of electrical connectors for automobiles sued another manufacturer and several competitors alleging theft of trade secrets. The plaintiff alleged that it had a contract to supply connectors to Bosch for use in cars manufactured by General Motors. After several years of performance under the contract, the manufacturer alleged that Bosch passed its designs off to its competitors in an effort to find a company to manufacture the required connectors at a cheaper price.…
Layoffs have become commonplace in the COVID-19 era as employers are forced to trim staff levels amid shelter-in-place orders. Many of these employers intend to rehire their former employees when the economy picks back up. Employers should be aware, however, of the impact, these gaps in employment can have on the enforceability of non-compete agreements and other restrictive covenants the employer and employee may have previously entered into. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for…
When workers get sued by their employer for breaching their employment contract, it’s fairly common for the workers to argue that the contract was invalid, but it’s less common for them to claim their signature on the contract was forged. That’s what Eric M. Frieman said when USI Insurance Services, LLC, sued him for allegedly stealing clients away from Wells Fargo to work with his new employer, RCM&D Self-Insured Services Inc., otherwise known as SISCO.…