Minority Conference is Saturday, May 6
The 11th annual Minority and Women Attorneys Conference will take place from 8:45 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, May 6, at The John Marshall Law School, concluding with a luncheon and speaker.
The conference is conducted by the ISBA Committee on Minority and Women Participation, chaired by Emilio E. Machado. Chair of the conference is Leslie A. Hairston.
Leadership Conference June 9-10 in Chicago
The ISBA Committee on Membership and Bar Activities will conduct a Bar Leadership Conference, "Leading Your Association: A Personal Approach to Leadership," on Friday and Saturday, June 9-10, at the Wyndham Chicago Hotel.
David B. Sosin and Lynn E. Patton are conference co-chairs. Christopher G. Perrin chairs the standing committee. The facilitator will be Robert Shaver of the Management Institute of the University of Wisconsin School of Business.
Admission scheduled April 2001 in D.C.
Confirmation has been received from the U.S. Supreme Court that the Illinois State Bar Association will have an admission ceremony in Washington, D.C., more than a year from now.
The ISBA ceremony will take place Monday, April 30, 2001, and will include a reception with justices of the Supreme Court. Call membership services director Janet M. Paul at (800) 252-8908 to obtain a registration form or more information.
ISBA announces full spring schedule of update seminars in practice areas
A full spring schedule of ISBA Law Ed Series seminars has been announced by the Committee on Continuing Legal Education.
The program schedule will begin with "Back to Basics" presentations by the Worker's Compensation Section from 9 a.m. to 3:15 p.m. Monday, Feb. 21, in the ISBA Chicago Regional office, and Friday, Feb. 25, at the Holiday Inn, Collinsville.
"Hot Topics in Traffic Law" will be presented by the Traffic Laws and Courts Section from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 26, at the Hilton Hotel in Springfield, and Saturday, March 11, at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Oak Brook.
Other scheduled educational seminars follow. See pages 10 to 12 for additional information.
Wednesday, March 22 "E-Commerce and Antitrust in the Next Millennium," Antitrust and Unfair Competition Law Section; ISBA Chicago Regional Office.
Friday, March 31 Agricultural Law Update, Agricultural Law Section; Illinois Agricultural Association Building, Bloomington.
Friday, April 7 Family Law Update, Family Law Section; Hotel Pete Marquette, Peoria.
Thursday, April 13 "The Economic Espionage Act of 1996," the Intellectual Property, Corporate Law Departments, and International and Immigration Law Sections; ISBA Chicago Regional Office.
Friday, April 14 Sentencing Symposium, Committee on Corrections and Sentencing; Chicago location.
Friday, April 14 "Physician-Hospital Relations: Assessing a Balance of Power," Health Care Section; ISBA Chicago Regional Office.
Monday-Tuesday, April 17-18 "Real Estate Taxation in the New Millennium," State and Local Taxation Section; Bank One Auditorium, Chicago.
Friday, May 5 "A General Practitioner's Look at Termination of Parental Rights, Adoptions and Alternatives to Adoption," Juvenile Justice and General Practice, Solo and Small Firm Sections; ISBA Chicago Regional Office.
Friday, May 5 "Business Law and Technology," Corporation, Securities and Business Law Section; Holiday Inn, Collinsville.
Friday, May 12 "Business Law and Technology," Corporation, Securities and Business Law Section; ISBA Chicago Regional Office.
Thursday, May 18 "An Update for Tort and Insurance Litigators," Tort Law and Insurance Law Sections; ISBA Chicago Regional Office.
Friday, May 19 "An Update for Tort and Insurance Litigators," Tort Law and Insurance Law Sections; Holiday Inn, Collinsville.
Details also will be announced soon for seminars that will be presented by the Commercial, Banking and Bankruptcy Law Section and the Education Law Section.
Registration fees for Law Ed Series seminars are $55 for sponsoring section members, $65 for other ISBA members, $90 for non-lawyers, and $125 for non-member lawyers. The fees include seminar course books, which also may be purchased separately for $50 each.
ISBA co-sponsors NIU Law program on defense strategy in capital cases
"Defense Strategies in Death Penalty Litigation," a symposium Thursday, March 23, at Northern Illinois University, will be co-sponsored by the College of Law, the Illinois State Bar Association and several other associations.
Scheduled to begin at 8:45 a.m. in the NIU student center's Carl Sandburg Auditorium, the symposium will be opened by Law Dean LeRoy Pernell. The morning schedule follows.
9 a.m. "The Death of Innocents: Can the Death Penalty Be Rendered Infallible?" The speaker is Prof. Lawrence C. Marshall of the Northwestern University School of Law, who has helped obtain the release of several wrongly convicted individuals from death row.
9:45 a.m. "Averting the Mistaken Execution of Innocent People," with Prof. Margery B. Koosed of the University of Akron School of Law, former coordinator of the Ohio Death Penalty Task Force.
10:30 a.m. "Death Penalty for Juvenile Offenders: Recent Developments and Prognosis for the Future," with Dean Victor L. Streib of the Ohio Northern University College of Law and author of "The Juvenile Death Penalty in the United States and the World."
Keynote speakers for the 11:45 a.m. luncheon in the Regency Room are Chicago Tribune writers Kenneth Armstrong and Steve Mills. Their topic is "The Failure of the Death Penalty in Illinois," based on their recent five-part series of investigative articles.
The afternoon symposium schedule follows.
1 p.m. "Theological Prespective on the Death Penalty," with Sister Joan Slobig of the leadership team of Sisters of Providence at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods, Ind. She has collaborated with congregations of women in addressing death penalty issues.
1:45 p.m. "Creative Mitigation in the New Millennium," with Chicago attorney Juliet Yackel, who concentrates in criminal trial and appellate practice in all phases of death penalty litigation.
2:30 p.m. "Psychodrama in Capital Cases: A New Tool for Humanizing the Accused," with Dana K. Cole of the University of Akron School of Law, a former criminal defense trial attorney.
At 3:15 p.m. an update on death penalty matters in the Illinois Supreme Court and closing remarks will conclude the program.
For additional information, call Sue G. Mellard, director of alumni relations and public affairs at the College of Law, (815) 753-9655. To register with credit card by telephone, call (800) 345-9472.
The fee for registration before March 15 is $95 for members of participating associations and NIU alumni. General registration is $105. After March 15, the fee will be $125 for all registrants.
Peoria Bar to co-sponsor roundtables
The Peoria County Bar Association will co-sponsor an ISBA Law Office Management Roundtable presentation from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, March 11, at the Packard Plaza in Peoria.
The program is being coordinated by the Law Office Management and Economics (Standing Committe on) Council, chaired by Chicago attorney and certified public accountant Paul Bernstein.
Four separate roundtables will be conducted. Participants will be able to attend all of them, and will receive a checklist of seven key elements pertinent to each discussion.
The four topics are: General Management (planning, facilities, financial management, etc.); Technology in the Law Firm; Personal Relationships (staff, clients and each other); Practice Management (marketing, client relations, compensation and time management).
Attendance will be limited to 40 participants. The fee is $25. For registration details, call Brenda Todt at the Illinois Bar Center, (800) 252-8908.
Judge Shadur cites disturbing trend in Rule 56 motions as fear of juries
By Jeff Cappel
Imagine the prospect of arguing your first case before the U.S. Court of Appeals before your admission to the bar. Then, the day after admission, arguing a case before the Illinois Supreme Court.
Milton I. Shadur did just that, thus beginning a long and distinguished career. Now a senior judge of U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, he has written some 6,600 opinions.
Judge Shadur spoke at the ISBA Midyear Meeting in Chicago during a seminar presented Dec. 11 by the Labor and Employment Law Section Council.
His topic was ethical and practical considerations for counsel in employment law, but his most passionate discussion concerned Rule 56 motions for summary judgement by defense counsel in employment discrimination cases.
Criticizing what he sees as a disturbing trend in Rule 56 motions, Shadur said such a decision "reflects insufficient thought a kind of knee-jerk consequence of the defense counsel's belief that he or she has a winner and therefore should go that route."
In written materials, the jurist noted that judicial receptivity to Rule 56 motions was greatly boosted by the 1986 Supreme Cases Celotex Corp. v. Catrett (477 U.S. 317), Anderson v. Liberty Lobby Inc. (477 U.S. 242), and Matsushita Elec. Indust. Co. v. Zenith Radio Corp. (475 U.S. 574).
Judge Shadur also believes that the "hospitality" accorded to summary judgement results from what he perceives as counsel's fear of juries "an ungrounded fear, in this court's experience," he wrote.
To Shadur, it's a matter of economics. "In my experience," he said, "even if that seems to be a good bet (Rule 56), counsel have frequently given not enough attention to the alternative of trial, which may often be less expensive for the client."
The proper analysis, he wrote, is not simply a cost-comparison matter of preparing a Rule 56 motion after discovery, versus preparing for and going to trial after discovery.
"When you realize that summary judgment and trial take place after discovery, all you're looking at is the forward-going cost," Shadur explained.
The aggregate post-discovery costs of pursuing summary judgement would have to be less than 60 percent of the aggregate post-discovery costs of a full-blown trial, before the investment of time and effort in pursing summary judgement would be a solid investment, he wrote.
The bottom line is that over-simplistic comparisons of costs and risks of summary judgment tend to be misleading. "People simply think is it going to involve the same amount of time and effort to get ourselves ready for trial as it is to pursue summary judgment," he said.
Judges are "regrettably not infallible either," in Shadur's view, thus opening the possibility of a summary judgment being wrongfully denied, and unappealable.
He added, ". . .that error (summary judgement denial) could be corrected only after the case has gone to trial and hence to a final (therefore appealable) judgement."
For that reason, there "is no corresponding risk implicated in the alternative decision to go to trial, for a trial will necessarily produce a judgement."
Nor does he see summary judgment as less work. "In our district," Shadur said, "summary judgements are such an onerous burden" and they produce an enormous amount of paper.
"I plead guilty to having drafted what used to be General Rules 12(m) and 12(n), and now to Rule 56.1, because we had to conform to the federal rules. And I can tell you, it's a pain; all of you know that."
Still, Rule 12(m) and its counterparts, Shadur wrote, are crafted to cast light upon any general material facts that may be in dispute in the case. "To that end, (such) rules are properly intended to assist judges in making that determination."
The judge observed that he never required a trial brief in an employment discrimination case, and seldom, if ever, in any other class of case.
"What do you need it for," he asked. "We're dealing with the same issues all the time, and in summary judgement, everybody has to go through all that paper mass."
"This court," he wrote, "will . . . continue to seek to press defense counsel to consider the ultimately conservative alternative of trial rather than summary judgment in appropriate cases."
Regarding ethical considerations, Judge Shadur said "we're not searching ethics in the Aristotelian sense, and when we look at the successive formulations that have most recently been codified by the Illinois Supreme Court and our district courts . . . we're not looking at prescriptions of moral conduct."
What's involved, he explained, is the identification of conduct that may subject a lawyer and his or her clients to "adverse consequences."
Shadur said problems that regularly plague lawyers on each side of the employment law practice stem from the question of who is the client.
"For example," he said, "when is it permissible for a plaintiff's lawyer to communicate ex parte with employees of the target employer? Of course, you ought to find out what the version of the operative standard is, but most jurisdictions have adopted ABA Model Rule 4.2."
Shadur drafted his district's model rules, essentially prohibiting "communications on the subject of representation with a party that the lawyer knows to be represented by another lawyer without getting the prior consent of that other lawyer."
He observed that it doesn't define just who is represented by either lawyer. While courts have adopted different approaches to this problem, he said, the Illinois Supreme Court hasn't adopted any of the ABA's committee comments.
The Supreme Court "finds that there's nothing there that either helps or hurts in reading 4.2," he said. However, the Illinois appellate case, Fair Automotive Repair v. Car-X Service Systems, gives the "greatest kind of leeway to a plaintiff's lawyer."
Shadur explained that it prohibits only ex parte communication with members of the corporate control group top management people who have responsibility for making final decisions and other employees whose input may be vital to employment decisions.
By contrast, the Northern District of Illinois has adopted both the ABA rule and committee comments, thereby prohibiting communication with people who have managerial responsibilities.
It further prohibits communication "with any other person whose act or omission in connection with that matter may be imputed to the organization for the purposes of civil or criminal liability or whose statement