Last month, Romanucci & Blandin recently hosted a Continuing Legal Education seminar that was attended by referring attorneys. The event, “Easiest Catch: Don’t Be Another Fish in the Dark ‘Net’” was presented by Mark Lanterman, Chief Technology Officer of Computer Forensic Service, via Zoom. A former member of the U.S. Secret Service Electronic Crimes Taskforce, Mark spoke on common techniques employed by hackers, common misconceptions regarding online security, and preventative measures to maintain both personal and professional digital information. Read on to ...

It has been another agonizing week in America. Blood in the streets of a Chicago suburb on the Fourth of July has given way to funerals and rallies, including an outpouring of support for two little boys, one a toddler orphaned as his two parents died in the shooting and another 8-year-old boy fighting for his life in the hospital with his spine severed by a bullet. This, among dozens of other families grieving and treating injuries both physical and mental from the traumatic event. Is this what you want, NRA? How can the supporters and manufacturers of assault weapons sleep at night knowing ...

Train crossings built for much slower trains

The Southern Transcon line of train tracks where the deadly Amtrak derailment happened on June 27, 2022 was completed in 1908. Trains of that early 20th Century era travelled at approximately 40-60 miles per hour, so people who needed to drive across in rural locations had a reasonable amount of time to see the train approaching and cross safely - even if they were driving heavy, slow farm equipment. Fast forward a hundred years, and trains travel at increasingly faster speeds due to technology and the human need for speed, yet rural ...

Columbine.  Parkland.  Sandy Hook. Santa Fe.  Uvalde. This is no longer tolerable. All of these schools are now ingloriously known for the massacres that took the lives of so many precious children, causing a lifetime of grieving families and losing generations of talent, love, brainpower and smiles. I know so many people who are sick of hearing action must be taken, but by the time we are blue in the face debating the change which NEVER comes, another carnage happens.  And this disgusting cycle repeats.  Everyone needs to wake up and demand change.  

This rhetoric about our inability to enact ...

Recently “The Home Edit” star Clea Shearer bravely announced she has aggressive breast cancer, which is  a shock for anyone, even more so because she was younger than 40. Shearer said she had asked repeatedly for an appointment with her OBGYN after finding a lump but could not get in, so she refused to let her concerns wait and asked her primary care doctor to order the mammogram that led to her diagnosis. Her Stage 2 diagnosis of course, if delayed any further could’ve been even more dangerous. Shearer was fortunate to have self-detected her lump and her fierce self-advocacy may have ...

In 2019, more than 36,000 people died in motor vehicle collisions in the United States^[1]. Then, in March of 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic shut the country down and had dramatically changed people’s daily lives for the better part of 2 years. While Americans drove less in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic, data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)  estimates that fatalities from motor vehicle collisions are increasing at a rate not seen since World War II ended.

Between the late 1960s and 2019, fatalities from motor vehicle collisions had been falling ...

Someone who experiences sexual violence, assault or harassment in the workplace will now have a powerful choice in how their claim is resolved, thanks to a new law passed by both houses of Congress in February of 2022. Instead of mandating a survivor must have their complaint resolved in an arbitration with their employer, those victims can now choose to have their case heard in court, in front of a jury of their peers. The passage of the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act follows years of vigorous advocacy from organizations like the American ...

Companies with Illinois employees have been targeted in recent years with class action lawsuits under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). These lawsuits generally allege that employers have not and are not in compliance with BIPA’s notice and consent requirements before collecting or disclosing employees’ biometric information, including fingerprints, retina scans and facial recognition scans.

One of the defenses has been that such claims are preempted under the Illinois Workers’ Compensation Act as workplace injuries and, therefore, cannot be ...

Have you ever been fingerprinted or had your face scanned without signing a consent form?  At work, do you ever use a fingerprint or retina scanner to clock in or access part of a building? Has personal information you’ve provided ever been stored on an unsecure computer system? 

If you’ve been in any of these situations, your rights may have been violated because, in Illinois, your biometric information belongs to you and only you.

Illinois was the first state to regulate the collection and storage of biometric data. Generally, the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA ...