Observations on Recent Efforts to Deter Frivolous Papers in the Illinois Circuit Courts

Expert witness reform.

The legal system depends on the medical expert for evidence. Doctors readily complain about frivolous cases that go to trial, yet a lawyer cannot bring a frivolous claim to trial without a physician expert witness stating that the claim is not frivolous. An insurance company cannot raise premiums without medical expert witnesses servicing the increasing litigation against the insured. Physician...

Patent "Trolls" and Claim Construction

This Essay explores the largely overlooked relationship between claim construction and patent assertion entities (patent “trolls”) finding that claim construction problems and trends benefit patent assertion entities. First, the Federal Circuit is deeply divided as to the proper approach to claim construction. This split is a significant contributor to uncertain patent scope, which is widely-re...

Medical restrictive covenants in Illinois: at the crossroads of Carter-Shields and Prairie Eye Center.

This article examines the history, development and treatment by Illinois courts of medical restrictive covenants. The authors highlight two recent cases from Illinois, one from the Supreme Court and the other authored by an appellate court panel. The article concludes by providing not only a forecast of how such covenants should be treated by Illinois state courts in the future, but also a path...

Recent Trends in the Enforcement of Discovery: Sanctions in the Federal Courts and in Illinois

Recent developments in configuration design and optimization of mineral separation circuits; A Review

The present research reviews two basic approaches for the separation circuit configuration analysis. The first approach is to optimize the circuit configuration. In this method, after a circuit modeling, a variety of search algorithms and mathematical optimization methods are used. Previous works show that this approach has more application in the flotation process. The second approach called t...