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Secondary or vicarious trauma can and does exist in our profession and can result from hearing clients talk about what they experienced and seeing their physical reaction to the experiences, writes Karen Munoz in her March Illinois Bar Journal article, “Vicarious Trauma in the Legal Profession.”
As Sebastian Wright Garcia explains in his article, “A Refined Way To Protect Noncitizen Workers,” in the March Illinois Bar Journal, the Biden administration in 2023 formalized a program to prioritize noncitizen labor protections and to prosecute employers who violate labor and employment laws. To encourage the help of undocumented noncitizens in these cases, Wright Garcia notes, the administration began to implement a new guidance called Deferred Action for Labor Enforcement to promote the fair execution of labor laws.
The 2024 first place winner of the Lincoln Award Legal Writing Contest is Morgan Handwerker, an associate at Schiller DuCanto & Fleck LLP, Chicago, who wrote “Practicing in a New World.” Morgan's article appeared in the February issue of the Illinois Bar Journal.
The assumption that gender expressions are fixed and fall into one of two categories correlating with one’s biological sex has given way to a gender-fluid world in which cohorts of people of all ages are transitioning between male and female identities or identifying as nonbinary or genderqueer (neither female nor male). As recounted in the March issue of the Illinois Bar Journal article, “Being a Pronoun Pro,” this has led to discussions and debates about pronouns in all types of settings—schools, health care institutions, and corporate boardrooms to name a few.
The Illinois Bar Journal’s February issue reports on the Corporate Transparency Act’s new FinCEN filing requirements, which took effect January 1. “The comprehensive legislation requires many companies doing business in the U.S. to report information about the individuals who own or control the business entity,” writes attorney Amelia Buragas in her LawPulse article, “Beneficial Information.”
“Generative artificial intelligence stands as proof of the transformative power of technology, promising to reshape the landscape of law and advocacy,” writes Morgan B. Handwerker in her March Illinois Bar Journal article, “Practicing in a New World.”
In his article February Illinois Bar Journal article, “Crafting an Effective Generative AI-Policy,” Carlos Cisneros notes that among the risk factors of using generative online artificial intelligence tools are whether content entered into a generative-AI tool’s prompt becomes the property of the AI company and whether confidential and biometric information is protected after being entered into an AI system. With this in mind, Cisneros recommends that lawyers should verify whether use of AI is covered by their malpractice insurance policy.
In his fifth and final article in his five-part Illinois Bar Journal series on trial advocacy, Gino L. DiVito focuses on the losing argument, which he says possess a unique status within trial advocacy. In his article, “What I Learned From Teaching Trial Advocacy: The Closing Argument,” published in the IBJ’s February issue, DiVito writes, closing arguments “occupy the climactic arguments in books, plays, movies, stories, and real trials. But persuasion does not magically occur based on the power of closing arguments. If you haven’t done the job of persuasion from the opening gun—if, during the other parts of trial, jurors haven’t accompanied you on the road toward victory—persuasion is unlikely to result from your closing arguments. … Nonetheless, closing arguments deservedly earn the mystique they generate.”
In a roundup of two recent Illinois State Bar Association CLE programs, the Illinois Bar Journal’s February cover story, “Artificial Intelligence and the Authentic Attorney,” observes that just as an attorney’s time is well spent considering the benefits and drawbacks of AI, the same can be said for keeping in mind best practices for communicating clearly and effectively with clients and colleagues.
In In re Parentage of A.H., a complicated child-support case that stretched over three countries and involved a recalcitrant noncustodial parent, the First District of the Illinois Appellate Court found several reasons for forcing the creation of a section 503(g) trust, most of which concerned the noncustodial parent.