
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. - Gov. JB Pritzker has shrugged off calls to veto legislation that critics say will create more lawsuits for Illinois courts to handle while giving trial lawyers more shots at huge paydays.
SB328 has been waiting for action for months, and on Friday Pritzker finally signed it into law. It will drag companies that have no or limited footprints in Illinois to be sued there because they chose to sell their products in the state.
It's similar to what has happened in Pennsylvania thanks to a series of court rulings interpreting registration-by-consent laws. Business leaders fought the bill, passed in May, saying it will allow trial lawyers to use Illinois state courts to extract big paydays from businesses and will harm the state's economy and its business reputation.
Companies from throughout the U.S. and the world could be dragged into courts in Illinois for certain kinds of claims, whether or not the company has any real presence in Illinois or if the alleged injury occurred in Illinois or can be traced back to conduct in the state.
These companies are already concerned with courts in Cook, Madison and St. Clair counties, with a pro-plaintiff reputation regularly leading to their inclusion on an annual report of the country's worst "Judicial Hellholes."
“By failing to reject this disastrous proposal, businesses and taxpayers will now be vulnerable to predatory lawsuits that will clog up our legal system and stymie our economic growth,” a coalition of business groups that opposed the bill said in a statement.
“Rather than moving to Illinois and creating new jobs and economic investment, many businesses will avoid our state entirely, undermining the momentum our state has worked so hard to create.”
Trial lawyers say the legislation is needed to allow people to "pursue full accountability" against corporations, "including from out-of-state companies that do business in Illinois" over alleged claims that their products have injured or sickened people.
They assert the law is more limited in its scope than critics have claimed, in large part, because SB328 "applies only to injuries or deaths that result from substances defined in" Illinois state law and would still require plaintiffs to identify at least one Illinois-based co-defendant.
Opponents of the legislation, however, have said those claims downplay the full reach of the law, as lawsuits over toxic substance exposure already commonly include numerous corporate defendants and the Illinois Uniform Hazardous Substances Act includes a wide range of potential target products for lawsuits, including pesticides, such as in the Paraquat litigation embroiling Philadelphia's courts.
The legislation is currently the subject of a court challenge from Republican lawmakers, who argue the law is invalid under the Illinois state constitution. The state constitution requires legislative bills to be "read" on three separate days in both the state House and state Senate before they can be approved.
However, Democrats used an increasingly employed legislative tactic to push SB328 within hours of its introduction. And they are relying on a constitutionally questionable legal doctrine, known as the Enrolled Bill Doctrine, to uphold the law.
Established by the Illinois Supreme Court decades ago, the Enrolled Bill Doctrine essentially allows the Speaker of the Illinois House and the President of the state Senate to declare that all of the constitutional rules were followed when passing a new law.
Republicans and other critics of the practice and of SB328 say the passage of bills like SB328 make a mockery of that principle, essentially forcing the courts to refuse to acknowledge the reality of blatant constitutional violations by Democrats in passing such laws quickly and without debate.
Illinois trial lawyers count among the most prolific of donors to Illinois Democrats, and particularly the state's two most powerful Democratic lawmakers, House Speaker Emanuel "Chris" Welch and State Senate President Don Harmon.
Welch and Harmon, for instance, collectively received a combined $1.78 million from trial lawyers and their firms just in the final six months of 2024 alone.
Both Welch and Harmon signed on as sponsors to SB328, ensuring its passage through the Illinois General Assembly and on to Gov. Pritzker.
The nightmare scenario for the business community can be seen in Philadelphia, which has a mass-tort program that has historically attracted plaintiff lawyers and their out-of-state clients chasing the type of blockbuster awards juries there have routinely given out. About 90% of plaintiffs suing Syngenta over an herbicide in Philadelphia are from out-of-state.
Syngenta, headquartered in North Carolina, has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear its pleas. It faces more than 1,100 lawsuits in Philadelphia and wants the court to revisit its 2023 decision in Mallory v. Norfolk Southern Railway.
"The Registration Statute, of course, existed pre-Mallory," a brief from business and civil justice reform groups says. "But with the imprimatur of Mallory - together with the soaring trend of nuclear verdicts in the Commonwealth and the high burden attendant to venue transfers... - widespread abuse of the Statute for forum shoppers who prefer plaintiff-friendly Commonwealth courts is all but inevitable.
"Businesses will now think twice about whether to conduct business in the Commonwealth, at significant cost to the state's financial well-being."
There are still unanswered questions from the Mallory decision, Syngenta says. Though the company did have to register with Pennsylvania to sell its herbicide Paraquat (which allegedly causes Parkinson's disease), it owns no property in the state and only employees about 15 people in it who are mostly sales representatives.
The company says the Registration Statute violates the Dormant Commerce Clause, which limits how states can regulate commerce.
To this point, Illinois courts have operated under different rules, under which Illinois courts are designated as "specific personal jurisdiction" legal venues. Under such a system, plaintiffs attempting to sue companies in Illinois state courts generally must prove that the company had sufficient ties to the state or that an incident that caused the alleged harms happened in the state.
The specific jurisdiction rules, which historically have controlled in most U.S. states, have served to limit the legal exposure of companies that operate across state lines, limiting the ability of trial lawyers to "forum shop" by choosing to file lawsuits in court systems considered to be more friendly to their pursuit of massive verdicts and settlements, often worth many millions or even billions of dollars.
The Supreme Court's action on the Syngenta case would certainly have an impact on Illinois, as it would in Georgia, Iowa, Kansas and Minnesota. Those four states also have laws allowing their courts to assert jurisdiction over out-of-state defendants that registered to do business there.