Insights

The US Patent and Trademark Office issued Examination Guide 3-20 on Oct. 28 to clarify procedures that trademark examiners should follow in view of the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2020 ruling. As we discussed in a previous article, the ruling stated that Booking.com was not a generic term and is entitled to protection under trademark laws. In its guidance, the USPTO stated, “the examining attorney must not initially refuse registration of a generic.com term on the Principal Register as generic, even if there is strong evidence of genericness.” Further, the guidance acknowledged that survey evidence may be analyzed to determine that consumers recognize the generic.com term as a source identifier.

The first reported substantive ruling by a judge sitting in Illinois on the legal implications of whether COVID-19 and the resulting governmental shelter-in-place orders relieve a tenant’s obligation to pay rent pursuant to a force majeure provision in a commercial lease agreement was entered by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Donald Cassling on June 3, 2020.

As we wrote about in a recent article, the trends in insurance coverage for COVID-19 related losses are: 1) so far insurers are winning, and 2) the cases are fact intensive and turn on policy and pleading language. As we noted, a judge in Missouri had recently ruled in two different cases to deny the insurers’ motions to dismiss on the basis that a policy that does not define “physical loss” or “physical damage” might cover the presence of a virus that “attaches” to the property and deprives the policyholder of its use. See Blue Springs Dental Care LLC et al v. Owners Insurance Co. (W.D. Mo. Sep. 21, 2020) and Studio 417 Inc. et al. v. Cincinnati Insurance Co. (W.D. Mo. August 12, 2020).

The stark effects of the coronavirus pandemic are conspicuously clear in downtown Chicago: Shuttered businesses that once catered to throngs of commuters and office workers loom over bare sidewalks, while trains fly by with a volume amplified by quiet streets.

Under established Illinois law, an insurer must defend a legal action filed against its insured unless it is clear from the face of the underlying complaint that the allegations fail to state facts which bring the case within, or potentially within, the policy’s coverage. The issue of whether the allegations are “potentially within” the policy’s coverage is often disputed itself. The Illinois Appellate Court was asked to address this issue and recently ruled in favor of the insurer in the case of General Casualty Company of Wisconsin, et al. v. Burke Engineering Corporation et al. 2020 Ill. App. (1st) 191648, September 14, 2020.

The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency announced on Sep. 14 that it plans to conduct a statewide investigation into the presence of per- and polyfluororalkyl substances (PFAs) in the state’s community water supply.