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March 15, 2013 Robert A. Clifford, senior partner at Clifford Law Offices, and a number of staff members and their family and friends worked the phones at a recent pledge drive night at WTTW, Chicago’s public television station. Clifford Law Offices helped take in 137 calls that grossed nearly $40,000 for the station that evening. Clifford is a member of the Board of Trustees of the station. The firm initiated closed captioning for locally produced…

March 13, 2013 Shannon McNulty, attorney at Clifford Law Offices, has been invited to participate in the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association (ITLA) Professionalism Seminar offering four hours of professional responsibility credit. McNulty will join a number of attorneys who will be speaking during the morning-long program May 3 at the Oak Brook Hills Marriott Resort, 3500 Midwest Rd., Oak Brook. McNulty’s topic is “Ethics of Witness Preparation.” To register, call ITLA at 800-252-8501 or email…

Two North Carolina women who are also food bloggers learned about two additives contained in the popular Kraft Macaroni & Cheese that are banned in various European countries yet still are in the product on U.S. store shelves. They started a petition to have the additives removed. So far, more than 220,000 people have signed the petition asking Kraft to remove yellow dye 5 and yellow dye 6 from the popular food. The two women,…

Tracy A. Brammeier, clerk at Clifford Law Offices and a second year law student at Loyola University School of Law, wrote an essay that was published by the American Bar Association Tort Trial and Insurance Practice Section (TIPS) in 2012. Her essay, which focuses on the lack of rail security in Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C.’s transit systems, won the 2012 TIPS essay competition on the topic of Disasters Caused by Foreign and Domestic…

A jury in California returned a verdict for $8.3 million against Johnson & Johnson, makers of the recalled DePuy hip replacement device. It is estimated that more than 90,000 of these ASR hip implants were recalled in mid-2010. At the time, the company said that 12 percent were expected to fail within five years. The verdict, which came in the Los Angeles Superior Court following a six-week trial, is the first of many to follow….

That’s the headline of a recent front-page story in USA Today (March 8-10, 2013). The newspaper reports that doctors sew up patients with mistaken objects inside more than a dozen times a day – the most common being sponges, needles and instruments. The story talks about a woman who had to undergo six hours of emergency surgery in Alabama to remove a sponge the size of a washcloth that was left during her C-section. It…

March 11, 2013 The Supreme Court of the United States Historical Society is hosting its inaugural gala. Clifford Law Offices is a proud benefactor of the event that will take place Wednesday (March 13, 2013) in New York. Paul Cappuccio, General Counsel of Time Warner and Ted Ullyot, General Counsel of Facebook, are the evening’s honorees. Guests will be treated to a rare viewing of the first official printing of the U.S. Constitution. The document,…

March 11, 2013 The Good Samaritan Law – that which protects people who help in emergency situations – has been much abused over the years. Hard to believe, but even doctors have tried to invoke it when responding to a “code blue” in a hospital. Bob Clifford, columnist for the Chicago Lawyer monthly magazine, writes about the law in Illinois and the latest case to examine and apply the statute that was originally enacted nearly…

A Los Angeles jury is deliberating in the first defective DePuy hip implant case on behalf of a 65-year-old former prison guard in Montana who alleged he suffered metal poisoning and other health problems from the company’s ASR XL hip implant he received in 2007. Johnson & Johnson, makers of the device and the defendant in the action, face thousands of lawsuits as “the world’s largest seller of health-care products failed patients before recalling 93,000…