Ready For The Defense

Township officials across Illinois are seeing a growing number of claims involving electric scooters, particularly where scooters intersect with sidewalks, roadways, and township vehicles. These incidents are often reported as routine negligence or premises claims, but their outcomes increasingly turn on a less obvious factor: whether there were local ordinances in place at the time of the loss clearly regulating where and how scooters could be used. While townships are not t

Roadway defect cases are a regular part of municipal litigation. For townships and municipalities, these cases often turn on a deceptively simple question. Should the danger have been obvious to the person who was injured. The Second District Appellate Court’s decision in Tarango v. Village of Carpentersville  helps illustrate how that question is analyzed and why it sometimes prevents courts from ending a case early. In Tarango , the plaintiff claimed she injured her ankle a