Despite how simple celebrities like Henry Winkler and Tom Selleck make reverse mortgages out to be on their television commercials targeting seniors, loss mitigation for reverse mortgages confounds homeowners, advocates, and judges alike. In his June 2020 Illinois Bar Journal article, “Reverse Mortgages Gone Bad,” Matthew Hulstein explains what families can do to bring a reverse mortgage out of default and keep their home.

An underdiscussed but vitally important aspect of today’s criminal justice system is the ever-expanding role of assessments charged to convicted defendants in criminal cases. These fines and fees charged by states and municipalities aim to minimize the cost of criminal prosecutions on the taxpayers and deter future criminal activity. Nationally, convicted persons are charged an average of $13,607 for conviction-related costs, including restitution and attorney fees. As Benjamin Sardinas notes in his May Illinois Bar Journal artilcle, “The Ball Is in Your Court,” nearly half of convicted persons’ families who helped cover those costs say they could not afford such fees and 38 percent of those families found court fees and fines the most difficult among the costs of conviction. Since the passage of Illinois Supreme Court Rule 472, correcting errors in the calculation and imposition of court assessments have become part of the responsibilities of trial prosecutors and defense attorneys. Sardinas reviews the history of correcting errors in sentencing, the changing legal landscape in the wake of Rule 472, and suggests how criminal trial attorneys may challenge assessments and sentencing errors to prevent their incidence and prevalence.

The legal profession is, out of necessity, practicality, or sometimes sheer stubbornness, notoriously backward looking. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, therefore, to realize that lawyers, judges, and the American legal system were largely unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic. We’re not unique in that, as most Americans seem taken aback by the virus. In many jurisdictions, court dockets have slowed or halted. But that hasn’t stopped the remainder of an attorney’s work from moving forward. Deadlines must be met, motions must be drafted, discovery must be served, and rulings must be issued. In his May Illinois Bar Journal article, “Law in the Time of COVID-19: Looking Backward While Moving Forward,” Brad Taylor asks how does a practitioner fulfill his or her myriad professional responsibilities while self-quarantining, practicing social distancing, and occasionally grappling with masses of frenzied, toilet-paper-obsessed shoppers? Not easily, Taylor says, and not without changing the way we perceive, at least in the short term, how legal professionals perform their roles.

Attorneys and their firms operate on both sides of the online consumer and data-collecting divide. We interact with all manner of websites and services, and therefore care that private information is safely managed. We also operate websites and services where consumers and our clients expect the same. Government regulation of personal information at state, national, and supranational levels is just beginning and cannot be ignored. Since websites know no geographic boundaries, attorneys—particularly those with firms that operate in multiple states or internationally—must educate themselves about these issues. In April’s Illinois Bar Journal’s Practice HQ column, “Don’t Be a Cookie Monster,” Affinity Consulting Group’s Jeffrey Schoenberger summarizes how website cookies work and an attorney’s obligation to be aware of the internet’s data-collecting nature.