Public Act 97-555 (Bradley, D-Marion; Wilhelmi, D-Joliet) creates the Illinois Residential Real Property Transfer on Death Instrument Act. It allows an owner of real estate to transfer residential property on his or her death. The definition of "residential property" is borrowed from the Disclosure Act and the Mortgage Foreclosure Act.The act requires that the owner (1) sign in front of a notary and two credible witnesses and (2) have the same mental capacity to execute a TODI as is required to make a will. This new Act will take effect January 1, 2012.You may review the text of this Act here. 

ISBA Director of Legislative Affairs Jim Covington reviews legislation of interest to ISBA members in his weekly ISBA Statehouse Review. This week he looks at Adoption forms (PA 97-493), the Illinois Personal Information Act (PA 97-483), Insurers must arbitrate small subrogation damages (PA 97-513), Cook County landlord and tenants (PA 97-470) and Jurors removed PA (97-436).

The amended rule forbids non-interest bearing pooled accounts, imposes new recordkeeping requirements, and obliges banks to report IOLTA-account overdrafts. Read Helen Gunnarsson's summary of the changes in the September Illinois Bar Journal.

Asked and AnsweredBy John W. Olmstead, MBA, Ph.D, CMCQ.  I am the chair of our three person management committee. Our firm, now entering second generation, is a 17 attorney firm in Kansas City, Missouri. We represent businesses and other institutional clients. We have several of our founding partners in their 70s and as they phase back and slow down we are discovering that the younger generation of partners have not developed client development skills. What should we be doing to get more business? We are not sure we even know how?A.  Research conducted over the years by numerous research organizations has shown that on average it costs five times as much (dollars/time investment) to get new clients than it does to get more business from existing clients. It just makes good business sense to leverage existing relationships.Institutional clients are reducing the number of law firms that they use. According to BTI Consulting Group, corporations in the Fortune 1000 list are using 20% fewer core law firms than they did a year earlier. As a result fewer firms will be getting work from these companies and they will likely be the firms that successfully cross-sell their practices.Recommendation From a Fortune 500 ClientRecently I was doing a telephone interview with the general counsel of a Fortune 500 company for our law firm client and I asked him if there was an opportunity for the law firm to get additional work in a practice area in which the company had no experience with the law firm previously and if an opportunity existed what the firm needed to do to earn the business. Here is his response