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Throughout his career, Mr. Tull has represented a broad spectrum of different types of clients, ranging from multinational corporations to ordinary families and individuals who are buying their first home. The following cases and transactions represent a few of the different matters where Mr. Tull has helped his clients achieve their goals.


  • Assisted a local business owner in purchasing an ownership interest in the Limited Liability Company that owned the warehouse that leased space to his business. Mr. Tull helped the client with negotiating the contract, revising the LLC’s operating agreement so that the client’s minority interest would be adequately protected from being marginalized by the majority owners, and helped him navigate the tax issues related to acquiring an interest in a closely-held real estate business.  


  • Represented numerous home buyers and sellers in DuPage County and Cook County in connection with the purchase and sale of their homes.


  •  Assisted an Irish barrister in resolving problems with the IRS. The barrister was a U.S. citizen who moved to Ireland many years before, and, after leaving the country, he stopped filing tax returns and paying U.S. taxes and also failed to file annual Reports on Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts disclosing his non-U.S. accounts, as is required under federal law. Mr. Tull assisted the client with preparing and filing all of the overdue tax returns and enrolled the client in the Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Program (OVDP), a tax amnesty program that used to be offered by the IRS that allowed U.S. citizens who had offshore bank accounts to come clean and pay a one-time penalty. Mr. Tull successfully shepherded the client through the OVDP process, allowing him to avoid significant financial and criminal liability. 


  • Counseled several local medical businesses with issues pertaining to entity formation, tax issues, leasing negotiations, permits and licensing, and purchase of practices.


  • Represented an insurance company in an appeal before the Seventh Circuit of Appeals. Mr. Tull drafted the brief defending the U.S. District Court’s order granting judgment to the insurance company, and the Seventh Circuit agreed with Mr. Tull’s arguments and affirmed the judgment of the trial court. See Selective Insurance Co. of South Carolina v. City of Paris, 769 F.3d 501 (7th Cir. 2014).


  • Successfully defended a London broker from the Lloyd's of London insurance market in a large consolidated case in Maricopa County, Arizona. The plaintiffs in the case were property owners who purchased insurance from a purported insurance company that had issued property insurance coverage to them, and then allegedly breached the insurance policy agreement by failing to timely make payments under the policy after the plaintiffs’ buildings were damaged in a freak hailstorm. The plaintiffs alleged that the “insurer” was not properly licensed under state law, and in fact had committed a fraud on its policyholders by failing to inform them that it was not a real insurance company. Plaintiffs further alleged that the London broker had participated in the insurer’s fraud by procuring the policies for the co-defendant insurance company in the Lloyd's of London market without adequately “vetting” the U.S. insurance company to determine whether it was in compliance with U.S. law. Mr. Tull moved to dismiss the Plaintiffs' claims in all of the cases, arguing that the London broker was not susceptible to jurisdiction in the Arizona Courts because it had never visited Arizona, never interacted with any Arizona customers, and didn't take any actions that had any bearing on the Arizona claimants; rather, the only fact tying it to Arizona was the fact that the Plaintiffs lived there and had suffered damage to their properties in the State. The Court agreed with Mr. Tull’s argument and dismissed all of the claims against his client, with prejudice, giving his client a complete victory in a $20+ million dollar case.


  • Part of a team of attorneys that represented a multinational accounting firm that was a defendant in a suit brought by former partners in the firm’s Hong Kong affiliate. The plaintiff partners alleged that their firm had been wrongfully expelled from the client’s international “network” of accounting firms, and that this expulsion had essentially put their company out of business. They further alleged that Mr. Tull’s client had wrongfully favored a Mainland Chinese affiliate over the Hong Kong affiliate, and that the Hong Kong firm’s resources had been misappropriated and used for projects that solely benefited the Mainland Chinese subsidiary.  After the Illinois circuit court awarded judgment to the client in the trial court, Mr. Tull defended the accounting firm in the Illinois Appellate Court and, later, before the Illinois Supreme Court. The Illinois Appellate Court affirmed the judgment for the client, holding that the Plaintiffs were bound by the terms of the arbitration agreement that the Hong Kong firm had signed when it first became an affiliate in the client’s multinational network of accounting firms.  See Tang v. Grant Thornton Int’l Ltd., 2014 IL App. (1st) 1131808-U.  The Illinois Supreme Court later denied the Plaintiffs’ petition for a writ of certiorari, giving Mr. Tull’s client a final victory in this complex proceeding involving Illinois law, UK law, Hong Kong law, Chinese law and international arbitration rules.


  • Represented a well-known electrical equipment manufacturer in numerous lawsuits against the company relating to its use of asbestos-containing materials in its products during the 1960s and 70s. Mr. Tull represented the manufacturer in hundreds of lawsuits relating to cancers allegedly caused by numerous individual’s exposure to the manufacturer’s products, and deposed dozens of witnesses in these cases.  Mr. Tull has also represented a number of other defendants in complex asbestos litigation in Cook County and Madison County, Illinois (the notorious "judicial hellhole" of Illinois).


  • Defended a multinational Indian technology consulting firm in a federal lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois by an alleged “business broker” who claimed he was entitled to a commission for his role in the client’s purchase of a Chicago-area business consulting firm. Mr. Tull drafted the opposition to the plaintiff's motion for summary judgment, and also was the lead drafter on the client's motion for summary judgment against the Plaintiff, which was granted by the District Court and subsequently affirmed on appeal by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. See Global Tech. & Trading Inc. v. Tech Mahindra Ltd., 789 F.3d 730 (2015).


  • Represented a general contractor in litigation in Cook County Circuit Court filed by one of his former clients relating to alleged construction defects in connection with a structure he had built. At the time that Mr. Tull took over representation of this case, the contractor had just emerged from a bruising bankruptcy battle with the plaintiffs that ended with the bankruptcy court finding that the plaintiffs’ claims were non-dischargeable under the Bankruptcy Code, and the client had a motion for entry of judgment hanging over his head. Mr. Tull worked with the client to devise a strategy that he could afford given his limited financial means, and over the next ten months Mr. Tull defended the client against the Plaintiffs’ aggressive summary judgment practice while chipping away at the Plaintiffs’ damages theory. The Circuit Court ultimately agreed with Mr. Tull’s arguments and denied the Plaintiffs’ motion for judgment in its favor, and also accepted Mr. Tull’s theories regarding the measure of Plaintiffs’ damages from the allegedly defective construction work. The case subsequently settled on favorable terms for the client.


  • Part of the team that represented the City of Chicago in a lawsuit regarding the Park Grill restaurant in Chicago’s Millennium Park. The City alleged that a Chicago Park District official had illicitly awarded a sweetheart leasing deal to the owners of the Park Grill due to the fact that the Park District official and one of the owners of the Park Grill were carrying on an affair. This case settled after several years of litigation, with the owners of the Park Grill agreeing to a renegotiated contract on more equitable terms.


  • Defended an Iowa grain processing company in a lawsuit filed by a truck driver in the Circuit Court of Cook County that alleged that the company’s workers had negligently loaded his truck while it was at the client’s facility, causing it to tip over and crash when it went around a sharp turn. Mr. Tull obtained deposition testimony and documentary evidence that showed the Plaintiff’s truck was not actually loaded by the client company, but rather by a third-party independent contractor that performed logistical services at its facilities, and further showed that the client had no role in supervising the loading of plaintiff's truck. Mr. Tull subsequently filed a motion for summary judgment in which he argued that the company owed no duty under Illinois law to protect the truck driver from the independent contractor’s negligence because the company did not control the “incidental aspects” of the contractor’s work. Mr. Tull represented the grain processing company at oral argument on the motion for summary judgment, and successfully persuaded the Circuit Court that his client was entitled to judgment in its favor on all of Plaintiff’s claims against it.



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