Cornered: Out of Court

Cornered: Out of Court - Best of 2025

• IICLE® • Season 2 • Episode 12

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Listen back to some of the IICLE staff's favorite episodes from 2025, including attorneys' responsibilities for shaping the practice with Timothy Eaton, enduring the emotional toll of divorce proceedings with Erin Wilson, the unique ownership positions of condo purchasers with Kenneth Michaels, Jr., and a literary outlook on the law with Meghan Brinson. 

IICLE® is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit based in Springfield, Illinois. We produce a wide range of practice guidance for Illinois attorneys and other legal professionals in all areas of law with the generous contributions of time and expertise from volunteer attorneys, judges, and other legal professionals.

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Oh, you're an attorney?
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I have a friend who...
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I've been meaning to update my will, but I just bought a new house…
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I want to start a business…
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My brother was fired…
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Hey, my friend got divorced a while back, and
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I just don't understand how her ex...
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You've been there.
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At a social function, meeting friends of friends.
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Word gets out that you're an attorney and suddenly your night is filled with partygoers asking you quote-unquote simple legal questions.
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The questions are seldom in your area.
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Some of the stuff you haven't thought about since law school.
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You're being cornered out of court.
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In the Cornered Out of Court podcast from IICLE, you'll hear from fellow attorneys about the questions they get and the responses they give to escape being cornered.
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IICLE launched this podcast Cornered: Out of Court in 2024.
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At the end of that year, we established a new tradition of asking the staff of IICLE to choose their favorite episodes of the year.
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Now, on the cusp of 2026, listen back to some of our favorites with us.
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Joe is a managing editor and a relatively new member of our team.
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Joe, which guest would you like to highlight from this year?
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The episode with Tim Eaton about how attorneys can handle conflicts of interest in a responsible way resonated with me in a couple of ways.
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I think it seems to be at the core of lawyering and practice in the legal profession at large, this consideration of how to balance a responsibility to the client, but also a responsibility to the justice system and to the larger public.
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Lawyers can have considerable influence over their clients.
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who often come to them when they're in trouble or they have complicated and critical problems they need help solving.
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And the decisions that lawyers make in the course of their advocacy can have profound impacts on not just the client, but the entire justice system and then the public at large.
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And it seems to me that these kind of tricky questions about conflicts of interest and civic obligations kind of goes to the heart of what ICLE does
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i.e.
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doing our best to help lawyers in Illinois do their best so that their impacts on the community, these are not just academic questions, they're the impacts that they have on the community and their clients, they're very real impacts and can be very significant.
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Timothy Eaton shares many insights on how attorneys' responsibilities shaped the practice in Chapter 1 of the IICLE publication, Attorneys' Legal Liability, and in this episode from August of 2025.
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As an attorney, you owe a duty to the court and you're to disclose things that as an officer of the court you should disclose.
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But on the other hand, you have a duty to your client and when they come into conflict, you need to do something about it.
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I've seen some attorneys, the way they handle it, for example,
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If their client has misrepresented certain facts to you that you've forwarded to the court and to opposing counsel, and then you find out that it wasn't true,
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Some attorneys seek to withdraw without disclosing to the court.
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This is what I found out.
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They simply have said, I can no longer represent this client.
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We have a conflict.
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Please let me out.
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Sometimes the judge pursues it and says, that's not enough.
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You have to tell me what is the issue.
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I think under those circumstances, if that does arise, remember you do have an ultimate duty to your client as well.
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Maybe if you ask
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Your honor, could we go into chambers so we can discuss this privately, confidentially, and then the court would know the circumstances and perhaps let you out.
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But it's a dilemma.
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You don't want to disclose things as your clients have told you that could be adverse to their interest to the other side.
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On the other hand, you can't condone the fact that maybe
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the client has misrepresented something to the court and your duty to the court, I believe at that point, is to withdraw and hope that the client will understand that the next person they hire shouldn't be put in that situation.
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They need to come clean with the court or with that lawyer.
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So it's a difficult issue at times.
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And there's tension between those conflicting duties.
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Courtney is up next.
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She is Associate Director of the Publications Department.
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Which discussion from this year's episodes did you find interesting, Courtney?
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Erin M.
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Wilson of Wilson Family Law, LLC, was the guest on a January episode about the legal and emotional challenges of divorce proceedings.
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I really appreciated her answer about dealing with stress during a divorce.
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The answer was compassionate and it was also extensive as it covered the wide-ranging emotions a person might feel during divorce.
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It really showed how much experience she has in separation matters and their fallout.
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I also thought her advice would be helpful for clients in other legal matters, as well as people dealing with other general day-to-day stresses.
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I think all listeners would benefit from taking some of the advice she offered.
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Let's hear some recommendations from Erin Wilson about how to stay sane during a divorce.
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Really my biggest piece of advice is not to let this divorce case consume you.
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Don't let it be all you eat, sleep, live, breathe, talk about, think about.
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You have to have some separation, which also comes with hiring a trusted attorney that you can rely on to make sure they're representing your interests.
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How to stay sane is really, during a divorce is the same as with anything else.
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You want to eat right, you want to exercise, you want to get good sleep.
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Also, some other important tools is therapy.
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We are huge advocates for therapy, whether it's direct divorce coaching, which some people like to do, or having an individual therapist.
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And you may also want to consider letting your attorney speak to your therapist one time just to give some perspective
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because that can help guide and navigate the process.
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Also, don't trust the internet.
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Don't just read every article under the sun and think that these doomsdays are going to happen to you.
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That again goes to having a good, reliable, trustworthy attorney.
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And try and minimize how much exposure your children may have to the divorce case, because your children can pick up on your stress.
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You're probably going to get in trouble with the courts if you're talking about the divorce case with your children.
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So make sure you're maintaining that separation.
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And even if your children are home and you're talking about it, but they're not in the room, they can hear you.
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They know what's going on.
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So really keep the kids out of it as much as you can and take care of yourself and don't let this case consume you.
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Next, we have Angie, who is a program planner with IICLE.
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Angie works on some of our most complex programs, such as the estate planning short course.
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Angie, which episode this year grabbed your attention?
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I chose the episode featuring Kenneth Michaels Jr.
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from Bouch and Michaels LLC because I found his question, what are purchasers actually investing in when they own a unit, particularly eye-opening?
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Ken reframed what I thought I knew about condo ownership, candidly explaining that buyers are investing in far more than their own 4 walls.
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His explanation made clear how much complexity and shared responsibility comes with living in a condominium, and it gave me new appreciation for the layers of ownership most people never realized they're signing up for.
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Here, Ken Michaels explains what condo owners actually get for their dollar from an episode all about condominium ownership and the associations that manage them.
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The real estate brokers will hate me on this one.
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I'm going to begin by reminding us all why we buy a home.
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And when we buy a home, when we pare it all down, what we're buying is the security and protection of ourselves and our family members.
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We are buying a century, a fortress in which we can be secure at night from the weather and elements, natural elements, as well as from other people and such with ill intent.
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It's also a great storage place for all the personal property we accumulate, and so on and so forth.
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Having given that background, maybe the real estate brokers will be a little bit more forgiving when I describe a condominium purchase as a great idea.
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If you're willing to invest a substantial part of your current
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wealth as well as future earnings stream into a not-for-profit corporation managed by a few people that you don't know of unknown skills and abilities for the purpose of managing a property where you and a large number of other people will live together in a collective environment.
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If you're happy with that, condominiums are the way to go.
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You're actually buying, imagine a cube of space
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because that's what you're buying is that space.
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Perimeters of this cube are defined by the interior of the perimeter walls of your condominium unit and the surface of the ceiling and floor.
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That is your space.
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You are also buying a percentage ownership as a tenant in common with all the other people who have purchased space in this space.
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And you're also included in that as part of your common elements, but somewhat differentiated as you're a percentage ownership of the land.
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But again, you own all this as a collective body, not as
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not individually.
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And so many people moving into a condominium association from the suburbs or such have to go through a psychological adjustment that this is no longer going out and walking the perimeter of your estate on Saturday morning to make sure there's been no intrusions because that's not what you're purchasing.
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The common elements of the space are the building, everything that's included within the walls,
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of that perimeter walls of that building, and all the plumbing, electrical, and other utility fixtures within that building that serve more than one unit.
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Within the definition of common elements, you may have some of the plumbing and electrical that once it demarcates into serving just that unit under most declarations, then that would become part of the unit.
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And that's that question is important for the purpose of who's responsible for maintenance, repairs and replacement.
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Also, there is in common elements.
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What about the patio on the outside of the building?
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Where is that?
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Well, that is a common element.
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It's owned by everybody, but not everybody has a right to come up on your patio on a Saturday night to start partying.
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It's a limited common element if it's designed to just serve your unit.
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you have exclusive use of it, but you do not own anything more than your percentage ownership of that patio space.
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That patio is actually owned by all your neighbors in you.
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The ex.
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That's important to understand, because you there's case law that
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establishes just because you have exclusive use of space doesn't mean you get to go build out all over that space or do something on that space that could deprive others from their ownership rights in that space.
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It's a nuance, but there's plenty of case law on that point.
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The land, of course, is owned by all the owners.
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Now, a lot of the condo work I do is primarily Chicago.
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and a lot of your condominiums are all along Lakeshore Drive, Marine Drive, and so forth, and all throughout the Chicagoland and the suburbs.
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You will have parking spaces.
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Many times the condo association itself owns the parking lot, much as a corporation owning a parking lot, and you do not own that parking space.
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Instead, you may have a limited common element right to use that space, and that's where the association doesn't own it, but all the unit owners own it as common elements.
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But there's also buildings where the association purchased rights to parking spaces and such, and another facility or so.
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And there, the association is renting them out, just as any corporation would.
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There is also another class of space parking spaces which is deeded, and that is always problem.
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You will actually own that parking space.
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Just it's an and it is a unit, so to speak, and by definition within
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the condo declaration.
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The problem there is many times the mortgage companies through the years haven't, when they have their servicing, don't realize that they need to pay a separate tax bill in Cook County for that parking space as well as the tax bill for the unit you live in.
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And there's been throughout my career
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Many times when you find people who did not realize that they lost their parking unit space because they failed to pay taxes on it and somebody came in, swept in and bought it.
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Last but not least, Megan Moore, our co-executive director and director of programs,
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was inspired by the literary outlook offered by one of this year's guests.
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I chose the episode Literature and the Law featuring Megan Brinson.
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The reason I chose this episode were a couple different reasons.
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First of all, as a former English major, I appreciated the opportunity to think about legal concepts in a different way and really bring literature into that thought process.
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And I think it's always, the second reason is I think it's always good to view the law from an alternative lens.
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So not just from the practice of law itself, but from different perspectives.
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I think it's a fantastic idea to have people who are going to be involved in the profession to be thinking about legal concepts and law and how it impacts people from
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the perspective of these great works of literature and how they've interpreted it.
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And I also appreciated how she talked about how literature has been used to advocate for changes in the law.
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which is another aspect of the law that sometimes we don't always think about.
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But that's actually a reason a lot of people end up going to law school is because they want to be change makers.
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And so I think that can be really inspiring for law students or students who are interested in law.
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So I think that class makes a lot of sense because of that.
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But even for lawyers, I think to go back to these texts and think about the things that got them inspired in the 1st place to be involved in the practice of law can be really
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insightful and helpful to think about those things again and reinvigorate their inspiration for being involved.
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And the other thing is because it forces us to go back in time to the time when these things were written and the laws that were in place in those times and the things that have changed since and really think about the historical context and the progress that we've made.
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I think that's also an important perspective as well.
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I appreciate the concept of taking this, again, this lens of literature and focusing it on the profession and the law and the way that we interpret it and looking at it more from the analysis of a piece of art, really, and thinking about things from that perspective rather than just always looking at it from a perspective of practice.
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In this excerpt from the episode, Megan Brinson unpacks how a real-life Illinois case may well have acted as the author's inspiration for a well-known short story.
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Charlotte Perkin Gilman's Yellow Wallpaper, which is a late 1880s short story about a woman who is receiving a postpartum treatment.
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called Rest Cure at the direction of her husband, who's a physician, and basically is moved into a attic garret room with ugly wallpaper and bad furniture.
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And she complains about that in this sort of creepy
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country estate, which seems at first like it's going to be just a lovely sort of break from the city, but she doesn't really get to enjoy it.
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She can only see it out the windows while she's complaining about this ugly wallpaper and her sort of frustration at being watched by her domestic help, employees, and being told that she's not allowed to write, right?
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So she cannot write, she cannot really see
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her child.
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She begins to hallucinate.
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I think we're led to believe that the short story, the novella, leads us to think that she's hallucinating.
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And kind of, it shows her descent into madness.
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You have very little doubt by the end of the novella that the author of the text with the language that she uses blames the treatment and particularly the husband's sort of overbearing control of his spouse.
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on her inability to continue to tolerate the conditions of her solitary confinement, which I think doesn't surprise anybody in the 21st century, where we understand now solitary confinement as being a type of torture, as being something that leads sort of inexorably to these kinds of negative mental health outcomes.
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But Gilman was inspired, according to some
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research by a report that she read of an Illinois case, actually, a historical habeas corpus case from here in Illinois from the mid-part of the 19th century, so an 1860s case, where a woman who later became a big champion for mental health reform and for women's rights, Elizabeth Ware-Packard, was not having a good experience in her marriage from the
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statements in the testimony that came out at her trial.
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She found her husband to be overbearing, a little controlling of the money, and she felt overworked and underappreciated.
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And it seems like she was also very active in the church and was maybe a little bit not religiously on the same page as her husband.
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So he began to suspect that there was something wrong in the marriage and actually had somebody pose as a
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a salesman of sewing machines and kind of like poke around and try to get her to talk about how she felt about her husband.
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She sort of unleashed a little bit of her dissatisfaction with her marriage and that was used as
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as an excuse to say that she was actually insane.
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So he was upset that she was upset, upset that she was writing a bunch of religious tracts that he didn't agree with, and had her committed to an institution about 100 miles up the road from us here in Illinois, and did that with the help of a physician
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who signed off that she was insane, right?
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So she, at that time, it wasn't necessary for her to have any kind of a hearing.
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A husband was able to put his wife in an institution without any sort of a hearing.
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And he held her there for, I believe, about a couple of years before she was able to convince the people who were in charge of the
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mental institution that she didn't belong there.
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She wrote very persuasive.
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She was a beautiful writer.
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She wrote very persuasive letters and had a lot of support from various members of the community that she was from.
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And so she was moved back home.
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The mental institution wasn't willing to let her go on her own.
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They put her back into the custody of her husband.
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And he took her home and restrained her in the attic.
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So this is the real life case, the rip from the headlines case that inspired Charlotte Perkins Gilman short story.
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She was confined in the attic for I think about a year before she was able to smuggle some letters out to some people in the community, Tankakee, who were interested in helping her.
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It was local businessmen and her friends who were their wives.
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who went to a judge in Kankakee and had it convinced him to have a hearing for her, which arguably she wasn't really entitled to under the laws of the time, which is sort of a surprise to people.
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But he had one anyway.
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And after a really public trial resulted in a lot of newspaper headlines, she was declared to be sane.
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A jury found that she was sane that having a difference of
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religious opinion with one's spouse doesn't make one insane that her religious opinions weren't that wild and that being unhappy in your marriage isn't a cause for being declared permanently mentally incapacitated and being put in an institution.
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What this gives us an opportunity to do in my class is to talk about the laws at the time that made that possible.
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which are coverture laws.
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So the coverture laws are very interesting.
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They're interesting to my law and lit students, but they're also very interesting to my gender and law students.
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Coverture is this legal principle that women do not have a legal identity outside of their husbands.
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So they're not free to contract.
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Under some forms of coverture, earlier forms of coverture, they're not allowed to own property in their own right or to
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use that property and direct the use of it, can't use it the way that they would like to, cannot will it away.
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Obviously, they can't vote, just, and also can be constrained physically in a lot of different ways under the strictest forms of coverture by their spouse who's only required to provide the necessities, right, the necessities of life to them.
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And so the spouse is free to
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to direct, constrain, and correct the behavior of his wife as he deems fit, as long as he doesn't exceed a certain amount of personal violence, which was deemed acceptable, not cruel, not the basis for divorce, and provides basic necessities.
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So those were all totally okay.
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And coverture reform starts happening in part, honestly, because of Elizabeth Ware Packard.
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So some of the property issues kind of start being, women start being allowed to at least inherit property much, much earlier in the 18, mid 1800s, 1830s through 1850s.
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They start to be able to direct in some states the use of their own property.
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But in Illinois, married women's
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property, the ability to enter into contracts, the ability, another famous Illinois case, Illinois v.
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Bradwell, to work, for example, as a lawyer is what Bradwell wanted to do in the late 1880s was not something that you could legally do.
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And so Elizabeth Ware-Packard did finally get a divorce
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from her partner.
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Packard had intended to kind of drop her off in an institution in back east and sort of leave her there.
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And she managed to escape that, get a divorce, and became a campaigner for not only women's rights, trying to end sort of piecemeal, not altogether, but statute by statute, repealing parts of COVIDure, and also letting people know that mental institutions, the one that she was in was.
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horrible.
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So this is before or around contemporaneous with reports from Nellie Bly, the intrepid female journalist who had herself institutionalized so she could report back on what those conditions were like.
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And so because of that, we see a lot of reform in mental health institutions in the late 19th century across the United States as well.
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So that's a really fascinating case.
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that brings up a lot of kind of historic laws that are helpful for explaining how important the 19th Amendment was, for talking about women's rights during the Civil Rights Movement, which we discuss.
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and other various like reform movements that happened in the early 20th to mid-20th centuries.
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So the effect of literature on the law is not always talked about in the law and literature context, but as an opportunity for not just to see
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what statutes are and what the state of law is that enables the conflict in the literature, but how literature can inspire movements that seek to change the laws that they talk about is a major theme and element in my class, and I hope the one thing that students can leave with.
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is that literature is interested in the law, just for the law's sake, but it's also very interested often in making a point, advocating for changes in the law.
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Thank you, Joe, Courtney, Angie, and Megan for sharing your favorite moments from 2025's Cornered Out of Court.
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And thank you, listeners, for making this podcast a success.
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We look forward to bringing you new episodes starting in January of 2026.
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Until then, enjoy the holiday season and have a very happy New Year.
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If you have an idea for a topic you would like to hear discussed on the IICLE podcast, we welcome your suggestions by e-mail.
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Our address is info.
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That's I-N-F-O at IICLE.com.
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IICLE is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit based in Springfield, Illinois.
00:27:17
We produce a wide range of practice guidance for Illinois attorneys and other legal professionals in all areas of the law with the generous contributions of time and expertise from attorneys, judges, and other legal professionals.
00:27:29
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00:27:41
Thank you for joining us for another edition of Cornered Out of Court, brought to you by the Illinois Institute for Continuing Legal Education.