Is Tom Dart serving summonses yet?

Cook County Eviction Summonses Not Being Served

I must admit that I haven’t had occasion to file a new eviction in the last week, but it has come to my attention that the Cook County Sheriff may not be making routine service of summons at this time.  To find out, I submitted a question to the Sheriff’s office and just received a response.  It appears that

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New law aims to improve service of process in condos and gated communities

sopNew law makes service on condominiums just a bit easier

Hopefully, things just got a bit easier for process servers in eviction cases.  The State of Illinois has passed an amendment to Section 735 ILCS 5/2-203 of the Illinois Code of Civil Procedure intended to assist process servers in making access to a “gated residential community”.  The new law requires guards in such a community to permit access to the premises to a process server.  The law defines a “gated residential community” as including “a condominium association, housing cooperative, or private community”.

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It’s a special process (server)

serviceThe use of special process servers to serve eviction notices

In most cases, the eviction process begins long before going to court. When a tenant defaults on a lease, fails to pay rent, or when a month-to-month tenancy needs to be terminated, the landlord must serve a “notice of termination” on the tenant.  This usually means placing the notice in the tenant’s hand.

Sometimes, getting the eviction notice served can be one of the hardest parts of the Illinois eviction process. Tenants who are at odds with their landlord or delinquent on rent are somehow able to find ingenious ways to be unavailable, away from home, or downright difficult to serve.  Worse yet, relations between the landlord and tenant can be so strained that a landlord may feel uncomfortable or even unsafe in serving the notice.

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Certified mail service of eviction notices in Cook County?

postmarkA new case interpreting the Forcible Entry and Detainer Act demonstrates the difference between condominium and landlord evictions

The First District Appellate Court has just published an opinion to Courts of Northbrook Condominium Ass’n v. Bhutani which highlights a major difference between condominium association evictions and traditional tenant eviction cases under the Illinois Forcible Entry and Detainer Act.  The Northbrook case involves a condominium association eviction under the forcible entry and detainer statute.  Landlords might be interested to know that it is not just they who can take advantage of the Forcible Entry and Detainer Statute to recover possession to land.  Condominium associations have a separate right under the FED to file an eviction to collect past due assessments or to obtain possession of real estate owned by a delinquent condominium owner.

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