Last week, the Illinois House of Representatives joined the Illinois Senate in passing amendments to the state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act (“BIPA”) to limit the scope of possible damages for violations of BIPA. As covered extensively here on PW, last year in Cothron v. White Castle, the Illinois Supreme Court held that an individual person accrues a separate statutory claim each time a defendant collects or discloses the individual’s biometric information in violation of BIPA. While the dissent in Cothron accurately observed that the combination of statutory damages and “per-scan” accrual meant that businesses could face “punitive, crippling liability . . . wildly exceeding any remotely reasonable estimate of harm,” the Cothron majority determined that “concerns about potentially excessive damage awards under the Act are best addressed by the legislature.”Continue Reading Illinois Legislature to Amend BIPA to Overrule Illinois Supreme Court Damages Decision