Ava L. Caffarini

A seasoned litigator with an array of experience, Ava L. Caffarini focuses her practice on insurance coverage, professional negligence, business litigation, and insurance defense. Licensed in Indiana and Illinois, Ms. Caffarini is experienced in defending businesses, attorneys, and other professionals in municipal, state, and federal court. In business litigation matters, she has represented businesses large and small in contract disputes, business torts, and products liability cases.  She also handles civil rights lawsuits and insurance coverage issues for clients in Illinois and Indiana.  Ms. Caffarini uses her varied legal background to accomplish the business goals and objectives of her clients. Here are some examples of her recent client work:

• Ms. Caffarini represented an Illinois couple in a fraud and breach of contract suit against an architect and general contractor who had been hired to rebuild the plaintiff’s home after a fire. The general contractor defrauded them out of nearly $400K, doing no usable work on the property and not following city codes. The architect also failed to complete the necessary building drawings, ignored city codes, and did not include features the plaintiffs had specifically requested. The general contractor and architect hid these mistakes from the plaintiffs for months and, ultimately, the property was condemned after a city inspection, forcing the plaintiffs to sell the property. The general contractor was defaulted out of the lawsuit for discovery violations and declared bankruptcy. The architect’s main defense was that his contract with the plaintiffs limited his liability to ~$40K. The court elected to not apply the limitation of liability at summary judgment because of fraud and breach of fiduciary duty claims against the architect, who settled for the value of his insurance policy.
• She represented an Indiana hospital and rehabilitation center in a lawsuit filed by the family member of a woman who was a resident at the facility and later died. Alleging violations of the Federal Nursing Home Reform Act, the plaintiff’s novel claim sought to treat a medical malpractice matter as a civil rights violation. The plaintiff’s initial demand was seven figures, but after undertaking extensive motion practice and discovery, the matter was settled for a low six-figure sum.
• Ms. Caffarini represented two companies involved in trading cryptocurrency and operating crypto ATMs. The clients had a minor data breach, which was the subject of the class action lawsuit. The most valuable claims in the case were state-level data breach statutes from California, which did not apply in federal court in Illinois. Caffarini and her team outmaneuvered the plaintiff by filing a motion to dismiss these claims and a motion to compel the arbitration clause in the user terms of service agreement. The matter was settled for $475K, a fraction of the original demand.

Ms. Caffarini earned a J.D. from the University of Illinois Chicago Law School in 2013, where she received Dean’s List honors and served as a staff editor on the Review of Intellectual Property Law. She also earned a CALI award for Trademarks and Copyrights, was a teaching assistant for Lawyering Skills II, and worked as a law clerk in the intellectual property group at a mid-sized law firm in Chicago.  She holds a B.S. in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Ms. Caffarini is a member of the Illinois State Bar Association and the Chicago Bar Association and is a member of the ISBA Tort Law Section Council.