Articles Posted in Legal Info

I don’t put a lot of stock in college rankings in US News and other publications. The formulas are too contrived, too subject to manipulation and present too great a temptation for institutions to misplace priorities in order to rank higher. They can distort high education much as over emphasis on standardized testing has distorted…

  The Georgia Supreme Court ruled on 11/7/2016 that outgoing text messages found in a cell phone are admissible in evidence as admissions of the person who sent them. However, incoming text messages are inadmissible hearsay, though their admission in evidence was “harmless” under the circumstances of the case. Glispie v. State, decided November 7,…

Much of our Atlanta-based litigation law practice is based upon referrals from other attorneys around Georgia and North America for catastrophic injury and wrongful death cases in Georgia. Most of these are not simple, slam-dunk cases. Often we have to contend with a rat’s nest of convoluted, multi-layered liability defenses. Among those is often the…

Merle Haggard sang, “The roots of my raising run deep.” So do Ken Shigley‘s. His rural childhood home was a modest cement block two bedroom, but full of love. His dad and uncle, WWII combat veterans, built it on weekends one pickup truck load of materials per payday. The house included an indoor toilet and…

When I started practicing law in 1977, hardly anyone but TV stations had video cameras, which at the time were heavy, tripod-mounted and extremely expensive. The idea of being able to play a video recording of an event in court would have seemed like science fiction if anyone had been so fanciful as to suggest …

  Almost all personal injury and wrongful death cases in the United States are handled on a contingent fee basis. That means that the lawyer is paid only in proportion to the amount recovered for the client. If there is no recovery, the lawyer is not paid. If money is recovered from the other side,…

Every few weeks or months, we see news stories about breach of data security in medical centers or health insurance companies. Most people hearing that probably just shrug, figuring it’s not as bad as breach of credit card or other financial data. Earlier this year, for example, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Georgia revealed that as…

Several years ago I handled a products liability case against an auto manufacturer that had designed its braking system on one model so that a poorly designed sensor would turn off the antilock braking system without warning. As a result, our client was a brain damaged quadriplegic. It took much expert analysis and discovery of…

Serious physical injuries can leave scars that are not immediately visible. While we are rather conservative about being too quick to label emotional reactions to ordinary types of injuries as psychiatric conditions such as  Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), it is important to recognize it when psychological injuries are real.  That requires that injury lawyers have…

Injuries to children are going to happen.  In fact, according to the CDC, injury treatment is the leading cause of medical spending for children equaling about $11.5 billion in the United States.  A serious injury to a minor child touches the heart more than a comparable injury to an adult.  Because young children lack the…