Articles Posted in Tort law

In nearly a half-century as a Georgia lawyer, starting when we had spittoons in jury boxes, bailiffs called greenhorn lawyers “Colonel,” and computers were just huge mainframes in large institutions, I have seen a lot of change. I have tried serious injury cases for over forty years. Years ago, I saw terribly low verdicts for…

Often in a catastrophic truck crash, the trucking company admits that the truck driver was negligent and was in the course and scope of employment. That is a smart tactic to attempt to focus all blame on two seconds of driver negligence rather than months or years of corporate conduct including negligent hiring of the…

When my father’s generation came home from World War II, many of them carried psychological scars about which they kept quiet. My parents married young, at 21 and 18, the week he returned from combat in 1945. My mother said that dad fought the air war over Europe every night in his sleep for at…

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…

Effective representation of the plaintiff in a case of serious injury or wrongful death often requires that counsel overcome an “independent contractor” defense.  That frequently involves solving a shell game of independent contractor business relationships used to evade financial responsibility. Sometimes lawyers refer to this as getting “beyond the monkey to the organ grinder.” The general rule is that a…