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Trucking has inherent dangers, both for other motorists hit by big trucks and for truck drivers who are underpaid and underinsured for their labor in one of the most dangerous of occupations. More truckers and delivery men, die on the job than any other vocation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.   The current…

Safety records matter, especially in the trucking industry in which 80,000 vehicles share the highway with your family and mine. If a trucking company builds a deplorable safety record there can be consequences in terms of fines, suspension, loss of operating authority, insurance rates, etc. So what happens when a persistently unsafe trucking company encounters…

In handling wrongful death and life insurance claims for clients, I learned years ago that blood alcohol tests after a person dies may not be reliable. Due to postmortem fermentation when a body is not kept cool after death, there can be “false positive” blood alcohol reports up to 0.20 grams/% — 2 ½ times…

Most long haul truck drivers are decent, hardworking folks who chose truck driving as a way to support their families even though it keeps them on the road away from home most of the time. At my childhood home in rural Alabama, a lot of my friends’ dads were over the road truck drivers because…

Folks, this post has nothing to do with law.  Appreciating the simple joys of a Southern summer, I just want to share a video someone posted of the “Shigley Hole,” an old swimming hole on land my great-grandparents homesteaded in the late 1800s near Little River Canyon in northeast Alabama. I can just imagine my…

Recent news stories of tragedies when young children were left in hot cars have generated passionate debate in metro Atlanta and across the country. Certainly any parent who intentionally leaves a child in a hot car to suffer and die should be prosecuted and harshly punished. As a former prosecutor, I find myself wondering whether,…

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has reported that the Twitter profile of Kevin Roper, the Wal-Mart truck driver who had been awake 24 straight hours before a fatal crash in New Jersey, had included the phrase, “move or get hit.” This illustrates what my friend Andy Young in Ohio pointed out to me last year about the…

The Georgia Supreme Court on June 16, 2014,  in the case of Department of Corrections v. Couch, held that attorney fees awards for plaintiffs under the Officer of Judgment / Offer of Settlement statute (O.C.G.A. § 9-11-68) cannot be based solely upon the plaintiff’s contingent fee agreement. Just what would be sufficient remains somewhat unclear.…

On Monday, General Motors recalled another 3.16 million vehicles built between 2000 and 2014. This was because those vehicles have ignition switches that “may inadvertently move out of the ‘run’ position if the key is carrying extra weight and experiences some jarring event.” That comes on top of last weeks’ defective products recall in which…

In Chattooga County, GA, near where I spent my childhood, a log truck jack knifed Friday and struck an oncoming passenger car. Two women in the car were transported to a hospital in Rome. Fortunately, an infant in the car, apparently secured in an infant seat, appeared to be unharmed. From the news photo and…