Articles Posted in Venue Changes

When younger lawyers ask me for advice on their cases, among my first questions are, “What is the venue?” and “Who is the judge?”   Often the response is, “Uh, I’ll get back to you.” Facts and law are vitally important. But the identity of the decision makers – judge and jury – are crucial too.…

For years both lawyers and insurance claims professionals assumed that a plaintiff could not win a substantial verdict in certain suburban Atlanta counties, notably Cobb and Gwinnett.  Until the past couple of years, I felt the same way. Last week, there was a verdict for $1,937,500 in Cobb County.  The plaintiff was an assistant attorney general…

Obviously my trucking litigation practice in Atlanta, Georgia, is in the wrong place or wrong specialty.  This week a federal judge in California ordered Taser, Inc. to pay $1.4 million in attorney fees to the lawyers whose client only collected $183,000.  The family of a man who was Tasered multiple times by police trying to…

When the Georgia General Assembly passed Senate Bill 3 — the “tort reform” conglomeration — in February 2005, most of the legislators hadn’t even read the entire bill, most of its provisions were not discussed in any detail, and hardly anyone understood it. To say it had a lot of poor draftsmanship is an understatement. …

Senate Bill 3 amended 9-10-31 to bring back a “vanishing venue” rule as follows: (d) If all defendants who reside in the county in which an action is pending are discharged from liability before or upon the return of a verdict by the jury or the court hearing the case without a jury, a nonresident…

The new Georgia tort reform legislation (SB 3) brings back the old rule of “vanishing venue” in which a case could go all the way through trial and then be sent back to the court of another county if no defendant residing in the forum county was held liable. The new law also adopts a…