Atlanta Injury Law Blog

The 30-year-old driver of a pickup truck was killed in predawn darkness at 5:30 AM this morning when his pickup truck he was driving ran into the back of a tractor-trailer that had broken down in the middle of I-20 in DeKalb County, according to news reports. The pickup driver was not identified. DeKalb police…

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,…

Former Olympic swimming champion Amy Van Dyken-Rouen is recovering following surgery to stabilize her spine after her spinal cord was severed at the T-11 vertebra during an all-terrain vehicle accident in Scottsdale, Arizona last week. The latest report is that she is out of ICU and looking forward to rehab in Denver. Demonstrating a resilient…

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.…

In the case of Hartley v. Agnes Scott College, the Supreme Court addressed the question “whether a campus police officer employed by a private college qualifies as a “state officer or employee” who may assert immunity from tort suits under the Georgia Tort Claims Act.” Last year, a plurality decision of the Court of Appeals…