Atlanta Injury Law Blog

In a unanimous opinion, the Georgia Supreme Court held Monday that legal malpractice claims may be assigned to other parties in some circumstances, the scope of which remains unclear. Villanueva vs. First American Title Insurance arose out of a highly unusual real estate closing. A senior attorney hired an associate to work on closings but…

“You snooze, you lose.” The time limit to file a lawsuit in court for personal injury or wrongful death in Georgia is two years. But the time to present a notice of claim to a city government when one is hurt or killed by a municipal government’s negligence or public nuisance — whether due to…

If you wait for the two year statute of limitations to make a claim for serious personal injury or wrongful death against a state agency in Georgia, you will be out of luck. The Georgia Tort Claims Act waives sovereign immunity up to  $1 million per person and $3 million per occurrence, subject to a…

Chances are you or a member of your family will be involved in a car wreck someday. When it happens, you need to know what to do in the event of an auto accident. Print this out and keep it in your glove compartment to refer to if you are involved in a motor vehicle…

In the past few years, half the work and hassle in representing individuals in personal injury claims is the endless hassle with medical lien claims. Medicare, which asserts claims under the Medicare Secondary Payer Act, is often the hardest to deal with because the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) bureaucracy is infamously slow…

  Outdoor decks are a common amenity for outdoor living at homes, apartments, condominiums, restaurants and commercial properties throughout Atlanta and Georgia. It seldom occurs to most people that these pleasant decks may hold hidden dangers that suddenly lead to serious injury or even death. Every year there are many incidents of deck collapses in…

As an Atlanta personal injury attorney, I have come to view our quadriplegic and paraplegic spinal cord injury (SCI) clients as friends and survivors rather than mere victims. Their never-ending quest for ways to overcome adversity and improve quality of life is awe inspiring. This week there is news that researchers at the University of…

Most bright middle school students probably have a working knowledge of the concept of hearsay, simply as gossip.  “He said she said” does not mean the statement is true. Hearsay as a legal rather than merely social concept is part of the law of evidence. The Georgia rule on hearsay will change on January 1st,…

Georgia law on the trial of personal injury cases has for most of my career provided for exclusion of evidence of settlements of claims arising from prior injuries. Now the Court of Appeals has cracked open the door to evidence that in the past has been excluded. In the case of Goforth v. Wigley, 178…

In trucking accident personal injury litigation in Georgia, plaintiffs often assert a claim for attorney fees and expenses of litigation including attorney fees under O.C.G.A. § 13-6-11, which was enacted as part of the Code of 1863. A decision this week by the Georgia Court of Appeals relied on existing case authority that an award…