Atlanta Injury Law Blog

As an attorney in Atlanta handling catastrophic injury cases, I often see problems with the “sticker price” on medical and hospital bills significantly exceeding the “reasonable and customary” amounts paid by medical insurers, and occasionally huge gaps between the bills and the available coverage. There are no easy solutions, so we just work it out…

Wednesday morning, 2/20/08, a tractor trailer on I-285 failed to stop for slowing traffic, struck a car, and pushed it into the rear of another tractor trailer. This happened near the intersection of I-20 where there is often a long line of tractor trailers backed up waiting to transition from I-285 to I-20.  The driver of the car…

The handling characteristics of a bobtail tractor (operating without a trailer) are far different from a tractor-trailer combination, especially on wet pavement. Here’s a test I happened to find on Youtube. The results of braking a bobtail tractor on wet pavement are pretty predictable.   Ken Shigley is a trucking and product safety attorney based…

Saturday morning, at the request of a patient’s family  who urgently want to provide for his care needs, I visited an intensive care unit at Grady Memorial Hospital to attempt to interview a man who became a quadriplegic in a recent traffic collision. Laying paralyzed in a bed, breathing through a tube, he was too…

It’s not Westlaw or Lexis, but there’s a new source of free legal research — the Public Library of Law. I wouldn’t rely on it for anything complicated, but it’s OK for a quick, free check of something relatively simple.

Here’s an intriguing video about the problem of side underride and the lack of side underride guards on trailers in the US. In viewing this, imagine what happens when a driver comes upon a tractor-trailer pulling out of a side road or driveway at night at highway speed. I showed this at a trucking litigation…

As an attorney in Atlanta, Georgia, with a practice heavily concentrated on trial of large truck and bus crash cases, I represent injured truck drivers (and their widows) almost as much as occupants of  other vehicles.  Posts about truckers violations of Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations sometimes give folks the mistaken impression that I am…

I’ve spent the last few  days in New Orleans at the American Association for Justice Litigating Truck Collision Cases seminar.  I spoke on Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) in relation to large truck products liability cases, debunking misconceptions about those minimal and largely outmoded standards. Since I know opposing counsel read my blog, I…

Brain injury survivors can look great even when their mental functioning is scrambled. To make the reality graphically visible to jurors it is often necessary to use sophisticated medical illustrations and animations. Several samples of animations explaining brain injuries are available online, though of course for trial use we would have to pay them.  For…

When I was a young lawyer there was a very busy quadriplegic trial lawyer in Atlanta named Stan Nylen.  He made his was from courthouse to courthouse in an “Ironsides” van and driver/attendant. Stan could raise one hand just enough to extend two fingers to shake hands. “Old war horse” lawyers in Atlanta have quite…