Atlanta Injury Law Blog

The Fulton County Daily Report today reports on a rule change to allow assignment of cases to the Business Case Division without consent of all parties.  Having had a small role in this, I can’t resist the temptation to write about it. The “Business Court” idea developed several years ago when the big banks took…

A rash of recent news stories about dangerously defective products from China points to the need to amend a tort reform law that was passed in Georgia twenty years ago. In 1987, long before so much manufacturing was outsourced to China, the Georgia General Assembly passed OCGA 51-1-11.1, which provides: (a) As used in this…

Saturday morning I was elected to the Executive Committee of the 38,000-member State Bar of Georgia.  It will be an interesting transition from outsider iconoclast on the 150-member Board of Governors that meets four times a year to having a place at the table on the 14-member Executive Committee that meets monthly, with serious responsibility…

On Friday morning, the Board of Governors of the State Bar of Georgia unanimously passed my motion to refer to the Disciplinary Rules & Procedure Committee the question of whether Rule 1.15(I)(b) should be amended so as to more clearly define specific interests of creditors of clients as to which an attorney may be required…

The nut case administrative law judge in Washington, DC, who sued a dry cleaner for $65 million for a lost pair of pants has lowered his price to $54 million.  Roy L. Pearson  — who turned down an offer of $15,000 for his precious pants — is proving the maxim that he who represents himself…

As I have discussed several times in this blog, the US Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration significantly increased truck drivers’ hours of service last year.  Under the current hours of service rule, truckers may drive 77 hours in 7 days or 88 hours in 8 days – a more than 25 percent increase from the…

The Georgia Supreme Court has held that OCGA 9-11-68 is unconstitutional, at least with regard to cases that arose before the effective date of the statute. See the full opinion in Fowler Properties Inc. v. Dowland here. The opinion is a bit enigmatic in that the Court stated “Our conclusion that OCGA § 9-11-68 is…

There are approximately 141,000 truck crashes every year in the US, according to a The Federal Motor Carry Safety Administration’s 2006 report.  In about 77,000 of these,  fault was attributed to the truck driver.   According to the FMCA 2006 report, the top 10 causes of truck accidents where the truck driver is a fault: 1.…

The Court of Appeals last week restricted the use of medical narrative reports in injury cases, holding it was reversible error to admit a neurologist’s unedited notes from the patient’s medical visits. The notes did not comply with O.C.G.A. § 24-3-18’s requirements for medical narratives, because they contained unexplained medical terms and test results and…

A fascinating new book by Norman Doidge, The Brain That Changes Itself, poses hopeful and intriguing possibilities for brain injury victims — and for those of us who are merely stuck in the rut of middle age. The author gives numerous examples of patients with brain injury due to either trauma or illness whose brains…