Tractor Trailer Theft Ring Busted

Most of my work as an Atlanta attorney involves serious injuries and deaths due to truck wrecks around Georgia and the Southeast — tractor trailers, big rigs, dump trucks, concrete mixer trucks, delivery trucks, mobile cranes, etc.

But my first truck-related trial, many years ago, was when I was an Assistant District Attorney in a rural Georgia circuit. It involved the theft of a tractor trailer and its cargo, and was related to thefts of fuel from a pipeline that passed through a small town. Most of the city fathers were implicated in the overall plot which was prosecuted in federal court. However, the feds bumped the tractor trailer hijacking back down to our state prosecution team.

This week there is a news story that reminds me of that long-ago prosecution. In Missouri, law enforcement officers have broken up a tractor trailer theft ring and recovered six semi-tractors and eight semi-trailers stolen in Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Maryland. Some young Assistant DA is going to have fun with that case.

Ken Shigley is a trucking safety trial attorney representing seriously injured people and families of people killed in tractor trailer, big rig, semi, intermodal container freight, log truck, cement truck, dump truck, log truck and bus accidents statewide in Georgia.

Mr. Shigley has extensive experience representing parties in interstate trucking collision cases, and in the past two years has spoken at national interstate trucking litigation seminars in Chicago (trucking insurance), New Orleans (trial tactics and side underride issues), St. Louis (punitive damages), San Francisco (dealing with insolvent trucking companies), Atlanta (trucking insurance, closing argument), Nashville (use of Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations), and Amelia Island (overview of trucking litigation).

He served as chair of the Southeastern Motor Carrier Litigation Institute in 2005, is a national board member of the Interstate Trucking Litigation Group of the American Association for Justice, and is on the National Advisory Board for the Association of Interstate Trucking Lawyers of America.

A Certified Civil Trial Advocate of the National Board of Trial Advocacy, he has been listed as a “Super Lawyer” (Atlanta Magazine), among the “Legal Elite” (Georgia Trend Magazine), and in the Bar Register of Preeminent Lawyers (Martindale). In addition to trucking litigation, he has broad experience in products liability, catastrophic personal injury, wrongful death, spinal cord injury, brain injury and burn injury cases. Mr Shigley is currently Treasurer of the 41,000 member State Bar of Georgia, of which he will become President-Elect on 6/19/10 and President in on 6/4/11.

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