December 2012

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 and difficult to deal with, and will never tell us the amount they demand before we settle a case with the other side.

I had one case in my office in which it took 18 months after the case settled, writing to them about every

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 which people are seriously injured or killed. Some of the common preventable causes of deck collapses, based on building code violations that could be detected with inspection, include:

–        Failure to protect against decay. Building codes require that all structural elements exposed to weathering

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 Pittsburgh have developed a still experimental system that enables a quadriplegic to operate a robotic arm with mind control.

The Pitt research team embedded a computer chip with 200 needles into the brain of a woman who became a quadriplegic in a

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, when the new Evidence Code becomes law.

The new Georgia Evidence Code, based more or less on the Federal Rules of Evidence, will go into effect on January 1, 2013. The new Evidence Code was a long-time project of the State Bar. Sponsored