Ethics
Category RSS FeedTrial preparation – social media
As president of the State Bar of Georgia, I often have occasion to speak at events that extend beyond my own personal injury, wrongful death and commercial trucking law practice. The following is excerpted from my presentation — “Trial Preparation: 30 tips in 30 Minutes” – at the … Continue Reading
Trial preparation – invest in the interview
As president of the State Bar of Georgia, I often have occasion to speak at events that extend beyond my own personal injury, wrongful death and commercial trucking law practice. The following is excerpted from my presentation — “Trial Preparation: 30 tips in 30 Minutes” – at the Georgia Law of … Continue Reading
A Lawyer’s Calling
The following was published in the August 2011 issue of the Georgia Bar Journal, as my president’s column. (If you want to see the end notes, go to the online version of the Journal.) It does not deal with my practice as a personal injury and wrongful death trial attorney focused on commercial trucking accidents. … Continue Reading
Fastcase is new free legal research benefit for Georgia Bar members
This month all Georgia lawyers have a new resource for online legal research as a benefit of membership in the State Bar of Georgia. The Member Benefits Committee compared Fastcase to the online research site that was previously provided to Georgia Bar members, and found Fastcase better in several significant aspects. Here are links to … Continue Reading
“Defriending” on Facebook my real-world friends who happen to be judges
Florida has ruled that judges and lawyers cannot be “friends” on Facebook. Out of an abundance of caution, most around the US will follow suit.
Continue reading…
“One call that’s all?” Personal injury “settlement mills” blasted in Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics
"Run-of-the-Mill Justice" by Stanford Law professor Nora Freeman Engstrom, published in a recent issue of Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, analyzes the practices of "settlement mill" law firms — those that "advertise aggressively, sign a higher percentage of callers to contract, delegate more duties to non-lawyers, file fewer lawsuits, and take far fewer cases to … Continue Reading
What to do when legal vultures descend on you after a tragic accident
This morning I met with a family who suffered a tragic loss when a tractor trailer ran over the parents late in 2008. The mother was killed and the father seriously injured.
They got me involved a couple of weeks after the crash when one of the sons found me on the Internet and invited me to … Continue Reading
Scam artist with phony injury claim attempting to hustle lawyers in Atlanta
This morning I got a call from a man in ICU at one of our local hospitals. He said he has hit by a tractor trailer yesterday, and that he had two fractured femurs, a ruptured spleen, ruptured discs, crushed vertebra, etc., and asked if I could meet him at the hospital. … Continue Reading
I May Be Wrong
Ron Ellington, a professor at the University of Georgia Law School, recently spoke to the inductees of Phi Beta Kappa at UGA. His remarks deserve wider distribution. He points out how the smartest and wisest leaders of a previous generation were dead wrong on one big issue, and suggests how to recognize when we are … Continue Reading
Overcoming stereotyping of people — clients, opponents, witnesses, jurors, or folks on the street
I grew up in rural Alabama and Georgia in the 1950s and 1960s, and began my legal career under a DA who instructed us to always strike all blacks from juries. When I decided to prosecute a black-on-black rape case in 1978, just as I had a white-on-white rape case, some of the folks around … Continue Reading
