July 2016

georgia-county-mapWhen younger lawyers ask me for advice on their cases, among my first questions are, “What is the venue?” and “Who is the judge?”   Often the response is, “Uh, I’ll get back to you.”

Facts and law are vitally important. But the identity of the decision makers – judge and jury – are crucial too. While phenomenal verdicts may occur in conservative rural counties in great cases, and the plaintiff will likely recover nothing in a rotten case even in the most generous venue, in average cases the identify of judge and county are crucial. For example, in a fatal

Virtues

Versions of this article were published by Ken Shigley as a president’s column in the Georgia Bar Journal (August 2011) and as the chairman’s column in the American Association for Justice Motor Vehicle Collision, Highway & Premises Liability Section Newsletter (Spring 2016).


James[1] had great unrealized potential. Son of a minister in another Southern state, he won admission to an Ivy League university but washed out during his first year and went home to complete college and law school. A marvelous story teller, his closing arguments could hold juries spellbound. But his cleverness was so unrestrained by mere

A lawyer's calling
A lawyer’s calling

Learn to do right; seek justice.
Defend the oppressed.
Take up the cause of the fatherless;
plead the case of the widow.

– Isaiah 1:17

It was a Sunday in December 1971, at my grandparents’ home in Mentone, Alabama, halfway down the hundred-mile-long plateau from Chattanooga to Gadsden that is Lookout Mountain. Within a mile radius were the simple homes, church, school and country graveyard intimately entwined with several generations of our family.

At the “children’s table” off the kitchen with my cousins, I could faintly hear the conversation of our elders at

child carseatOnly a monstrous parent would intentionally leave a child in a hot car for hours to suffer and die. While that is the allegation in a pending murder case in Georgia, even if proven true it would be aberrational.

But every summer we hear of a rash of incidents in which a distracted, multitasking parents, usually functioning outside their normal routine, forgets a child sleeping in the back seat. The results are tragic — death or brain damage due to heat stroke. On average, 37 children die in this way in the US every year.

It can happen

mediation_explainedHaving served as the neutral mediator in hundreds of cases as well as the advocate for clients in hundreds of other mediations, I have come to see both the strengths and weaknesses of this method of settling personal injury and wrongful death cases.

Judges love to refer cases for mediation because every case that settles is one less case the judge has to deal with on the court docket. It simply saves the judge a lot of time and work. Perhaps the chances of court ordered mediation succeeding could be improved with a little more court involvement in setting up