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Top 100 Personal Injury Lawyers
Top 100 Personal Injury Lawyers

Kenneth L. Shigley, Sr., of Atlanta, Georgia, has been named one of America’s Top 100 Personal Injury Attorneys ® for 2020.

Selection to America’s Top 100 Personal Injury Attorneys® is by invitation only and is reserved to identity the nation’s most exceptional litigators for high-value personal injury, catastrophic injury, wrongful death, product liability, and medical malpractice matters.
To be considered for selection, an attorney must focus more than 50% of their active legal practice on personal injury, catastrophic injury, wrongful death, product liability, and/or medical malpractice matters. These minimum…

On a warm October afternoon two years ago, wearing one of the yarmulkes that Jewish funeral directors provide for non-Jewish attendees, I helped shovel red Georgia dirt into the open grave of an old client and friend. As I did so, I pondered the unanswered question whether long-term side effects of her food poisoning a quarter century earlier had contributed to her death after years of internal organ illnesses.

A recent decision of the Georgia Supreme Court on what is required to get a food poisoning case to a jury brought that grim saga back to mind.

In Patterson v.

chapman.0830 - 08/29/05 - A Supreme Court headed by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has questions for Chapman University Law School professor John Eastman as he and California Attorney General Bill Lockyer argue the 1905 ''Lochner v. State of New York'' case during a re-enactment Monday afternoon at Chapman University. (Credit: Mark Avery/Orange County Register/ZUMA Press)
Justice Antonin Scalia

The one time I met the late Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, he talked about how much he loved hunting quail. It is good that he was able to spend his last day in this mortal realm on a quail hunt.

Back in 2012, when I was president of the State Bar of Georgia, Justice Scalia spoke at a dinner I attended at the World War II museum in New Orleans, along with Buck Ruffin who was then unopposed to become president-elect of the Georgia Bar, and our wives. David Gambrell, a former Georgia…

Every few weeks or months, we see news stories about breach of data security in medical centers or health insurance companies. Most people hearing that probably just shrug, figuring it’s not as bad as breach of credit card or other financial data. Earlier this year, for example, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Georgia revealed that as many as 80 million customers of the Anthem Blue Cross had their account information stolen. My family and I were among them.

Most phackereople do not realize that breaches of medical data privacy can be just as expensive as a financial date breach

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 A hot summer afternoon at the pool offers rest and relaxation perfect for the season — cool water, a relaxing chaise chair, and a cold glass of lemonade by your side. However, pleasure of a pool must be coupled with prudence in  swimming pool safety due to the risks of drowning , near drowning and spinal cord injuries due to diving accidents.

While I can enjoy hanging out at the pool on a summer day as much as anyone, I can’t help thinking of the families I have helped after tragic swimming pools injuries.

The saddest story in my experience…

As we ramp up capacity to handle more and larger cases of wrongful death and catastropic personal injury, and prepare to move into new office space in the Buckhead area of Atlanta later in the summer, I am pleased to welcome two new staff members:

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A year goes by awfully fast when you’re working two full-time jobs. With only 81 days remaining in my term as State Bar president, I look forward to the ability to just focus on my clients and my law practice.  For now, however, I find myself working late into the night to catch up on case files, juggling a very complicated schedule and returning calls from the road at odd hours and a little slowly.

I believe all the networking in the bar presidency will strengthen my work for clients after my term is finished.  While no one can or…

Eulogy for My Father
Robert Nelson Shigley, June 25, 1924 – May 27, 2010

Mentone Community Church
Mentone, Alabama
May 30, 2010

Daddy was born a few hundreds yards from here in a farm house built around a pioneer log cabin.

It was a time before paved roads or electricity came to the mountain.

His grandmother Melissa’s family, the Keiths, were among the first settlers on this mountain after the cruel expulsion of the Cherokee.

His grandfather, Frank Shigley, came here from Michigan at 18, in 1883, after a barn fire injured his lungs, was one of the first Wesleyan …

In September 1995, I explained the Internet ("It was developed for national defense and  used to be called the Arpanet"), email and web sites to a couple of hundred lawyers at a seminar at St. Simons Island.  Since this was before anyone had Power Point or LED projectors, I used transparencies on an overhead projector to show folks what I was talking about. None of them had ever been online.

I explained that at that time there were about 40 law firms in the United States that had web sites, and most of those were clustered around Silicon Valley in California.  Surely no one would ever pick a lawyer on the basis of a web site, but just for laughs I might give it a shot. Everyone laughed.

The following spring, in 1996, I set up a crude web site, knowing nothing about search engines or how to optimize them. After a while I bought some software in a box at CompUSA and began designing my web sites myself in order to have flexibility and control. For about four years I had the field of personal injury law web marketing in Georgia pretty much to myself.

Of course, I began to get invitations to speak to bar groups and tell how to do it. Flattered to be invited, I complied.

Unfortunately for me, there were often young lawyers who had never tried a case sitting in the back of the room, taking careful notes. A few weeks later I would see new web sites popping up in which those kids sometimes practically cloned my web site.

A few years ago I decided to outsource the technical work of maintaining a web site so I could focus on content.  At that point I launched what I think was the first lawyer blog in Georgia.

Sure enough, within a year other lawyers and law firms in Georgia started their own blogs. Now it seems almost every lawyer with a checkbook has a slick looking web site and blog.

I am constantly amused at how much some of the web site development companies charge lawyers who know nothing about this stuff.  It’s highway robbery. I should have started a web site development company back in ’96.

What’s next? I’m not talking.

My daughter is passionate about running. While she may never make the Olympics, she is fully committed in college cross country. She runs marathons and half marathons every chance she gets, just for fun. Last year she incorporated this into a piece of art that we are having framed to hang either at home or in my office:

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.

Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.

It doesn’t matter if you are a lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you better be running.

Last Monday at Bonita Springs, Florida, I spoke at an international conference of medical researchers on neurofibromatosis, the condition that made my daughter deaf.  Other than a handful of patient family representatives who were invited to provide a human perspective, the participants were research scientists and medical specialists from top unitiversties and research centers around the world.  I could understand little of what most of them said, but I hope they could understand me.

I pointed out that the time from Pearl Harbor to VJ Day was 3 years, 8 months and 6 days. If World War II could be…