A fiery crash on I-95 at Richmond Hill near Savannah in Chatham County on July 26th caused the wrongful death of a woman and sent her husband to a specialized burn unit in Augusta. It appears all too typical of other truck accident cases we have handled throughout Georgia, including those in the Savannah area and along I-95 and I-16.

According to news reports, as a southbound tractor trailer approached the exit the driver moved from the center lane to the right lane. Approaching a line of cars slowed in traffic, the truck driver then tried to get

truck2“TMI” for “too much information” is a common, joking expression for overdisclosure of personal details in conversation or social media.

Now it appears that trucking companies with bad safety records yelled “TMI!” loudly enough, and spent enough money on “K” Street lobbyists and campaign contributions to impede public access to their safety records.

Five years ago, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) launched a new trucking safety initiative called the Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) program.  At the heart of this program was a Safety Measurement System (SMS) designed to analyze violations from inspections and crash data. The idea was

If we have a nearly unique niche in our law practice it is the search for vastly more insurance for catastrophic truck crash cases where the visible insurance coverage is terribly inadequate. Other law firms — in Georgia and elsewhere — call us in to handle that part of a wrongful death or catastrophic personal injury case resulting from a tractor trailer crash.

Alchemist-Cropped

The approaches to finding significant additional insurance coverage are not really legal alchemy or voodoo.  But they do involve a critical knowledge of subtle complexity gathered over 38 years in law practice that does not appear in

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As Georgia faces the prospect of a winter storm this week, we also face the prospect of truck wrecks caused by violations of an important trucking safety rule. Last year, for example, a Georgia DOT spokesman was quoted saying that every major accident in Georgia’s “Snowmageddon 2014” ice storm involved a tractor trailer.

The safety rule throughout the United States is that trucking companies and their drivers are required to exercise “extreme caution” in conditions adversely affecting traction and visibility.

truck on ice Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulation 392.14 which provides that, “Extreme

When a commercial truck driver is killed or seriously injured due to the negligence of the driver of a smaller vehicle, it is important to find out whether the insurance policy on the commercial truck includes uninsured / underinsured (UM/UIM) coverage. If so, that UM/UIM coverage would be available to compensate the truck driver or his/her family.

Getting that UM/UIM coverage information from the trucking company and its insurer prior to litigation can be tricky. Official Code of Georgia § 33-3-28 does require pre-suit disclosure of insurance coverage information by insureds and insurers. It provides, in part: “Every insurer providing

Georgia State Capitol 1904

The Georgia Chamber of Commerce held a forum on tort reform last week. According to today’s Daily Report, Rep. Rich Golick, chair of the House Non-Civil Judiciary Committee who is a corporate attorney for Allstate Insurance Company in his “day job,” told the attendees:

“Go talk to the plaintiffs bar. … See if consensus can be struck,” he said. “I beseech you — it’s the middle of August and there is a run-off and a general election — now is a great time for quiet conversation in quiet rooms where consensus

CW Transport, LLC is a four-truck garbage hauling company in metro Atlanta. Though small in size, it is large in vehicle maintenance and unsafe driving violations. That bad record culminated in an incident in which the transmission parts from a CW Transport truck flew off the truck, across the median of I-20 and through the windshield of a Chevy Blazer.

That flying transmission part sliced off the arm of a young mother, Jemeka Malone, and killed her 8-year-old son, Cameron McIlwain. Ironically, the husband and father, Quantaine Malone, is himself a long-haul truck driver. This incident was featured in the

ABCO Transportation, Inc., a refrigerated freight haulder based in Dade City, Florida, has had for several years an unsatisfactory record of unsafe driving violations with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. When a trucking company has a record as bad as ABCO, often there are issues of management turning a blind eye to safety, in my experience as a trucking trial attorney.

ABCO’s poor safety record culminated July 2012 when an ABCO truck driver ran a red light on Thornton Road in Douglas County, Georgia, causing a tragic crash that took the lives of two AutoTrader.com employees and injured

A tractor trailer’s excessive speed in a curve was blamed for the big rig tipping over May 2012, killing a woman en route to pick up the diploma of her daughter who had graduated from high school earlier that week, according to a report by Robert Salonga in the San Jose Mercury News.

In San Jose, California, taking an exit on I-680, Hieu Huynh was  riding in a Toyota Camry driven by her daughter. The daughter saw a truck coming and tapped her brakes to create some space.  She didn’t see the rig tipping over, but her mother did. 

In the past 10 days this plaintiffs’ trial lawyer, in the capacity of State Bar of Georgia president, has co-presided over a joint meeting of the State Bar Executive Committee and the Georgia Supreme Court, had a joint press conference with the Attorney General of Georgia and spoke at a lunch meeting that included general counsels of some of Georgia’s leading corporations. In 75 days, I will complete my term as State Bar president and get back to practicing law full-time.

I do not expect any favoritism from anyone as cases must be decided on their merits.  But if a