TV advertising law firmsLawyers and paralegals who had previously worked at personal injury firms that advertise heavily on television, billboards and bus placards have told me many tales about the business model of those firms.

They have told me how lawyers may be responsible for 600 cases at a time, with 100 or more in litigation.

They have told me how young lawyers in some of those firms are paid only for work on cases they settle before suit, so they have an extreme vested interest in taking whatever an insurance adjuster is willing to offer at that early stage, selling the client’s

Independent contractor shell game

Effective representation of the plaintiff in a case of serious injury or wrongful death often requires that counsel overcome an “independent contractor” defense.  That frequently involves solving a shell game of independent contractor business relationships used to evade financial responsibility. Sometimes lawyers refer to this as getting “beyond the monkey to the organ grinder.”

The general rule is that a defendant is not liable for the negligence of an independent contractor, but there are many exceptions.  While not comprehensive, this paper seeks to outline major theories for overcoming the independent contractor defense.

  1. Interstate Motor Carriers.

Prior to 1956, interstate motor

bright-ideaNo matter how many years a lawyer has practiced, there is no end to the need for exposure to bright new ideas from the best lawyers around the United States.

Over the past year, I had the opportunity to serve as chair of the Motor Vehicle Collision, Highway and Premises Liability Section of the American Association for Justice (AAJ). The largest section of AAJ, it encompasses the work of most “meat and potatoes” personal injury and wrongful death lawyers in America.

The section includes over 2,500 trial lawyers in all 50 states and specialized litigation groups on trucking litigation, bus

video iphoneWhen I started practicing law in 1977, hardly anyone but TV stations had video cameras, which at the time were heavy, tripod-mounted and extremely expensive. The idea of being able to play a video recording of an event in court would have seemed like science fiction if anyone had been so fanciful as to suggest  it.

But today investigation of any serious injury or wrongful death case involves a hunt for video recordings from a variety of sources. We hardly could not have imagined this in my early days as a prosecutor.

In 1983, the first consumer camcorders began to

Ken Shigley of Atlanta, who was president of the State Bar of Georgia in 2011-12, is now chair of the largest practice area section in the American Association for Justice (AAJ), the national organization of plaintiffs’ trial attorneys. Shigley took the helm of the Motor Vehicle Collision, Highway & Premises Liability Section of AAJ and the organization’s annual convention in Montreal on July 14, 2015.

ken_shigley_coverWith over 2,500 members nationwide, the section includes specialized litigation practice groups on Trucking Litigation, Bus Litigation, Traumatic Brain Injury, Spinal Cord Injury, Motorcycle Litigation, Bicycle Litigation, Resort Torts Litigation and

hallway

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When you are traveling away from home, you want to stay somewhere you feel secure. The last thing you expect while traveling is to stay at a hotel or motel that is unsafe because of hazardous conditions or unsavory characters on the premises.

All too often, criminals enter hotel and motel premises due to management’s failure to take reasonable measures to protect their guests. If the owner of the establishment has reason to expect a crime to be committed on its property, generally due to prior incidents on the property or in

It was a Friday evening in Gainesville Georgia. Three-year-old twins John and Koraleigh were in their grandparents’ front yard with teenage brothers and their girlfriends. The teens had brought a television from inside and were planning a “movie under the stars.” Mom was at her home next door but assumed the children were being watched as she could hear their laughing and playing. Now she says, “Had I known, I would have never assumed, never have assumed.”

Like many a three-year-old, John had slipped past the fence behind the grandparents’ house and through the gate. Although the gate door was

Many prospective clients in serious personal injury and wrongful death claims ask questions about legal fees and litigation expenses in handling their cases. As an Atlanta personal injury trial attorney handling serious injury and death cases across Georgia, and as an individual who remembers very well what it is like to be flat broke and in debt, I am very sensitive to those questions.

The short answer is that in handling personal injury and wrongful death cases for individuals and families, I do not require any money up front from clients whose cases I accept. I evaluate the merits of

“You snooze, you lose.” The time limit to file a lawsuit in court for personal injury or wrongful death in Georgia is two years. But the time to present a notice of claim to a city government when one is hurt or killed by a municipal government’s negligence or public nuisance — whether due to negligent operation of a city vehicle, dangerous conditions on city property, failure to replace a missing traffic sign or whatever —  is only six months.

O.C.G.A. § 36-33-5 requires that notice be provided to a municipality within 6 months of the  claim. We lawyers

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