The femur (thigh bone), extending from the hip to the knee, is the strongest and longest
bone in the human body. Because it is so strong, in relatively young people it usually requires a great deal of kinetic force to break the femur shaft. That often happens in truck, car and motorcycle crashes. In older people with weaker bones, however, a fall may be sufficient to fracture of the femur, especially the neck of the femur where it joins the pelvis.

In our decades of representing badly injured Georgians, we have handled numerous femur fracture cases. In

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

Wrongful death claims in Georgia are necessarily emotional. When a family member is killed by someone else’s negligence, grieving survivors often have mixed feelings about filing a wrongful death lawsuit for that death. Certainly no amount of money can bring the departed loved one back. However, a monetary award is the only way that civil law has to recognize the value of the life, compensate for the death, and penalize the party at fault.

Skillful legal advocacy in a wrongful death case can generate funds to care for the family’s real needs and with which the family may appropriately memorialize

You are a great lawyer in your area of practice. You are also smart enough to know when a big case may require prompt action outside your comfort zone.

Just as a trial lawyer may not feel comfortable handling a complex real estate, divorce or estate planning matter, a great lawyer in those fields may not want to risk a client’s rights by trying to figure out how to handle a catastrophic truck crash case.

When you get a call from a friend or client that a family member has been killed or seriously injured in a crash with a

negligent hiring warning signOften in a catastrophic truck crash, the trucking company admits that the truck driver was negligent and was in the course and scope of employment. That is a smart tactic to attempt to focus all blame on two seconds of driver negligence rather than months or years of corporate conduct including negligent hiring of the driver. They may get by with it because of a Court of Appeals decision that bars claims for the company’s corporate negligence that are “merely duplicative” of respondeat superior agency liability for negligence of an employee. Hospital Authority of Valdosta/Lowndes County v. Fender, 342

When my father’s generation came home from World War II, many of them carried psychological scars about which they kept quiet. My parents married young, at 21 and 18, the week he returned from combat in 1945. My mother said that dad fought the air war over Europe every night in his sleep for at least a decade. The longer-term ramifications of that played out in many ways throughout his life. As he lay dying over six decades later, he began to tell me for the first time the war experiences that had haunted him most through his life.

Recently,

Cruise ships are like floating cities with thousands of passengers on board. Usually a lot more fun than the typical workaday city, but probably no less likely to involve accidents and injuries.

Cruise ship lines cannot guarantee that no one will get hurt aboard, but they do have a responsibility to prevent dangerous conditions on board that can cause serious injury to its passengers. When a cruise ship accident occurs because of poor maintenance, incompetent or  improperly trained employees, inadequate safety equipment or emergency precautions, the cruise  line can be held accountable.

Cruise ship tickets typically have a provision that

Bankruptcy bad for personal injury plaintiffsPeople who have suffered a serious personal injury, and families that have lost the breadwinner due to wrongful death, may be  tempted to file for protection of a Bankruptcy Court. However, we  warn clients that it is generally a very bad idea. Why is that?

Upon filing of a petition for bankruptcy, control of the personal injury action passes to the bankruptcy trustee for benefit of creditors of the injury victim. 11 U.S.C.A. § 541(a)(1).

Failure to list an injury claim as an asset in a bankruptcy may result in the injury claim being barred under the equitable doctrine of

Douglas County, Georgia, where I graduated from high school and returned for a few years as a young lawyer, is known as a very conservative venue. However, Douglas Countians do not lack the ability to do the right thing when the facts call for it.

Today’s news includes a report that the State Court of Douglas County awarded $700,000 damages against the owner of a pit bull that mauled an 8 year old neighbor child. Before that incident, the owner had been cited at least 10 times over a four-month period and seriously attacked another neighbor in her driveway.

The

While my "day job" involves representing individuals and families in serious injury and wrongful death cases across Georgia, part-time public service is also important.  This doesn’t hurt clients, as the time devoted to public service is counterbalanced over time by the exposure and insights gained. 

The following article appears in today’s Fulton County Daily Report:

Deal fills last empty seats on Criminal Justice Reform Council

All 13 members of the Special Council on Criminal Justice Reform, a panel of legislators, judges and attorneys charged with studying the state’s courts and recommending ways to improve them, have now been named.

Gov. Nathan Deal’s office issued a statement Monday afternoon outlining his appointees, as well as those of the lieutenant governor, speaker of the House and state Supreme Court chief justice.

The members chosen by Deal are his executive counsel D. Todd Markle (to serve in place of the governor); Douglas County District Attorney J. David McDade; Judicial Qualifications Commission member Linda Evans—who is also the wife of former Georgia Republican Party general counsel J. Randolph Evans; and State Bar President-elect Kenneth L. Shigley.

Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle tapped Senate Ethics Committee Chairman John Crosby, R-Tifton; Senate Judiciary Chairman Bill Hamrick, R-Carrollton; and Senate Urban Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Ramsey Sr., D-Decatur.

House Speaker David E. Ralston, R-Blue Ridge, appointed Rep. Mary Margaret Oliver, D-Decatur, an attorney; Rep. Jay Powell, R-Camilla, an attorney and former mayor; and House Special Rules Committee Chairman Willie Talton, R-Warner Robins.

On May 6, Chief Justice Carol Hunstein affirmed that she will sit on the panel and also named Atlanta Judicial Circuit Superior Court Judge Ural D. L. Glanville, a former Fulton County magistrate, and Waycross Judicial Circuit Superior Court Judge Michael P. Boggs, a former Democratic state representative.

Deal signed House Bill 265, which created the special council, last month in his son’s courtroom in Hall County. The council must report its findings and recommendations to next year’s General Assembly.

“With this council now in place, it is our hope to uncover new approaches to make Georgia communities safer while increasing offender accountability, improving rehabilitation efforts and lowering costs,” Deal said in a written statement. “While this effort should ultimately uncover strategies that will save taxpayer dollars, we are first and foremost attacking the human costs of a society with too much crime, too many people behind bars, too many children growing up without a much-needed parent and too many wasted lives.”

Deal, Hunstein and others already have suggested that the council should consider the effectiveness of accountability courts, such as DUI, drug and mental health court programs that offer alternative sentencing and rehabilitation programs for non-violent offenders, as well as giving judges more discretion at sentencing and thus eliminating some mandatory minimums.

Several of the council members attended a one-day conference on May 6 hosted by the American Bar Association in Washington where they heard strategies from other states that have recently embarked on reform initiatives.