wrongful death

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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…

When a family member is killed or seriously injured in a crash with a tractor trailer, a normal human instinct is to wait a decent interval before consulting an attorney. Then one may be inclined to take one’s time talking with a hometown lawyer who handles an occasional car wreck case along with divorces, criminal cases and real estate closings.  Meanwhile, trucking companies and their insurance companies are busy burying incriminating evidence.

A recent case in our office illustrates the importance of striking hard and fast to preserve evidence. While a truck crash victim was in ICU at the…

Rear underride crash test

Death by decapitation due to trailer underride  can  result when tractor trailers park on the roadside.

The kneejerk response of most people seeing pictures of these incidents is to simply blame the dead person. But it’s not that simple. When an innocent passenger is killed or maimed, some portion of fault is normally apportioned to the driver who departed from the traffic lane for whatever reason. But it is necessary to also examine a trucking company’s decision to violate safety standards by parking a big rig on the side of the road.…

In handling Georgia wrongful death cases in which the victim had very little conscious survival time, we often have to address the question whether to make a claim for pain and suffering before death.

In Georgia, wrongful death cases may include two separate claims.

First is the wrongful death claim for “full value of the life” which belongs to family members designated by O.C.G.A. § 51-4-2 – spouse, children or parents. Recovery for the “full value of the life” includes both economic and intangible components and is not subject to claim of the decedent’s creditors and medical providers.

Second…

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 children were riding a bus to elementary school every day, like most parents I trusted the school bus driver to deliver them safely to school and back to our neighborhood. Usually that is what happens as school buses are generally considered the safest means of transporting children to and from school.

But occasionally children are seriously injured or killed in the process of being transported by school buses. We have successfully handled some of those cases.

School bus injury cases are not the same as car wreck cases. Lawyers handling those need to know the legal wrinkles unique…

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.

No words can ever be adequate when a young child is killed. For the child’s parents, grandparents and other family members, it is like having a hole punched in the heart. That wound never really heals. For parents, in the words of Willie Nelson, it’s something you don’t get over but you get through.  The tasks of mourning after death of a family member are all too familiar.

This week in Paulding County, GA, there was a car crash in which a 20-year-old driver was distracted by dropping his cell phone and water bottle. Leaning over to retrieve…

An approaching driver’s view of a tractor trailer pulling from breakdown lane into traffic in the dark

A tractor-trailer pulled from the highway shoulder in front of an approaching SUV on I-95 in Jasper County, SC, just north of Savannah, about 9:30 PM Wednesday night, August 8, 2018. The impact killed Raymond Jackson, Jr., driver of the approaching vehicle, a 1999 Ford Expedition. This happened about 3 miles north of the Georgia-South Carolina line, between the Savannah River and Hardeeville.

Initial news reports  of this crash involving vehicles emerging from Georgia do not identify…

A chain reaction crash involving four big rig tractor trailers on I-285 near Camp Creek Parkway in south Fulton County, GA, killed a woman in a passenger car on June 19, 2018.

According to the Georgia State Patrol, A tractor-trailer was traveling northbound when it struck three other big rigs and the rear of a car, pushing the car underneath another tractor-trailer.

News photos showed that at least one truck’s cab was badly crushed and the roof of the passenger car was caved in.

In addition to the one fatality, five others were taken to Grady Memorial Hospital. It…