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Safety records matter, especially in the trucking industry in which 80,000 vehicles share the highway with your family and mine. If a trucking company builds a deplorable safety record there can be consequences in terms of fines, suspension, loss of operating authority, insurance rates, etc.

So what happens when a persistently unsafe trucking company encounters the natural and logical consequences of unsafe operation?

Too often in our law practice, we see cases involving newly authorized trucking companies with largely the same officers, owners, equipment and personnel as an earlier company that had a bad record. “Reincarnated” carriers, also known as…

In handling wrongful death and life insurance claims for clients, I learned years ago that blood alcohol tests after a person dies may not be reliable. Due to postmortem fermentation when a body is not kept cool after death, there can be “false positive” blood alcohol reports up to 0.20 grams/% — 2 ½ times the legal limit of 0.08 for drivers and boaters in Georgia.

Years ago, I was hired by the widow of a retired Army officer who drowned on a fishing trip. A life insurance policy excluded coverage if the insured was intoxicated at the time of…

Most long haul truck drivers are decent, hardworking folks who chose truck driving as a way to support their families even though it keeps them on the road away from home most of the time.

At my childhood home in rural Alabama, a lot of my friends’ dads were over the road truck drivers because it was one of the few ways a guy living there, without a college education, could make enough to keep the family in the rural community they loved.

Paid by the mile and under pressure from employers and shippers to make “just in time deliveries,”…

Folks, this post has nothing to do with law.  Appreciating the simple joys of a Southern summer, I just want to share a video someone posted of the “Shigley Hole,” an old swimming hole on land my great-grandparents homesteaded in the late 1800s near Little River Canyon in northeast Alabama.

I can just imagine my late grandfather and his siblings jumping off those rocks and plunging into that pool as children well over a century ago.

Enjoy some down time with you family this summer. If you want to find the trail to the “Shigley Hole” see http://www.secretfalls.com/hiking/desoto-scout-trail.

Recent news stories of tragedies when young children were left in hot cars have generated passionate debate in metro Atlanta and across the country.child asleep in car seat

Certainly any parent who intentionally leaves a child in a hot car to suffer and die should be prosecuted and harshly punished. As a former prosecutor, I find myself wondering whether, if I were the District Attorney in Cobb County,  I would seek a sentence harsher than life without parole. Certainly I envy any prosecutor who tries such a case with strong forensic science to back up the charge.

Some people cannot understand how any…

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has reported that the Twitter profile of Kevin Roper, the Wal-Mart truck driver who had been awake 24 straight hours before a fatal crash in New Jersey, had included the phrase, “move or get hit.”

This illustrates what my friend Andy Young in Ohio pointed out to me last year about the practical values of Twitter in trucking accident litigation.

A Wal-Mart public relations spokesperson was quoted saying, “It is our belief that Mr. Roper was operating within the federal hours of service regulations.” I don’t know what the evidence will show regarding driver logs…

The Georgia Supreme Court on June 16, 2014,  in the case of Department of Corrections v. Couch, held that attorney fees awards for plaintiffs under the Officer of Judgment / Offer of Settlement statute (O.C.G.A. § 9-11-68) cannot be based solely upon the plaintiff’s contingent fee agreement. Just what would be sufficient remains somewhat unclear.

The Supreme Court reversed in part a Court of Appeals decision holding that the contingent fee was a sufficient basis for the fee award as no fee was actually incurred until the contingency occurred, that is when the tort recovery is obtained.…

On Monday, General Motors recalled another 3.16 million vehicles built between 2000 and 2014. This was because those vehicles have ignition switches that “may inadvertently move out of the ‘run’ position if the key is carrying extra weight and experiences some jarring event.”

That comes on top of last weeks’ defective products recall in which every Chevrolet Camaro built since General Motors re-launched the car in 2010- about 511,508 cars globally because drivers could accidentally turn the car off with their knees.

This was the same problem at the recall of the deadly Chevy Cobalt last month.

As in most…

A Georgia tractor trailer driver for Wal-Mart who had been continuously awake for 24 years caused a deadly pile-up early Saturday morning in New Jersey.  Although details are still emerging about the crash, we do know a Georgia truck driver is charged in the New Jersey crash that killed comic James McNair, 62, of Peekskill, New York.

Kevin Roper, 35, of Jonesboro, Georgia, was operating a truck “on the New Jersey Turnpike without having slept in excess of 24 hours,” according to the complained filed in Middlesex County Court. Roper failed to see traffic slowing in front of…

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…