Atlanta Injury Attorney Blog

The Georgia legislature in Atlanta passed a sweeping change to Georgia Uninsured Motorist Insurance coverage law this past session and the law goes into effect on January 1, 2009. Most Georgia drivers should expect to see a mailing asking them to make their new selections this winter.

The change is significant and it can be confusing. Under the old scheme, you either chose to have Georgia uninsured motorist insurance coverage or you chose to waive it. If you did have it and you were injured in a car accident in Georgia, the first inquiry was “how much insurance does the other driver have?” Let’s assume the bad driver had the minimum limits of $25,000.00 and that you had $50,000.00 in Uninsured coverage. You would be entitled to seek the bad guys $25,000.00 and then another $25,000.00 from your own policy. (there are certain exceptions under which you could recover more but they involve situations where the insured had to repay certain Federal programs)

Under the new scheme as laid out in O.C.G.A. §33-7-11(b), the consumer can now make three basic choices. First you can chose to waive the coverage entirely. (bad idea) Second you can get Add-On type Uninsured Motorist Insurance Coverage. This is the best choice. Going back to the example above, if the bad guy has $25,000.00 and you have $50,000.00 of Add-On type Uninsured Motorist coverage then you can recover up to $75,000.00 for a serious injury.

Over the last six months, my law practice has received a staggering number of calls from clients that have been burned through the negligence of others. I have represented a Decatur, Georgia woman burned at a Stone Mountain spa by hot stone therapy that resulted in second degree burns and permanent scarring; a Gainesville Georgia toddler that received skin grafts after having hot grits spilled on her hands at day care; an Atlanta Georgia woman that was burned when the drive through attendant spilled coffee on her resulting in second degree burns and permanent scarring and just this past week I spoke with a woman whose 22 month old had to receive skin grafts after the gravy at Dairy Queen spilled on them.Put simply, these companies are actively ignoring the acute danger that scalding foods and liquids pose.Let’s talk about burns for a moment. First, it is important to know that adult skin is more that 4 times as thick as a child’s and therefore, a child will sustain a full thickness burn much more quickly than an adult. According to the National Burn Victim Foundation, it would take a liquid at 140 degrees 5 seconds on adult skin to cause a 3rd degree burn. On a child it would only take 1 second.

A First Degree burn is painful but only involves the out layer of the skin, the epidermis.

A Second Degree burn will show blistering and can get into the reticular layer of the dermis. They can result in scarring and can require grafts when they are partial thickness burns instead of superficial only.

An Atlanta man’s dog was attacked in Piedmont Park recently and his Chau died as a result. As detailed in this article, Dog Dies After Being Attacked At Piedmont Park by a local Atlanta TV Station, this dog was viciously attacked and ultimately died of its bite wounds. This issue has received a lot of press recently and there are strong arguments to be made by dog lovers who claim that it is unfair that all that can be sought under Georgia Law is the value of the animal.

Georgia Property law has long held that animals are chattels or property and when they are injured or killed, the value of the property is what the tortfeasor owes. Over the past month, several lawsuits have brought the issue to the forefront including ones regarding owners whose pets died as a result of melamine poisoning from Chinese dog food. These owners legitimately ask, how will will dissuade this type of behavior by manufacturers when the damages are $800 at worst.

When I represented Liberty Mutual Insurance, we defended several cases involving injuries to animals and I saw the other side of the issue too. If you accidentally run over the neighbors cat, do we want these cases going to suit over the “pain and suffering” of an animal that is impossible to know because they cannot talk? Do we as a society want lawsuits in our courts with multi-thousand dollar hip operations to fix animals injured in car accidents in Atlanta?

Assume that we tried or settled your car accident Injury case and now you are trying to determine what your actual recovery will be. Many of my clients call and ask, what will I have to pay in taxes? The answer is, probably nothing.

Compensation for pain and injuries is not gross income under the tax code. Generally speaking, unless you received money for punitive damages in Georgia or lost wages, there is no tax on the money recovered.Generally speaking, all income is taxed. So if you get income, it will be taxed. The key here is that injury settlements are compensation and not income, so there is no tax. The exceptions are if you got paid for lost income or punitive damages. The portions of your settlement allocated to those sections would be taxed. Under Treasury Regulation § 104(a)(2), damages received through verdict or settlement because of injuries is not income.

If you have any further questions, please give me a call.

A Floyd County Georgia woman was killed on I-75 in a collision with a tractor trailer while she was trying to change her tire. According to this article by Kim Sloan, Help Sought in Fatal Accident” the Serious Collision Reconstruction Team of the Georgia State Patrol is looking for eyewitnesses to the incident.Courtney Adcock, of Shannon, Georgia near Rome, Georgia was struck and killed by a passing tractor trailer in Whitfield County while helping a friend with a disabled vehicle on the highway at at night. The SCRT unit investigates all fatal accidents on state roads and they do an excellent job of examining the evidence to determine if the trucker was at fault for the collision. In this one, it sounds like they have not made a determination of blame yet and that is the reason for the search for eyewitnesses.

When I was defending tractor trailer companies, fully 30% of the fatal incidents I looked into had to do with disabled vehicles on the side of the road. Although it may seem obvious, many people with blown tires and other mechanical troubles chose to work on their vehicles or stay in their cars with tractor trailers whizzing by at 70 miles per hour and that is a terrible risk to run. The physics of an impact over 45 miles per hour are often fatal as passenger vehicles and SUVs are unable to absorb that kind of energy, especially when the mass moving at those speeds or above is close to the 80,000lb weight of many tractor trailers.

My plea to my readers is this; if something goes wrong with your car, do not stay with it on the side of the interstate. Gather your family and move as far off the roadway as possible and then call for help. The risks of staying next to a lane of travel are astronomical and please don’t even think of trying to change a tire on the interstate. Risking your life to save a $50.00 tire change fee with a wrecker service is a bad way to save money. I would rather go broke for lack of clients than see another senselessly wasted life. These accidents can be avoided with a little common sense.

As an injury lawyer, I am constantly litigating car accident cases where the insurance company disputes liability and tries to scare off the injured party. This often leads to the litigation of “swearing contest” cases where there are no eyewitnesses and the jury is left to judge the credibility of the parties without further aid. What is odd about this predicament is that there are increasing numbers of cameras and yet it is very difficult to get the police and DOT to produce the records.

As any Atlanta motorist knows, there are a series of video cameras covering not only all major highways, but increasingly we are seeing video and still cameras at major intersections. Through the years, I have sent Open Records Requests and Subpoenas and the response has been “we don’t record that information.” The lack of access to those videos leads to needless litigation by both sides to the dispute. There are situations where the trucking company was clearly in the wrong but litigated the case because of the chance that a jury would see it their way and when I was defending insurance companies, I handled many a case where the passenger car driver was clearly at fault and the video would have exonerated the tractor trailer driver.

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I ran across this editorial on an Albany Georgia television site about dog bites and vicious dog attacks. The author tackled a difficult issue: what controls should there be on the ownership of certain breeds of dogs including Pitt Bulls, Dobermans and some strains of German Shepherd. As a dog bite lawyer, I have litigated enough cases to know that some of those breeds can be very aggressive to humans and can cause serious injuries when they are. According to the article, there are a number of States that are considering a ban on certain breeds.

The most interesting proposal on the piece is the bond proposal and I will tell you why it is meritorious. I have a client that was in his own yard when he was attacked by the neighbor down the road’s unrestrained Pit Bull. The County where the attack occurred had leash laws and the owner was clearly in the wrong. The problem is, the owner had allegedly allowed their homeowner’s insurance to lapse. We are now litigating that issue in Court but it appears that there will be no insurance to cover the matter. It is frustrating to watch someone’s life turned on its ear because another Georgian ignored the leash laws.

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The number of bike riders in Buckhead and the Metro Atlanta area is increasing and so is the number of riders being hit by cars. As I was mulling over whether to ride my 10 year old Mongoose Trail Bike to work to help the environment, I ran across this Atlanta Journal Constitution article by Thomas Stinson entitled “Rookie and rusty cyclists hit streets … and hospitals” published in late July. Mr. Stinson profiles a local rider that ended up with both elbows being fractured for his efforts at reducing his carbon signature.

All joking aside, bike riders have long know that Atlanta traffic is notoriously unfriendly to riders. There are very few dedicated lanes and none on the major thoroughfares. When I was a younger lawyer, I used to ride from Midtown Atlanta down to the Public Defenders office on Peachtree Street downtown and remember getting nailed by several errant motorists. The only long term cure to the problem is oddly, more cyclists. The more common the practice is, the better motorists will be at avoiding collisions with them.

As you might imagine, injuries are way up due to the flood of riders. The best thing you can do as a rider is to wear your helmet, ride in the daylight and make sure that your Atlanta uninsured motorist lawyer is on par with your liability coverage. If you are hit by a car while riding your bike in Atlanta, Marietta or Sandy Springs and you suffer from an injury, be sure you work with an attorney that has handled bicycling cases before as their are nuances to them that a generic lawyer will not appreciate.

I was saddened another pointless loss of life caused by a tractor trailer crash. Here, the family was struck when the tractor trailer crashed into them after cresting a hill. This article details the sad outcome of this collision on Friday. In the unattributed article in the local paper, it states that the trucker crested a hill on a rural highway and plowed into several vehicles, also striking a grandmother standing on the side of the road to walk her grandchildren home.

What infuriates me about this is how preventable this collision was. Georgia tractor trailer drivers operate on these roads on a daily basis and know exactly what time of day school buses pass through the area. They should know better than to come flying over a hill top. That area frequently has slow moving farm equipment, not to mention school buses. We can only hope that the trucker has his license revoked and the injured heal up. Lawyers that deal with trucking cases can only shake their heads in knowing sadness because we see the same inattention leading to tragedy again and again.

I am going to be producing a series of video observations on handling certain aspects of casualty claims over the next few months. Here is the first of them.