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In Georgia, there is a two year statute of limitations within which your injury lawyer must file your lawsuit for injuries, with a few exceptions. Over the past few weeks a number of clients have called with the two anniversary fast approaching. Waiting until the last minute to file an injury claim is a very risky proposition. If your injury attorney has not filed suit yet I cannot emphasize enough how dangerous this is.

Now it is true that there are many good reasons to be patient in the pursuit of your injury case. If your medical care is continuing for instance, it would be foolish to attempt to try or settle your case in the middle of the care. However, as the first anniversary of the car accident passes you should have a talk with your lawyer to decide what the strategy is. If your medical care is at an end, the only thing you should have to wait for is the medical records. Once they are in, your attorney should be able to draft the demand within one week and the insurance carrier will usually respond within 45 days. The negotiations will take another 2 weeks, but at that point, you will have a good idea of whether the carrier is going to make a fair offer or if you will need to litigate the case to obtain the fair value.

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I see hundreds of cases a year and we are getting more and more Georgia notices of medical liens. This past week I noticed that we have received several Georgia Medical Lien notices filed by Feiler and Associates and Clinton Harkins on behalf of their medical provider clients against potential recoveries by my clients. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but the problem is these clients all have health insurance! If you get notice of one of these liens being filed and you have health insurance, you need to call an Atlanta injury lawyer, immediately.

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When you are injured in a car accident in Georgia and there are serious medical bills and the at fault driver only has minimum insurance coverages, the availability of Georgia Uninsured and Underinsured Motorist Insurance is a major issue. As you may recall from my post a few weeks back, we were hopeful that the Court of Appeals would extend the logic of the Toomer and Thurman decisions to hold that having to pay off hospital liens in Georgia would have a positive effect on a persons ability to access their UM coverage. That has not happened.

As I explained earlier, for car crashes from before 1/1/2009 in Georgia, car accident lawyers are often faced with situations where their clients only have $25,000.00 in Georgia Underinsured motorist coverage and the at-fault party has $25,000.00 in liability coverage. Barring other insurance sources, the clients were left with having to settle for the available limits of $25,000.00 and no access to their UM. Georgia Appellate Courts held though in Toomer and Thurman that mandatory payment language in Federal Law for Medicare and Federal Worker’s Compensation claims would allow that same person to access their Underinsured coverage.

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Lawyers find that they have to file suit more often to obtain fair compensation for their clients than in years past. Years ago when I represented insurance carriers for injury claims in Georgia as a defense lawyer, I found that most of them had a fundamentally sound philosophy. They would pay for valid claims and they would fight exaggerated claims.Due to the success of the big three insurers with their deny, delay, defend philosophy, insurers that formerly operated in a reasonable manner seem to have adopted a “me too” approach. I am noticing that the adjusters handling cases prior to suit are less seasoned and more likely to make the standard silly arguments like “we reduced the bills because they are unreasonable” and “your client did not follow up until 3 weeks after the hospital.” Many of these arguments sound fine on the phone but the insurers know that in trial they just don’t fly.

So, the question becomes, what to do about getting fair value for my clients when they are seriously injured? The answer is that more often than not, we file suit. In a recent case I handled for a client in Dunwoody, Georgia he had a rear end collision with an insured where there was around $2300.00 in damage to his VW. He went to the hospital that day and was ultimately diagnosed with a herniated lumbar disc. As with any moderate damage case, the insurer blew off the demand letters from a prior lawyer and offered him $5,000.00 claiming that the injury pre-existed the crash and that the property damage was too low to cause a disc herniation.

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Georgians injured in a car crash have to be on their toes when it comes to hospital billing departments. Most hospitals code the intake so they know if the patient came in with a broken leg from a car accident or a broken arm from a trucking crash. Even where the patient has health insurance (which they are obligated to bill unless there is medpay insurance) the hospitals are trying to opt out and hiring a collections law firm to send out immediate lien notices. Why are they doing this to injured people in Georgia?

The answer is simple; if United Health insurance only allows $4,000.00 under their fee schedule for a set of procedures but the procedures are billed at $24,000.00, the hospital would rather get $24,000 instead of $4,000.00. By placing a medical lien on the file, they hope that they can tap into the injury settlement that the injured patient may be pursuing.

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Practicing law as an Injury attorney, I see a variety of serious injuries on a weekly basis and I spend hours talking to clients about the impact these injuries have on their lives. Serious car accidents frequently result in soft tissue injuries and many clients come to me after being told by the insurance company for the at fault driver that soft tissue injuries are not a big deal and they won’t pay much for them. This begs the question; what is a soft tissue injury and what is it worth in Georgia?

First, you have to draw a clear line of distinction between low impact cases where the majority of the medical care is chiropractic and moderate and high-impact cases. I do not accept low impact chiropractic cases and frankly the court system is overrun with claims that really have no business in the courts. Conversely, insurance carriers have a nasty habit of ignoring cases where the crash was serious but the MRIs and X-rays don’t show fractures or major disc herniations. I have written extensively about what an injury case is worth in Georgia, but this post will discuss soft tissue injuries specifically. Technically speaking, soft tissue injuries are those which affect anything besides the bones. This includes muscles, ligaments and tendons. A sprained ankle is a soft tissue injury as is a torn ACL. Just because the injury is to a soft tissue in the body does not mean it is insignificant.

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I have handled over 1,000 cases through the years and one of the more frustrating scenarios involves having to explain to a client with a major injury like a cervical or lumbar disc herniation that the at fault driver only has minimum limits. As I have explained in my discussion on Georgia Uninsured and Underinsured Motorist Insurance, this is one of the major reasons why clients should carry $100,000 in UM insurance at a minimum. That said, many clients come to me after the crash and they only carried $25,000.00 in UM themselves. Herniated Disc cases in Georgia are worth more than $100,000.00 in most cases so the issue of available insurance coverages is a critical one for case evaluation.

For crashes that occurred prior to January 1, 2009 (when Georgia law changed) or for people that buy non-stacking UM coverage, the challenge became getting past the at fault driver’s $25,000.00 limits.

One argument that is gaining traction is the argument that if the client has to reimburse an outside party such as Medicare, Federal Workers Compensation Liens, Medical Liens etc., then to the extent that a check has to be written to those entities out of the recovery from the at fault driver, because those liens are not subject to the Georgia “made whole doctrine”, that dollar amount may be recovered against the Uninsured Motorist Coverage above and beyond the at fault driver’s limits. Toomer v. Allstate 292 Ga.App. 60 (2008) Toomer makes it clear that the argument is viable for Medicare liens and Federal Workers Comp claims, but it is still unclear if the Court of Appeals will apply the same logic to Medical Liens and Health Insurance Reimbursement Claims.

It will be interesting to see if Medical Liens and ERISA Self Funded Health Insurance Reimbursement claims will also qualify to allow older claims to dip into the uninsured motorist coverage that would otherwise be in the shadow of the torfeasor under the Bohannon decision. I will post updates as the issues are ruled on.

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Two clients recently came to me with compression fractures in the vertebrae of their spine as a result of car accidents, and they were both women. As a lawyer, this accident got me wondering whether compression fractures from car accidents are more common in women than men. Indeed, I have come to find that after experiencing car accidents, women are more vulnerable to compression fractures.

Since women are more likely to have osteoporosis, and as a result, their spinal vertebrae can be weaker and more vulnerable to the compression forces that can occur in car crashes in Georgia. It turns out that forty percent of women will suffer a vertebral compression fracture by the time they are eighty. (Source: University of Maryland Medical School www.umm.edu/spinecenter ) because compression fractures can result from trauma, and/or they can be a result of trauma that has affected an already weakened vertebrae (which may not be known by the individual at the time of the accident), it is essential to have an understanding of the possible effects of a car crashes on the spine.

As with all my cases, I delve deeply into the medicine behind the injuries to maximize the recovery. Therefore, I think it is important to explain what happens in a compression fracture injury here. The normal human spine resembles the diagram below with the vertebrae being separated by the intervertebral discs which act as shock absorbers and allow flexibility.Compression fractures in car accidents occur when too much force is exerted on the spinal column while it is being flexed in an unnatural way. Vertebral compression fractures usually occur at T11 and T12, which is the bottom of the thoracic region and at L1, the first vertebra of the lumbar region. These vertebral compression fractures that occur are due to the natural curve of the spine.

Let’s us assume that you have decided that your Atlanta injury case is small enough that it would not make sense for a lawyer to handle it. This assumes you have already read the article on should you hire an accident lawyer or not. We will also assume that you are either in a situation where the insurance company is making a low offer or they are fighting you on the issue of whose fault the crash is. Assuming you have the backbone for the fight…what is next?

First understand that you will be suing the other driver, not their insurance company. You will need to locate the other driver by looking at the crash report. Know that sometimes the address is wrong or the person has moved away so never ever wait until just before the statute of limitations (two years for Georgia injury cases and four years for property damage cases) because you may file the suit and then get a notice back from the sheriff saying that they were unable to serve the defendant ( a “non est”)

In Georgia, you must sue the defendant in their home county unless you are dealing with a non-resident of the state or you have a trucking company as a defendant. You can do this by mail, but I suggest going to the clerk’s office and picking up the summons and the return of service and sending your complaint. Click on this Georgia injury lawsuit that I recently filed. You will have to pay around $125.00 to file the suit.

Georgia drivers that are hit by hit and run drivers face unique challenges in handling their injury and property damage claims. We will break the discussion into two key subtypes; where the driver is eventually found and where they remain a phantom vehicle.

Hit and Run Driver is Eventually Located
These are great cases in that leaving the scene is a basis for an award of punitive damages in Georgia. This normally occurs when the driver flees the scene after the crash and someone is able to get the license plate number and the police track them down. If you are hit in a crash in Georgia and there is some basis for tracking the hit and run driver, work on the investigating officer to pursue the lead on the scene because many of these hit and run drivers leave because they are drunk or stoned. In the eventual civil case, we would be unable to introduce speculative evidence of intoxication, but hard evidence developed from the officer’s investigation that very night can be powerful.In a case involving a located hit and run driver in Atlanta, you should get a copy of the accident report and get in touch with the other driver’s insurance company immediately. They will advise you if there are any coverage defenses (unauthorized driver, named driver exclusion, etc.) If the coverage is valid, you should have an easy time bargaining for a high dollar value on your car if it has been totaled out as the threat of punitive damages gives you leverage. Remember to also ask for diminution in value if your car is repaired.

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