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Many of you are trying out the convenience of the car rental-ish entity, Turo, which allows you to rent people’s private vehicles much in the same way that Airbnb does for houses. One of the key questions is, what if you rent a Turo car and get into a car accident and damage another car or hurt someone?

I scheduled a trip for Labor Day to San Francisco and one of my all time goals was to rent a hot car and drive the Pacific Coast Highway and the Napa and Sonomo Valleys. I got on Turo and found a perfect 2018 Black Jag F-Type convertible for a reasonable $200 a day. Throw in a few taxes etc and then you come to a buy insurance screen. Turo pretty much tells you they have no idea if your car insurance will cover you and suggests you buy a “spot” policy that covers you while driving. This policy is written by Liberty Mutual and comes in either $30,000 in liability coverage or $1,000,000 of liability coverage. The larger policy costs $81 dollars a day! Once you factor this in, the rental rate looks a lot less attractive.

I started poking around. First I checked with American Express, which normally provides coverage for property damage done to rental cars so you don’t have to buy that from Enterprise or Hertz or whatever. Nope, Amex says right on their website “we do not consider Turo to be a car rental company” and therefore their coverage does not apply.

Dr. Dao should not have been asked to leave the United flight he paid for, but he was a fool to behave like he did once he realized leaving was inevitable. Were I the Judge on this case, I would look long and hard at the contract for carriage and what Dr. Dao said on tape before I allowed certain issues to make it to the jury. In this era of fake news I read articles suspiciously and look only for hard facts, so let’s look at this case together.

If you read the passenger accounts and listen to the audio tapes, it all boils down like this; Dao was seated when United asked for four volunteers to give up their seats so a flight crew could make it to their next flight. He initially volunteered, but changed his mind when told about how long it would be till the next flight.

United supervisors then asked him to leave his seat and he would not. At that point, airport security officers got involved. Dr. Dao made his critical mistake when he refused the lawful request of the officers to leave after being told he would be removed. He had every right to be outraged at being asked to leave. He had every right to be furious with the airline, but when a law enforcement officer makes it clear that they are going to forcibly remove you, do not act like a child and scream and throw your body about. His injures were the result of his foolish decision on how to react to an outrageous situation. “You can drag me out, but I’m not going. I’m staying right here,” is not a wise reaction. “I make a lawsuit against United Airlines” is indicative of a lot of what is wrong with the world.   I will give him a hall pass on lying about having to be at work when you are no longer a doctor, but the rest of his decisions from then on were poor.

In a story made for Hollywood, it was recently revealed that billionaire Peter Thiel was quietly funding Hulk Hogan’s litigation against Gawker.com. We have previously discussed the silent emergence of hedge funds investing in high stakes divorce and business litigation for a cut of the winnings. What we are seeing here is a long term revenge play straight out of The Count of Monte Cristo.

The story goes like this:

  1. Hulk Hogan had intercourse with a Tampa area woman and he claims he did not know it was recorded. The tape circulated for a while and was then posted on Gawker.com.

Our injury lawyers are representing the family of one of the victim in the Greatime Getaways tour bus that collided with a tractor trailer owned by Polcon Tile & Terrazo on October 13, 2016 in Gilmer County, Georgia.  We are looking to talk to any witnesses or other individuals with information about the accident to assist in our investigation.
The accident occurred on Georgia Highway 515  and preliminary reports suggest that the tractor trailer driver was at fault.  We understand the tractor trailer was traveling on Whitestone Road and attempted to take a left onto 515 southbound.  In doing so, the tractor trailer cut across the 515 northbound lanes and blocked the lane in which the tour bus was traveling, which caused the tour bus to collide with the back end of the tractor trailer.  The collision killed the tour bus driver and injuring 43 passengers.
Left turns are one of the most dangerous maneuvers a tractor trailer can make.  This is even more true when the left turn is made across multiple lane highways.  Both federal and state laws, as well as numerous training manuals and industry policies, govern the process by which left turns are safely made.  One of the hazardous conditions involved in a tractor trailer left turn is the obvious fact that it takes a lot more time to clear a tractor trailer through an intersection than it does the average vehicle.  This is a combination of the added time it takes a heavy tractor trailer to start moving from a complete stop as well as the added time it takes for the lengthy trailer to pass through the intersection. Tractor trailer driver must undergo extensive training and remain highly alert to properly gauge whether the entire tractor trailer will be able to clear the roadway safely and timely without impeding oncoming traffic.

There was an article in the New York Times two weeks ago entitled “Phone Makers Could Cut Off Drivers Why Don’t They?” The article asked if it is easy to disable the phone at road speeds, why don’t phone makers do that and cut down on texting and driving. My short answer is an effort to auto disable phones when moving at vehicle speeds would have inherent flaws that could open the phone maker up to legal liability that does not exist if they don’t even try. Moreover, the failure to save us from our own stupidity is not the job of the manufacturer.

None of us want dangerous products on the market. Cigarettes are dangerous, but so long as there are warnings, we can put on our big boy pants and smoke ourselves to death. Knives are supposed to be sharp; we know to be careful with them. We will not tolerate baby cribs with slats so wide that babies can choke to death. We will not accept poisonous drugs. We will not accept aircraft with substandard welds.

Cell phone use in cars whether it is music apps, maps, email or texting, is rampant. The technology is addictive from a sociological perspective, but not in the way that cigarettes are with chemicals added to addict the customer. They are just very sticky technologies. So now lawyers are filing suits against technology manufacturers claiming they should protect the consumer and the motoring public from themselves. The problem with holding them responsible is their decisions are not bad enough to be the proximate cause of the crash. The cause is the driver being careless enough to use technology that everyone knows is dangerous.

By Special Correspondent, Julia Simon

In Atlanta and many other cities there are confusing guidelines for leftover food donation that  often cause hunger, waste, and anger among restaurateurs and the homeless. According to UNEP (The United Nations Environment Programme) about 20 pounds of food per person, per month is wasted each month in North America alone, Adding up to about 30-40% of America’s food supply.

Many restaurants and bakeries, like Panera Bread or Subway, bake bread fresh each day and are forced to trash leftovers at the end of the day for a couple of reasons. The National Coalition  for the Homeless states that from Jan. 2013 to Oct. 2014  21 cities have passed confusing  laws that scare restaurant owners about the potential for being sued if someone gets sick from spoiled food.

By Steve Petteway, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States – Clarence Thomas – The Oyez Project,

Justice Thomas needs to retire. He has truly shown his derriere in his latest dissent in Foster v. Chatham. The basic facts of the case are as follows:

  • In 1987 a black man was convicted of raping and murdering a woman.

Litigation funding from third-party sources is nothing new in personal injury cases, where injured victims, out of work and short on cash, have been permitted to borrow against the expected return on their pending cases for years now. But what about the prospect of investing money in someone else’s legal proceeding? A new report from the New York Times magazine has highlighted this growing trend, using a classic David v. Goliath story in the process.
At the heart of this news story is a lawsuit involving Miller UK, a small British company, and Caterpillar, the American construction equipment behemoth. Their dispute centers over a particular model of equipment and the intellectual property involved in its design.  The unique part of this dispute lies with the method Miller is using to fund its side of the case.  Rather than paying its legal team straight from the company coffers, Miller has turned to an outside entity called Arena Consulting to front the money for its legal costs.  If Miller is unsuccessful in the suit, Arena will walk away empty-handed.  However, if Miller wins, Arena will stand to gain a significant portion of the proceeds, perhaps into the tens of millions of dollars.
This type of litigation finance is relatively new, but it is already causing a great deal of controversy.  Those in favor argue that this outside funding allows the little guy to have its day in court when they could never afford to fund such a case on its own, particularly when going up against such well-funded opposition.  Nevertheless, detractors of this practice worry that this type of investment could drive the already high costs of our legal system even higher and that the interests of investors and litigants may not always be perfectly aligned.  Whatever the outcome of the Miller case, this topic is just beginning to pique the interest of legal scholars, and we should expect a great deal of debate on its merits in the years to come.

Because we handle a large number of premises liability cases, we frequently get calls on cases that involve injuries or death from children playing in residential swimming pools. Under most circumstances, trespassers on someone else’s land are going to find it very difficult to recover for any injury suffered while on that property. However, most homeowners would be surprised to hear that they could be held liable if a trespassing child made their way into their land and drowned in the backyard swimming pool.

The legal doctrine that provides for this exception is called the Attractive Nuisance Doctrine. Under this exception to the normal rules about trespassers, Georgia Courts have recognized that children don’t always have the capacity to understand unfamiliar dangers or appreciate the risks presented by unfamiliar property. Under this particular doctrine, a landowner has a duty to keep their property free of dangers that are accessible and could cause harm to trespassing children. Gregory v. Johnson, 249 Ga. 151 (1982) is a Georgia Supreme Court case that says this doctrine also applies to swimming pools.

So when is a homeowner with a swimming pool responsible when a neighborhood kid sneaks in and accidentally drowns in the pool? The Gregory Court says five conditions have to be met:

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