Atlanta Injury Attorney Blog

A Norcross 17 year passenger died when his friend lost control of their car while allegedly speeding. See WSBTV coverage of the crash. Unfortunately teenage driving is all too common of an element in fatal crashes in the Atlanta area. What is unusual here is the fact that the police have charged the parents for allowing the unlicensed 16 year old to drive the car.

While most parents stay up at night as it is worrying that their children might hurt someone else, there is also the deep seated fear of the family getting sued into the poorhouse for the actions of the teenager. So the question arises; can the parents of a teenager driver be legally liable when their child causes a crash that kills someone?

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This morning, I deposed Jeff Kidd with Collison Specialists out of Gainseville Georgia. Jeff was hired in a case where I represent the family of a woman who was thrown from her motorcycle when a driver who had been licensed for 10 months got a flat tire and decided to park his car in the middle of I-285. The motorcyle could not avoid the minivan that came to a sudden stop in front of him and the woman was thrown and died.
I talk with a lot of young lawyers who prepare to depose the insurance company’s lawyer and believe that they need to attack every conclusion. The fact is that a reasonable and well prepared expert is not going to be “broken” on cross examination. The key to taking a useful deposition is to listen carefully to their conclusions and decide which ones do no harm and which ones need to be attacked. Once you identify the opinions that are harmful, go at the factual underpinnings and assumptions. Normally it is the car accident Reconstructionist’s assumptions that are the most vulnerable. You can often open play in their opinion by getting them to admit that if other assumptions are true, their conclusions can be significantly off. Atlanta wrongful death attorneys practice this common sense approach that is respectful of the expert and the jury.

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For years car insurance companies have decried the “greed” and audacity of personal injury plaintiffs and their lawyers for bringing lawsuits over injuries in car accidents. Now, irony of ironies, these same insurance companies are launching a tidal wave of lawsuits as they go after the uninsured and underinsured.

Let me be clear; there is nothing wrong or immoral about an insurance company seeking subrogation. The concept is sound. What is disguising is their willingness to sue the uninsured into a lifetime of debt. It is a fact that trial lawyers do not personally sue uninsured individuals unless there are substantial assets. Why not? Not only is it unproductive because liquidating meager assets yields little cash but there is a fairness problem. No right minded lawyer wants to sue an average person into the poorhouse over a negligent act.

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A fellow lawyer won an important victory at the Court of Appeals last Spring (The Bethany Group LLC v. Grobman 315 Ga.App. 298 (2012) which resulted in a $1.2 million dollar settlement for the family of a taxi driver who was murdered at an apartment complex. What is noteworthy about the development is the difficult facts they had to work with. The victim was a cab driver summoned to the property by a disposable phone. No evidence of at request from a tenant and that is a tough case.

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In a rare and tragic instant Aila Masud was struck and killed by a flying tire while driving on I-85 in Atlanta. Eyewitness accounts agree that the wheel came from a passenger vehicle driving the opposite direction although there is mixed information about the driver trying to avoid something in the road.

My wife read the article and being married to a car accident lawyer, she naturally asked “who is legally responsible for the tire killing the woman?” The sad thing is that our law firm has been through this exact situation before. We recently settled a case in Maryland with co-counsel involving a man struck in the chest while driving by a runaway wheel from traffic going the other direction.

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I wrote over a year ago about the tragic death of a woman on the way to the Peach Bowl in 2011 at the hands of a habitually reckless Georgia State Patrol Officer. The AJC reports today that he has plead guilty to vehicular homicide and will serve 2 years in jail and 8 years on probation. There is some justice in the result but what really bothers me is the lack of punishment for his superiors and their decision making.

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So some bright star decided that after umpteen years of predictability, the guiding lights of hearsay and probative value should be dimmed and we ended up with a new evidence code in Georgia that tracks the Federal Rules of Evidence in many regards. One of the critical issues for good Atlanta car accident lawyers like me is whether the police report of the car accident is now admissible evidence.

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So you may have read our previous post about the Beneke v. Parker decision that confirmed that the 2 year statute of limitations on car accident claims in Georgia is extended for the number of days after the crash that it takes to resolve the traffic ticket. One of the other lawyers came to me with a new client the other day and even though the crash is four years old he claimed that the police records showed that the defendant had not shown up for the hearing and therefore a FTA (failure to appear) warrant had issued.

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In an earlier post about Mercury Insurance’s Motion for Summary Judgment claiming that their insured had failed to give timely notice within 60 days of a catastrophic crash, I promised I would post the briefs and so here they are. Hope they are helpful. The names have been altered for privacy reasons.

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Its been a mixed bag the last two weeks for dealing with accident insurance companies in Georgia. Friends and potential clients alike often wonder what their options are with injury claims. The best way to answer that is through a number of examples that illustrate what we do week to week.

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