Atlanta Injury Attorney Blog

Georgia Limited Liability Releases and General Releases

As a general rule, when you are injured in a car accident in Georgia, the other driver’s insurance company will only pay for their client’s negligence when they are closing the case out. When the insurance company makes an offer to settle the claim, they will require you to sign a “release.”

A release is nothing more than a contract where you as the injured party agree to give up certain legal claims in exchange for payment of money. When it comes to dealing with car accident injuries in Atlanta, Georgia, you will typically find that there are two types of releases; a “general release” and a “limited liability release.”

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The firm tried the case of Hazel v. Shapoori to a jury in Gwinnett County State Court and the jury returned a verdict for twice what Allstate had offered. This was a smaller case that the firm took on to help out a nice lady who had $6,200 in medical bills, $1,300 in lost wages and an Allstate adjuster who refused to pay more than $4,000.00. Once our firm got involved, she was offered $6,000, which we politely declined.

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Reviewing the tragic LA Times story of thefatal New York City bus crash and the evidence that a 18 wheeler may have cut the bus off and caused the accident, I am reminded of the article we wrote a year ago about accessibility of Georgia Highway Traffic cameras.

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The firm’s Atlanta tractor trailer accident lawyers in cooperation with our good friend, Michael Goldberg, recently finished up depositions of the tractor trailer company’s driver. In the attached video, you will see what often happens when an undertrained and nervous driver attempts to make up a story to get out of responsibility. This video was made as a backdrop to a live mediation presentation our firm gave last week.

In this case, our client was operating a dump truck while towing a light pickup truck, shortly after midnight on I-85. The semi tractor trailer crashed into the rear of our client and, according to the police report, rear ended the dump truck and knocked it off the highway. Our client speaks only Spanish and the investigating officer decided that the crash was our client’s fault because he felt the tow lights on the pickup were inadequate.

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In Georgia, it is well established that if you are hit by a drunk driver, you can seek punitive (punishment) damages. One issue that has been hotly debated though is whether you can introduce evidence that the other driver was drunk where the case is proceeding to trial with only the Uninsured Motorist carrier remaining as a viable defendant. Georgia Appellate Courts seems to have finally clarified their answer with a resounding “yes.”

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After Georgia changed its UM (uninsured and underinsured motorist insurance) laws in 2009, the changes left people with “added on” type coverage and UE (uninsured excess) or reducing type coverage. The good kind ads itself to the policy of the person who caused the car accident. For example if the at fault driver had $25,000.00 in coverage and you had $50,000.00 in UM added on coverage, then if your injury was severe enough, you could recover $75,000.00.

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On February 4th, the first of several products liability suits against DePuy and DCMedical were filed. As we discussed in an early article on the blog, most of the cases are vulnerable to removal to Federal Court because there is a rule which says if the Defendant is not from the State where the lawsuit is brought and it is a big case, the Defendant has the right to move the case out of the local level Courts and into Federal Court. This is an advantage for DePuy because once the case is in Federal Court, it is subject to certain rules regarding Multi District Litigation.

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Today we just wanted our readers to reflect on what it means to be a lawyer with integrity. I was fortunate enough to have a mentor who believed in me when I was a younger lawyer and I will save the lengthy discourse on the monumental merits of mentoring for another day, but he left me with some role models. One of which is a probably fictionalized depiction of King Henry VIII’s one time friend, Sir Thomas More. In Robert Bolt’s powerful play about the difficult decisions More made, “A Man for All Seasons”, he paints a lawyer for the ages. An honest and incorruptible Judge, a father, a husband and a very stubborn man. Bolt’s description of him reads to me as a eulogy that few of us can hope to totally achieve, but that we should strive for. Bolt wrote:

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Our firm represents the family of 5 year old Karla Campos, who was tragically killed last December by an elderly and infirm driver, Edith Anderson. Mrs. Anderson was charged after the death with vehicular manslaughter and on Monday, Judge Adele Grubbs sentenced her to 3 years in prison for her decisions. Continue reading

Late this summer DePuy Orthopedics sent out a recall of the ASR XL Acetabular hip replacement and our DePuy Implant lawyers in Georgia have been mobilizing to get information to the recipients.

The recall came about after new medical studies showed that the DePuy hip implant had a 1 in 8 failure rate. The failed hip replacements caused some patients metal sensitivity, fractures and pain and in many cases led to the need for a revision of the hip replacement. Many of these complications could have been avoided had DePuy and Johnson & Johnson simply not received a special clearance from the FDA to begin marketing the hip replacements without clinical trials.

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