Atlanta Injury Attorney Blog

As a regular part of their job, accident lawyers are called upon to examine and interpret the car insurance policies that apply in the aftermath of a crash. For the innocent victims of the crash, certain policy exclusions can be devastating.

Take for example a recent client who was struck by a driver whose license had been revoked due to too many dui convictions. This driver had no drivers license and had borrowed a friend’s car. Under Georgia law, even though the driver had no license and no insurance of his own, the insurance policy on the vehicle covers anyone driving the vehicle with permission. (understand that if a person is not a permissive user, they are not covered by the vehicles insurance) We sent out the certified letters to USAA insurance request they disclose the insurance policy limits and disclose any policy defenses. If this policy is drafted like most, it will continue an exclusion for coverage when the vehicle is operated by an unlicensed driver.

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Our Athens Injury Lawyer website is now active and we are meeting with clients through an office sharing agreement in Downtown Athens, Georgia. Please feel free to contact us to make an appointment at the Athens office.

In Georgia you can settle your property damage claim and proceed with your injury claim and what you do in one will not affect the other. The Georgia legislature passed O.C.G.A. §51-1-32 and 51-1-33 to ensure that you and the insurance company can work out your property damage sooner and without fear that it will impact your rights if you sustain an injury. Understand that just because they pay for your car repair, it does not mean that they will accept liability on the injury. Be careful though because there is still a danger when it comes to signing releases.

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The Georgia Senate has passed a bill banning texting while driving and it calls for a stiff fine for adults and license suspensions for teenagers. The House version of the bill calls for license suspensions if you cause a crash while texting. Although we should all applaud the passage of the bill as it may save countless lives, the cynic in me complains that driving while distracted is already a ticketable offense.I suppose though that literally telling people that driving while texting is illegal will have a more damming effect.

This legislation sadly grew out a of fatal crash involving Caleb Sorohan in December and the bill is called the “Caleb Sorohan Act for Saving Lives by Preventing Texting While Driving”.

Now all we have to do is solve the enforcement problem. My solution? Use traffic cams to take high res shots of cars and their tags from the front and rear on I-8/I75 and send them tickets in the mail. It will make for a safer world for all of us.

Option 2 is for GPS enabled phones to know when the phone is moving at highway speed and disable the texting function unless the driver is able to handle an intricate input task proving they are a passenger.

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I agreed to step in and try a case for another Atlanta injury lawyer two months ago only to find out in deposition that the client had filed a Chapter 13 Bankruptcy due to business debts prior to the crash that injured him. Under the Bankruptcy Code, he has a duty to amend his Bankruptcy to reflect that he has the injury claim as it is a potential asset. In this case the client failed to do that and the bankruptcy is now closed.

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Despite the media spotlight shifting to car accidents caused by driving and texting, the number one killer remains drunk driving in Georgia. As drunk driving car accident lawyers, we civilly prosecute drunk drivers who injure and kill innocent victims across the State of Georgia. This traffic camera video of a drunk driver plowing into an unsuspecting victim demonstrates the human consequences to selfish decision making. One victim was killed and another was left with a serious brain injury. The victim’s parents want this video spread as far as possible to deter other drivers from making this tragic decision.

Although the criminal justice system is charged with the primary responsibility for punishment, Georgia law also recognizes that there should be a civil punishment for drinking and driving when you cause an injury. O.C.G.A. § 51-12-5.1 provides for punitive damages when the person behaves with a reckless indifference to the consequences of their behavior.

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When you read the CNN coverage on the head on crash between a tractor trailer and a Mennonite Church van in Kentucky that took 11 lives, the divergence between the effect of God’s law and man’s law is illustrated. Friday morning a tractor trailer driver crossed the center line in Kentucky and took the lives of 11 people headed to a Mennonite wedding.

Although our thoughts and prayers are with these unfortunate souls, I cannot abide the perspective of the church member mentioned in the article because to follow that path is to encourage this to happen again to other people.

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There is a very unusual Georgia wrongful death decision out of the State Court in Bibb County that was recently upheld by the Court of Appeals. It has the potential to drastically affect wrongful death cases involving Georgia uninsured motorist insurance coverage. Smarr v. Richardson et al. involved the death of a young man in a car crash caused by a driver with $100,000.00 in liability insurance through Allstate. As we have discussed previously, a Georgia wrongful death case has two components, the statutory claim for the value of the life and the claim by the Estate of the deceased for pain and suffering, medical expenses, fear of imminent death and funeral expenses. In Smarr, Counsel for the family of the young man chose to allocate $99,900.00 of the Allstate money to the statutory claim and $100.00 to the Estate claim.

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The Georgia Supreme Court issued a decision today on cancellation of car insurance and although I don’t think it was very interesting, it reminded me a case that we handled that was and has some bearing for Georgia consumers. We took a case for a badly injured woman who had been involved in a car crash as a passenger. The driver had driven off the road and flipped the vehicle. In response to our request for insurance information, the insurance company claimed they had canceled the policy for non-payment of premium at midnight, six hours before the crash.

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The firm is working on the tragic wrongful death case of a child run over by an elderly driver in Cobb County. As all Georgia wrongful death lawyers know, there often is not enough insurance to assist the family in recovering from the devastating loss. In this case, the driver that killed the little girl only had a $25,000/$50,000.00 policy. That means that the most the policy will pay is $25,000 per person injured or $50,000.00 total per wreck. Here, the mother of the child was standing 2 feet from the little girl as she stepped from the school bus into a blocked off cul de sac. The defendant driver swerved around 2 cars stopped behind the bus, ran onto the curb and past the cars, past the bus and ran the girl down 2 feet from her mother. Her mother was not touched physically by the car but experienced the horror of seeing her daughter sustain a mortal wound.

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