Atlanta Injury Attorney Blog

I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to have Uninsured and Underinsured Motorist coverage in Georgia. In 11 years of practicing as an injury lawyer, I have found that the people that cause the most devastating injuries in automobile collisions tend to be uninsured and underinsured drivers. Bad drivers tend to have a lot of speeding tickets and prior collisions and cannot afford decent coverage. As a result, the at fault driver did not have enough liability insurance to repay my clients for the medical bills they incurred and the injuries they sustained.

Most drivers in Georgia operate with the minimum mandatory limits of $25,000.00. That may seem like a lot of money but that’s only if you have not been to the hospital recently. For example, in Metro Atlanta, the typical ambulance ride costs $600.00, the Emergency room visit is at least $800, X-Rays cost around $250, an MRI is $1100, a CT scan can cost $2000 and so on. Even a modest trip to the emergency room usually costs around $2,000.00. Then there can be mountains of bills from physical therapy and medications. In short, even a simple auto accident case with sprained muscles that requires an ER visit and physical therapy can leave a person with over $5,000.00 in bills. If there are any broken bones, the value of the case in front of a jury quickly grows to over $25,000.00.

Now imagine you have been in an accident in Roswell, Georgia and a driver has totaled your car by negligently failed to leave enough following distance. You have gone to the hospital and learned that you have a herniated disc in your neck that is going to need surgery. The total cost for your medical expenses will be well over $45,000.00 which does not even include the amount of income you will lose for missing work during surgery and recovery. You make contact with the at-fault driver’s insurance company and learn that the driver only had $25,000.00 in coverage and is not a wealthy person. Reality is that there may be no recovery for you beyond the $25,000.00. As your grandmother told you, you cannot get blood from a stone.

If your agent cares about you or you are tuned in, you will put medical payments insurance on your Georgia car insurance policy. This is a coverage that directly benefits you and your passengers in the event that you or they are hurt in an accident. It pays regardless of who caused the accident and does not have to be repaid if you make a recovery later against an at fault party. This coverage is comparatively inexpensive and I highly recommend that you at least get $5,000.00 in coverage. Christopher Simon, a car accident lawyer in Atlanta, knows that it can make all the difference between getting collections phone calls and sleeping through the night.

The easiest way to find out if you have the coverage is to pick up the phone and call the number on your insurance card. Just ask them, do I have medical payments or medpay insurance and in what amount. They will then walk you through how to open a claim.

Granted I do only review Georgia car insurance policies for people when things have gone wrong but isn’t that the way you should approach your insurance purchasing? The most common thing I hear from people after they have been in a terrible accident is “I have full coverage.” What does that mean?

In the insurance industry, it can mean very little. Many insurance agents will tell you that you have “full coverage” and what that really means is you have liability insurance, collision coverage and comprehensive coverage. It has nothing to do with the amount of the these coverages. I have to break this news to people all too frequently.

So… First step is to get out your policy information. Every six months or so you should receive a declarations page. If you cannot find it, pull up your insurance account. Almost everyone has their policy documents available online these days.

When a car is damaged and repaired in a Georgia car accident, it is not “as good as new” when fixed. Diminution in value or diminished value generally applies only to cars that have not been in a wreck before. The idea is that in this day and age of Carfax and vehicle background checks everyone will know if the car was in a wreck when you try to sell it. No one will pay the same price for a used car when choosing between a previously repaired car and an undamaged one.

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Well the legislature struck out on the important changes they were trying to implement but at least they did some good for the State. These bills will now go on to the Governor for signature and hopefully they will make it through.

ID Theft Protection: Georgia Credit Freeze Law.

Link to Legislation, Votes and Status: http://www.legis.ga.gov/legis/2007_08/sum/hb130.htm

What should you do when your car was damaged in a car accident in Georgia and it was the other driver’s fault? Let’s assume that the officer cited the other driver and your car is driveable. What should you do? Everyone knows that you exchange information at the scene. What next?

You should contact the other driver’s company that day and you should contact your own insurance company and provide them with notice of the accident. If the other insurance carrier is not a fly by night operation, they will schedule an appointment for either an adjuster to come out of a location for you to take your vehicle to for a damage appraisal. You should take photos of the damage before you leave your vehicle with anyone. When I am hired as an Atlanta personal injury lawyer, I take great pains to lock down the photographic evidence from the police officer’s dashboard camera, satellite photos and other evidence to assist with arguing liability. However, unless you take pictures of your own vehicle, you will be at a serious disadvantage if you try to handle the property damage on your own.

If you took it to a shop, you will get an estimate on cost and time to repair from the shop. The other carrier should provide you with a rental car for the duration of the rental. If the other insurance carrier is being a jerk about these things and you have collision coverage, you have the option of turning it over to your own company.

One of the things many of my clients want to know is how to get your car fixed after a crash in Georgia go about getting their car fixed after it has been in a crash in Georgia. If the accident report came out against you and in favor of the other driver just understand that you are facing an uphill battle. Police Officers frequently get the blame issue wrong. It’s not because they are mean, it’s because they are not in the business of deciding liability. Some do a more thorough job that others, but many times they will simply write out the ticket that they feel seems most obvious. We frequently spend half of our time tracking down eyewitnesses and developing evidence to prove liability.

If the accident report assigns blame to you under the “contributing factors” section on page one or you got the citation, you better have collision coverage on your own policy. The other car’s insurer will not pay for your property damage and rental car unless it looks like they are to blame. Under these facts, submit the claim to your own insurer. If you have no collision coverage, then you are in a pickle. I will bundle the property damage claim with the bodily injury claim when clients hire me but that decision is made on a case by case basis.

If there is no injury claim and you have a sound reason why the other side is to blame; do the following:

I received my credit card statement today and noticed a $39.00 late fee in it because the payment posted 4 days late. Let me put it this way. If your account is pretty current, everything on credit cards are negotiable. I called and politely but firmly reminded them that payments have always been current and the balance was low. They looked at the account and immediately removed the charge. As a lawyer, I long ago gave up litigating consumer cases, but there are some lawyers that will still take these.

Scrutinize your credit card bills. Banks will try to sneak things past you. Also, watch out for the interest rates creeping up when you were not looking. Every year or so it does not hurt to call them and see if you can negotiate a lower rate by pointing out other credit card offers you have received. Give it a try. You have nothing to lose.

Generally speaking, the criminal defendant is indicted for the crime, usually by a grand jury. They decide whether there is enough evidence to warrant going through with a prosecution. You may hear on TV that “the grand jury met.” Although there are significant differences between states and the federal government, the basic premise is that the group of citizens is empaneled for a period of time to act as the first gatekeeper of criminal justice. They receive a very one sided presentation of the case from the lawyer employed by the governmental entity prosecuting the case. Practicing as an injury lawyer now, I look back in disgust at the how unbalanced the playing field is in favor of the prosecution. The only thing the defendant has is the presumption of innocence and if there are any priors, then the jury ignores the standard.

The group of citizens then decides if there is enough evidence for them to issue the indictment. If no, that is usually the end of the case. If they decide to go forward, then the defendant is indicted and the prosecuting attorney (a District Attorney in Superior Court in Georgia, a Solicitor in State and most Municipalities, sometimes a City Solicitor) takes the case from there.

From there, cases diverge wildly. Some complex cases involve numerous motions to supress (keep evidence away from the jury) notices of introducing evidence of prior crimes and so forth. Each case is different and I will not be providing an exhaustive treatment of the subject here. Suffice it to say that in most criminal cases in Georgia, there is very limited discovery and no such thing as depositions except in unusual circumstances.

I am writing this blog to explain civil litigation in Georgia as best I can. As time goes on there will be more and more complex articles that may be of great use to other attorneys, but in the beginning we will cover the essentials that will allow ordinary people to feel more comfortable in handling their civil cases on their own.

The most important distinction in the law lies between criminal law and civil law. Think of them as two distant branches of the same family. They have some similar features in that they involve trials, many shared rules of evidence, the thrill of cross examination and defense lawyers. Otherwise though they are systems of justice administering to totally different components of our society. Georgia workers compensation attorneys work in a specific subset of law governed by Georgia workers compensation law. There is an administrative law board instead of jury trials and the case law and rules of evidence for workers comp are completely different.

Criminal Law is a body of law designed to delineate between criminal and non-criminal actions. It covers everything from speeding tickets all the way through death penalty murder trials. The party bring the case is always a government entity and the whole purpose of the case is to determine guilt or innocence and the appropriate punishment. Think of it this way; criminal law is only about crime and punishment.