car wreck Tag Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Atlanta Injury Lawyer Blog

“I Could Have Been Killed!” Do I Have a Case?

September 19, 2014 | Robin Frazer Clark

I have handled hundreds and hundreds of car wreck cases in Georgia. Very often I hear this common theme from prospective clients: “I Could Have Been Killed!” And it is often very true…they could have been killed, but thankfully, they weren’t. So do you have a case when you could have been killed but you weren’t? Or better put, do you have a case when you could have been killed but you weren’t physically harmed at all?

I thought of this because this morning while perusing the headlines I came upon this story about a JetBlue plane that experienced a blown engine and made an emergency landing. Smoke filled the cabin, oxygen masks magically came down, and flight attendants yelled “Brace! Brace! Brace!” as they landed, which fortunately, they did so safely without injury. Watch the video and you will see that many people on board thought they were about to die. And, in fact, they had a long time to think that as the plane, which was over water, had to turn around and go back to California to land. They all could have been killed, but they weren’t.

Therein lies the conundrum.

Can I Sue the County?

September 9, 2014 | Robin Frazer Clark

Let’s say you have been injured in a car wreck because of negligent maintenance of a right of way owned by the County. Can you sue the County for your injuries?

Of course, I have tried to teach my readers the short answer is always yes, you can sue anybody for anything. The real question then is if you sue the County, will your lawsuit be successful? The answer there, unfortunately, is probably not.

Counties in Georgia enjoy wide immunity from being held accountable through lawsuits. This is called “‘sovereign immunity,” which simply means you can’t sue the King. Were your car wreck to have occurred on a State-owned right-of-way, maintained by the State of Georgia, you would have a viable lawsuit against the State of Georgia under a statute known as “The Georgia Tort Claims Act,” O.C.G.A. Section 50-21-20 through -37. The State of Georgia, in passing “The Georgia Tort Claims Act,” recognized the inequity of a situation that would allow a Georgia citizen to be able to sue and recover from a private individual or corporation if they were negligent but not from the State of Georgia if it, acting through its employees, were negligent. The trade-off agreed in the statute for doing away with sovereign immunity for the State is an individual employee may not be personally sued (so it protects State of Georgia employees from litigation) and recovery is capped (regardless of injury) at $1 Million. This seems like an inherently reasonable trade-off…good for all citizens of the State of Georgia.

Do I Have a Case?

June 24, 2014 | Robin Frazer Clark

Do I have a case? I am asked this countless times…at church, over cocktails, in the gym…anywhere where someone who knows I am a trial lawyer who represents injured individuals finds me and grabs me to ask. Do I have a case? Four little words, but so very complex.

In the world of personal injury law practice, I am a generalist. I take all variety of personal injury cases. The only limitation for me is whether I think I can prove the case and whether the damages justify my representation. So “Do I have a case” depends on many things, but first is can we prove one? The plaintiff in a personal injury lawsuit has the burden of proof, meaning the plaintiff must prove the case and the defendant really has no burden. The plaintiff must prove, by a preponderance of the evidence, four things: 1)duty; and 2) breach of duty; and 3) causation and 4) damages. “Preponderance of the evidence” is a cute little phrase that means nothing more than it is more likely than not. “Preponderance” is used in law school and should never be used again anywhere else, but especially not in a courtroom to a jury. The burden of proof simply means that a jury agrees it is more likely than not that this thing happened. And the plaintiff must prove all four necessary elements; three out of four is not good enough.

Sometimes determining whether someone owed you a duty not to injure you is simple. Like in a car wreck case in which you have been rear-ended. Every driver on our Georgia roads owes every other driver on our roads a duty not to follow too closely and not to rear-end the car in front of them. So if you have been rear-ended in a car wreck, you can easily prove #1 and #2, duty and breach. In our car wreck case example, it is #3 and #4 that get a little harder. Damages means you have an injury to which you attribute to the car wreck. Damages are simple enough usually…if you suffered a broken leg in a car wreck, a leg which was perfectly fine before the car wreck, you have both damages and causation, meaning you can prove the broken leg was caused by the wreck and not from something else, not from some other force. If however, you believe you have injured your back or neck in a rear-end car wreck but no broken bones, the task of proving causation, that the force of the car wreck caused the neck or back injury and nothing else, gets a bit harder. Factors involved here on whether you can prove causation include your past medical history and whether you had ever been treated for neck or back problems before the wreck. For example, let’s say you were involved in our rear-end car wreck on the way to the hospital for back surgery for a chronic back problem. It would be pretty difficult to prove the car wreck caused you to have a back injury that now needs surgical treatment. You were already on your way to get that surgical treatment before the wreck ever occurred! See how this works? Those are the tougher cases and they often come down to expert testimony from your treating physicians about what they believe caused your back injury.