Atlanta Injury Lawyer Blog

2007 Georgia's Legal Elite

I am pleased, humbled and honored to announce I have been named by Georgia Trend Magazine as one of its 2007 Legal Elite in the area of Plaintiff's Personal Injury in Georgia. Of the 43 lawyers named as Legal Elite for the practice area of Personal Injury in Georgia, only 21 were named in the specific are of representing plaintiffs, and of those 21 lawyers only three were female and I am extremely honored to have been named as one of those. Selection to the Legal Elite list means I was one of 21 plaintiff's personal injury lawyers (out of a total of 38,000 lawyers in the state) in Georgia selected by their peers as the most effective in plaintiff's personal injury law practice. Recipients were chosen by our peers, which means my colleagues in personal injury law consider me to be one of the most effective plaintiff's trial lawyers in Georgia for my clients. Quite an honor, indeed!! This honor really acknowledges my level of expertise in plaintiff's personal injury work in Georgia and my dedication to my client's cause.

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An Arizona jury returned a plaintiff's verdict yesterday of a whopping $36.5 Million against Swift Trucking Company for Swift Trucking's driver's negligence in causing a horrible crash that killed the father of eight children. $13.5 Million of the verdict was for punitive damages to punish Swift for not producing their driver's logs in the litigation. Tractor-Trailer drivers are required by Federal law to maintain log books showing how many hours they have driven. At issue in this case, and many others, was driver fatigue.

Swift tractor-trailers are all over the roads of Metro Atlanta and Georgia. For safety's sake, drive as far away as possible from big tractor-trailers. Leave a lane between you and them if you can. Try never to drive in front of them if possible. Some wrecks, like the one in Arizona, are 100% the fault of the truck driver and there is often nothing the victim could have done to avoid the wreck. But it helps increase your chances of not having a wreck with them if you stay as far away from them on the roads as possible.

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Posted In: Motor Vehicle Accidents

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It's not news that doctors protect their own, although that fact is now proven. In a recent study, 46 percent of physicians surveyed admitted they knew of a serious medical error that had been made but did not tell authorities about it. This in spite of the fact that in 2000, the U.S. Institute of Medicine reported that up to 98,000 people die every year because of medical errors in hospitals alone.

There is probably plenty of blame to go around for this phenomenon: inadequate State Medical Boards, hospitals that profit off of physicians, and an attitude of many physicians that they simply should not be held accountable for their errors, because, they are, after all, doctors. Let's hope the Georgia Composite State Board of Medical Examiners, the Board that oversees all physicians licensed here in Georgia, does a better job of cleaning their own house. Plaintiffs' trial lawyers who handle medical malpractice cases here in Georgia, as I do, will do everything we can to hold negligent physicians accountable in a civil court of law, as long as the Georgia Legislature stops limiting a Georgia citizen's access to the courts and, thereby, to justice.

Posted by Robin Frazer Clark | Permalink | Email This Post

Posted In: Medical Malpractice

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It is hard to believe this actually happened, I know, but in a Rhode Island hospital, there have been three botched brain surgeries in the last ten months in which the physician operated on the wrong side of the brain! In two cases, the doctors did not realize the errors until after they had opened the skull. This is not just rotten luck: this is evidence of a significant systems failure in that hospital.

We, as Georgia citizens, can only hope we would be better served by our hospitals and our physicians, and that the Georgia Composite State Board of Medical Examiners would be more diligent in weeding out incompetent doctors. We place our lives and the lives of our loved ones in the hands of these physicians and we expect some minimum level of competence, which clearly is absent if the physician operates on the wrong side of the body.

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Posted In: Medical Malpractice

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Another log truck accident in Milledgeville, Georgia has killed a 12 year old girl and injured her mother. The accident happened on Sparta Highway in Baldwin County. Although much of the Georgia economy depends on logging, these accidents with logging trucks happen too often and, when they do, they are usually fatal. Although the details of this accident haven't yet been made public, my guess based on my experience in handling these types of serious trucking accidents is that logs may have become unstable or lose and may have gone right through the Toyota Camry in which the child was riding. My heart goes out to the mother who was driving and to the child's family. There is nothing as devastating as the loss of a child.

Posted by Robin Frazer Clark | Permalink | Email This Post

Posted In: Motor Vehicle Accidents

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I am very pleased to announce a $10 Million verdict by a Bibb County jury for a woman who was made severely ill by a laparotomy pad (sponge) left in her stomach by her doctors during surgery. Although the sponge left by the doctors was discovered in her stomach about a week after it was negligently left there, it had already poisoned the unfortunate woman so severely that it caused kidney damage and blindness.She also suffered severe memory loss and depression. The verdict was against the hospital due to the failure by the hospital's nurses to keep an accurate sponge count during and after the surgery. The injured woman had approximately $800,000.00 in medical bills to treat all of the new medical problems caused by the sponge that was not supposed to have been left in her body.

Georgia citizens take heart! So often insurance carriers play the "conservative county" card in trying to lowball plaintiffs in settlement negotiations, and Bibb County is certainly perceived as a "conservative county." I think what this means is that the good people of Bibb County know real medical malpractice and a real tragedy when they see one and will gladly give appropriate financial relief to balance the harm that is often done by rampant medical malpractice. The Bibb County jury rendered justice as they saw fit,and their verdict is nothing short of an affirmation of the jury system, so preciously protected by the 7th Amendment to the Constitution.

Posted by Robin Frazer Clark | Permalink | Email This Post

Posted In: Medical Malpractice

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