This afternoon in San Jose, California, a jury returned a verdict against two truck drivers, Gordon Trucking, and the state of California for nearly $50,000,000.00 ($49 million plus).
My friend Tommy Malone of Atlanta and Randy Scarlett of San Francisco represented Drew Bianche, a young man who had just graduated from college with a 4.0 GPA and had been accepted to medical school. Drew suffered a severe traumatic brain injury when two tractor trailers approaching from opposite directions on an unreasonably dangerous and narrow roadway sideswiped each other causing one of the trucks to the hit car Drew was riding in as a passenger.
The verdict was all compensatory damages, no punitive damages. Five percent of fault was allocated to the state, and 95% to the truckers.
Ken Shigley is a trucking safety trial attorney representing seriously injured people in tractor trailer, big rig, intermodal container freight, cement truck, dump truck and bus accidents statewide in Georgia. He served as chair of the Southeastern Motor Carrier Litigation Institute in 2005, is a national board member of the Interstate Trucking Litigation Group of the American Association for Justice, and is on the National Advisory Board for the Association of Interstate Trucking Lawyers of America.
He has extensive experience representing parties in interstate trucking collision cases, and in the past two years has spoken at national interstate trucking litigation seminars in Chicago (trucking insurance), New Orleans (trial tactics and side underride issues), St. Louis (punitive damages), San Francisco (dealing with insolvent trucking companies), Atlanta (trucking insurance, closing argument), Nashville (use of Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations), and Amelia Island (overview of trucking litigation).
A Certified Civil Trial Advocate of the National Board of Trial Advocacy, he has been listed as a “Super Lawyer” (Atlanta Magazine), among the “Legal Elite” (Georgia Trend Magazine), and in the Bar Register of Preeminent Lawyers (Martindale). In addition to trucking litigation, he has broad experience in products liability, catastrophic personal injury, wrongful death, spinal cord injury, brain injury and burn injury cases. Currently he is Treasurer and a candidate for President-Elect of the 41,000 member State Bar of Georgia.This post is subject to our ethical disclaimer.