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Georgia Motorists: Watch Out for Car Accidents this Fourth of July Weekend!

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  Every year nearly 20 people die on Georgia's roads over the Fourth of July weekend. I want to urge all of my blog readers to be extremely careful as they hit the road this weekend for family day trips, vacations, and fireworks shows. A few months back I did some research for this Georgia car accident blog, and discovered to my surprise what a large number of people die in car wrecks over the various holiday weekends. I had assumed I might find a tragic number of people died in car crashes that happened over New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, and I did. But I had not expected to find that so many people were killed in auto wrecks on the other holiday weekends. To get the stats, I looked at the data collected by the National Highway Traffic & Safety Administration for 2009, the latest data available online.  https://askcompetentlawyer.com/  NHTSA collects data about fatal car accidents from all fifty states and the U.S. territories. The   Fatality Analy...

Eleven Die in December 2008 Atlanta Car Accidents; Worst Month of the Year

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  More people died in car crashes in December 2008 than in any other month of the year. In fact, the "contest" wasn't even close. Eleven people died in ten separate December car accidents here in Atlanta. The next worst month was April, when seven people died in collisions. Three of the collisions involved pedestrians Perhaps predictably, given the holiday season, Atlanta police said 3 of the 10 wrecks were caused by DUI drivers who were under the influence while driving. I am an Atlanta auto wreck lawyer, and I have been chronicling the 2008 and 2009 car accidents around Atlanta. I am up to December 2008. I am using the FARS database in order to get the data I am using. The month got off to a bad start, when a drunken driver caused a fatal, two-car collision here in Atlanta.  https://askcompetentlawyer.com/complex-litigation/   The accident happened at the corner of Boulevard Dr. and Hansell St. at 7:19 p.m., and Atlanta police listed the cause of the acci...

Healthcare Fraud So Shocking You Won't Believe Me That It Happened

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  According to a criminal complaint filed by the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, a Detroit doctor has been falsely diagnosing patients with cancer, just so he can give them chemotherapy and make money from doing that. I am a whistleblower lawyer, and I had so much to do today that I had decided I would skip blogging today. But then I read about this case, and was so shocked and infuriated that I just had to write. The accusation is so bizarre that I'll say it again.  https://askcompetentlawyer.com/medicare-medicaid-fraud/   The Complaint says that Dr. Fata of Michigan diagnosed patients with cancer, even though they did not have cancer, because he decided he would like to make more money. Apparently he couldn't drum up enough cancer patients who needed chemotherapy, so he invented a few. The Complaint is filed as a healthcare fraud indictment. The doctor is accused of defrauding Medicare because he billed for chemotherapy, PET scans and other...

Under Georgia Law, Who Decides When Spoliation Has Occurred?

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  I live in Atlanta, Georgia and practice   Georgia personal injury law . I have been blogging about a legal concept called "spoliation", which is the destruction of legal evidence that could have been used in a lawsuit. I started off with a legal blog entry talking about the law and its origins, and then in a second blog entry I discussed   O.C.G.A. § 24-4-22 , the  https://askcompetentlawyer.com/complex-litigation/  Georgia statute about spoliation. In my third personal injury blog post on spoliation, I talked about the reason that courts punish spoliation, and in the fourth I discussed the court's concern that a party not be charged with spoliation if the party did not have custody or control of the evidence. In today's entry, I want to talk about what happens when a party is accused of spoliation. In legal matters, courts sometimes grant summary judgment, meaning the court decides before the jury trial starts that the law is so clear on an issue that the iss...

The Most Dangerous Roads Around Atlanta: Where Car Wrecks Occurred in 2009

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  I handle Atlanta   car wreck lawsuits , and I have been blogging about the statistics on car wrecks here in our city. I am using data from the FARS ("Fatality Analysis Reporting System") system, as reported on   City-Data.com , to see whether we can identify some trends and weaknesses in the road system here in Atlanta. From the 2009 data, we can see that some roads were particularly dangerous for Atlanta drivers. Some of the findings were pretty obvious. You would expect a number of deadly crashes on the heavily-traveled, multi-lane highways around Atlanta, and the data confirms the problem. Deadly car crashes occurred on all of the major highways around Atlanta. Two people died on the multi-lane road SR-400. Two more were killed along I-285 / SR-407, which runs around the city. I-75, another enormous, multi-lane road that crosses the city from southeast to northwest, saw five car wrecks that caused deaths. Four more deaths from car accidents occurred along I-85, which...

Eleven Die in December 2008 Atlanta Car Accidents; Worst Month of the Year

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  More people died in car crashes in December 2008 than in any other month of the year. In fact, the "contest" wasn't even close. Eleven people died in ten separate December car accidents here in Atlanta. The next worst month was April, when seven people died in collisions. Three of the collisions involved pedestrians Perhaps predictably, given the holiday season, Atlanta police said 3 of the 10 wrecks were caused by DUI drivers who were under the influence while driving. I am an Atlanta auto wreck lawyer, and I have been chronicling the 2008 and 2009 car accidents around Atlanta. I am up to December 2008. I am using the FARS database in order to get the data I am using. The month got off to a bad start, when a drunken driver caused a fatal, two-car collision here in Atlanta. The accident happened at the corner of Boulevard Dr. and Hansell St. at 7:19 p.m., and Atlanta police listed the cause of the accident as being a driver who was DUI. Two days later, on December ...

Pennsylvania Thinks About Fighting Fraud with a State False Claims Act

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  Will Pennsylvania get a new - albeit somewhat half-hearted - False Claims Act? Two legislators are urging the State to adopt a   Pennsylvania False Claims Act   that would at least allow the state to recover for health care fraud against the state. As a whistleblower lawyer who handles False Claims Act suits, I would like to congratulate the bill's sponsors for taking a step that just plain makes sense. https://askcompetentlawyer.com/fraud/  First, putting a stop to fraud is an obvious no-brainer. Bill sponsor State Rep. Brandon Neuman pointed out that the bill "would deter fraud and punish wrongdoers, and "raise significant revenues through recovered losses and other damages." Why would Pennsylvania -- or any other state -- not want to do that? Rep. Neuman also noted that if the state passed the statute, it would allow the state to get a 10% increase in the amount of money they receive for Medicaid recoveries. Representative Neuman was talking about...