By Atlanta Injury Law Blog , Ken Shigley.

This morning I had the privilege of speaking to the mass swearing in of new lawyers in Atlanta. Here's a link to the video and, slightly different, what I had planned to say:

Bar Admission Ceremony

Fulton County Courthouse

December 3, 2010

 Good morning. I’m Ken Shigley, president-elect of the State Bar of Georgia.

 On behalf of 42,000 members of the Georgia Bar, welcome to the profession you have invested so much time, effort, student loans and parents' money to enter during this Great Recession.

 All Georgia lawyers are members of the State Bar, through which our profession governs itself.  I urge you to take advantage of the networking and growth opportunities in the Younger Lawyers Division and 43 practice area sections.

 Of immediate interest, you get free computerized legal research as a member benefit, now Casemaker, switching to Fastcase next month.

 I want to make 3 points.

 1.         See your profession as a high calling.

 2.         View  admission to the bar as the beginning of a lifetime of learning.

 3.         Keep balance in your life.

 First, calling.

 Few careers offer as much potential for meaningful service as law.  Most of us started law school with a spark of idealism and optimism. That is tempered by experience, but rather than sinking into cynicism, cultivate a mature sense of high calling. That may lead you in amazing paths you cannot now imagine. 

 The Rules of Professional Conduct and professionalism standards are necessary guides, but no substitute for character. Build upon the moral lessons from your families,  scoutmasters and clergy.

 Remember that our biggest mistakes are mathematical. We miscalculate the brevity of life and the length of eternity. Explore how your own faith tradition relates to your role as a lawyer.

 Embrace your opportunities to work with hurting people, and to be a problem solver rather than just a gladiator.

 Explore the classic virtues: prudence, fortitude, justice, temperance, faith, hope & love.

 Second, lifelong learning.

 Law schools teach law as an academic discipline but don’t teach you how to practice law.

 Admission to the bar is just a starting point for that.

 You will make mistakes. We all do. Don’t be afraid to recognize your daily mistakes and learn from them.

 Many of the best minds in the profession are at your disposal, so seek out good mentors and be aggressive about continuing education. The Bar’s Transition to Practice mentoring program and mandatory CLE are minimums for licensing. You must go far beyond that to excel.

 You are entering the legal profession at an extraordinary time. Technology, economic stress, and global market forces will produce more change in our profession in the next decade than in the past century. You will see new business models for law practice, international outsourcing of legal work, and billing structures that create incentives for efficiency. The billable hour will cease to be the norm for law firms.

 You need core competencies that law schools do not teach – in communication, strategy, quantitative skills, cross-cultural work, project management and leadership.

 You must continually master new knowledge – including science and technology --in the subject matter of your legal work.

 If you are able to surf the wave of change, you can do very well, developing innovations I can’t foresee. If you do not continue learning, you will be toast.

 
Third, balance. 

In a study of clinical depression in 104 occupational groups, lawyers were #1.   13% of lawyers consume 6 or more alcoholic drinks per day.  Mental health and substance abuse issues are present in most lawyer discipline cases.

The State Bar has a Lawyers Assistance Program for lawyers who get on that slippery slope, but prevention is better than treatment.

Be your brother’s and sister’s keeper. If you have a colleague who has a substance abuse problem, contact the Lawyers Assistance Program to arrange an intervention. I wish I had done that for one of my buddies from high school days, whose drinking impaired his judgment. He plead guilty to a felony and was disbarred.

So put the daily grind of work and the economic distress in a larger context, cultivate that sense of calling.

 At the risk of sounding like your mom, eat right and get enough sleep and exercise to maintain physical and mental health. If you neglect that over time, the long hours and stress of law practice can be deadly.

 Maintain healthy interests outside the law.  A weekend camping in wilderness lowers my blood pressure about 20 points.

 Keep room in your life for the people you love.  No success at work is worth failure at home.  At the end of this earthly sojourn, you won’t regret time spent with your family rather than at the office.

 So, view law as a calling, keep learning, and keep a healthy balance in your life.

 And if you know someone who is run over by a tractor trailer, call me. With two kids in college, I need to make a living too.  We can both do well.

God bless you all.

Ken Shigley, author of Georgia Law of Torts: Trial Preparation & Practice, is  a Certified Civil Trial Advocate of the National Board of Trial Advocacy, and has been listed as a "Super Lawyer" (Atlanta Magazine), among the "Legal Elite" (Georgia Trend Magazine), and in the Bar Register of Preeminent Lawyers. He practices law at the Atlanta law firm of Chambers, Aholt & Rickard, and has broad experience in catastrophic personal injury, spinal cord injury, wrongful death, products liability,  brain injury and burn injury cases. He is also president-elect of the State Bar of Georgia. Ken and Sally Shigley have been married 27 years and are proud parents of Anne Shigley and Ken Shigley, Jr.  This post is subject to our ethical disclaimer.

Originally posted at Atlanta Injury Law Blog . Please visit http://www.atlantainjurylawblog.com/ .

By Atlanta Injury Law Blog , Ken Shigley.

When I was an Assistant District Attorney in Douglas County one year out of law school, I was 27 but looked about 17. That spring, a lawyer-legislator from a neighboring county who used our District Attorney's office as his "home away from home" encouraged me to run against a frail and elderly State Senator from Carrollton.

I knew and liked that Senator's family, and chose not to run against him.  I figured if I forced him to campaign through the hot summer, he would drop dead in the heat and I would enter the Senate with his death on my conscience. He died the next year and one of my high school friends, Wayne Garner, won a special election to fill his seat.Wayne is now mayor of Carrollton.

For nearly a decade that seat has been held by Bill Hamrick, who is now in line to become chairman of the Georgia Senate Judiciary Committee. As president-elect of the State Bar I went to a lunch meeting with him yesterday.

Bill is a decent guy who works hard to do a good job for his constituents.  I am continually amazed at the personal and financial sacrifices he and other legislators make for public service.  With budget issues consuming more and more time, legislative sessions have stretched out from two months to four, making it increasingly difficult for independent professionals and business people to serve as citizen legislators.

If I had run, won, and hung on, I would now be the most senior member of the legislature. When I see the sacrifices they make year after year, I realize it may be good that I didn't follow that path.

Ken Shigley is  a Certified Civil Trial Advocate of the National Board of Trial Advocacy, and has been listed as a "Super Lawyer" (Atlanta Magazine), among the "Legal Elite" (Georgia Trend Magazine), and in the Bar Register of Preeminent Lawyers. The author of Georgia Law of Torts: Trial Preparation & Practice, he practices law at the Atlanta law firm of Chambers, Aholt & Rickard, and has broad experience in catastrophic personal injury, spinal cord injury, wrongful death, products liability,  brain injury and burn injury cases. He is also president-elect of the State Bar of Georgia. This post is subject to our ethical disclaimer.

Originally posted at Atlanta Injury Law Blog . Please visit http://www.atlantainjurylawblog.com/ .

By Atlanta Injury Law Blog , Ken Shigley.

The primary runoff election yesterday produced a muddled outcome and likely runoff for Governor, but one unambiguously clear and positive winner. Sam Olens, who until recently was chair of the Cobb County Commission and the Atlanta Regional Council, won his party's nomination for Attorney General in a landslide.

I have known Sam as a professional colleague, laboring in the trenches representing ordinary people, since long before he entered politics through his neighborhood association in East Cobb. He is a serious, soft-spoken, unpretentious guy who  is knowledgeable about a broad range of public policy concerns such as water and transportation, and does not come across like the typical politician.

Ironically, Sam is a Jewish Republican trial lawyer, endorsed by the Christian Coalition, and he beat former State Senator Preston Smith, who was the prime author and sponsor of SB3, the draconian tort reform bill passed in 2005, much of which has been held unconstitutional.

Ken Shigley, author of Georgia Law of Torts: Trial Preparation & Practice, is  a Certified Civil Trial Advocate of the National Board of Trial Advocacy, and has been listed as a "Super Lawyer" (Atlanta Magazine), among the "Legal Elite" (Georgia Trend Magazine), and in the Bar Register of Preeminent Lawyers. He practices law at the Atlanta law firm of Chambers, Aholt & Rickard, and has broad experience in catastrophic personal injury, spinal cord injury, wrongful death, products liability,  brain injury and burn injury cases. He is also president-elect of the State Bar of Georgia. This post is subject to our ethical disclaimer.

Originally posted at Atlanta Injury Law Blog . Please visit http://www.atlantainjurylawblog.com/ .

By Atlanta Injury Law Blog , Ken Shigley.

A great trial lawyer passed from the scene last week after a valiant battle with cancer. Fred Orr has served as president of the Georgia Trial Lawyers Association just last year. He was a trial lawyer for 46 years and practiced the last 35 years in the same building near the courthouse in Decatur.

Fred was a passionate advocate for his clients and his political candidates. He had many wins, and like any trial lawyer, also came in second enough to keep him humble.

His greatest win was a public interest case. In the Presidential Parkway case a generation ago, Fred led the legal battle against construction of in which the an eight-lane freeway through much of the historic Druid Hills community. The highway would have destroyed numerous parks, churches, the Fernbank Science Center, a virgin forest. and hundreds of historic homes in DeKalb County. Fred was a David going up against Goliath, but won at trial and on appeal.

Fred, old friend, you will be sorely missed. I will even miss all the emails seeking contributions for your candidates!

Ken Shigley is treasurer of the State Bar of Georgia, of which he has been elected to become president-elect on 6/19/10 and president on 6/4/11.

Mr. Shigley is a truck and bus safety trial attorney representing seriously injured people and families of people killed in tractor trailer, big rig, semi, intermodal container freight, log truck, cement truck, dump truck, log truck and bus accidents statewide in Georgia.  He has extensive experience representing parties in interstate trucking collision cases, He served as chair of the Southeastern Motor Carrier Litigation Institute and is a national board member of the Interstate Trucking Litigation Group of the American Association for Justice.

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.

This post is subject to our ethical disclaimer.

Originally posted at Atlanta Injury Law Blog . Please visit http://www.atlantainjurylawblog.com/ .

By Atlanta Injury Law Blog , Ken Shigley.

While my daily work in Georgia centers on litigation about tractor trailer wrecks, like most attorneys I have a peripheral interest in U. S. Supreme Court nominations.

News this morning is that President Obama will nominate Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court.  She is a former Harvard Law School dean and currently Solicitor General of the United States. The Solicitor General represents the federal government in the Supreme Court and is sometimes referred to as the "tenth justice" because of the close working relationship between that office and the Supreme Court.

If Kaplan is confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice, the next question is who will be tapped as the next Solicitor General. This is of somewhat more than academic interest to me because an Atlantan with whom I have worked in litigation was in the running for that job when Kagan got it in early 2009.  Teresa Wynn Roseborough, formerly at the Sutherland firm in Atlanta and currently chief litigation counsel for MetLife in New York, clerked for the retiring Justice John Paul Stevens, has been a finalist for an Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals post, was a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Clinton Administration, and was frequently mentioned as a likely Solicitor General when Obama was elected.  I count Teresa and her husband Joseph as friends.

Both Kagan and my friend Teresa Roseborough are significantly more liberal than I am on a number of controversial issues. (One likely would not be a member of the Christian Legal Society for 35 years without being a bit socially conservative.) But I deeply respect the abilities and character of both women.

Ken Shigley was recently elected president-elect of the 41,000 member State Bar of Georgia. His law practice focuses on representing people who are catastrophically injured, and families of those killed, primarily in  trucking and bus accidents, catastrophic personal injury, wrongful death, spinal cord injury , brain injury,  burn injury , products liability,and cases. Much of his practice is focused on tractor trailer, big rig, 18 wheeler, truck and bus crashes.  He is a Certified Civil Trial Advocate of the National Board of Trial Advocacy,  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). 

 For criteria to be considered in selecting an attorney, see The Smart Consumer's Guide to Hiring a Great Lawyer.

Originally posted at Atlanta Injury Law Blog . Please visit http://www.atlantainjurylawblog.com/ .

By Atlanta Injury Law Blog , Ken Shigley.

Today's Wall Street Journal includes a good piece by Peggy Noonan, who was a speechwriter for President Reagan.  In  "Look Ahead With Stoicism - and Optimism,"  she makes the point that while many institutions of society have failed in the first decade of this century, we can rebuild them by taking personal responsibility and focusing on the core mission of the institutions in which we labor.

Next Saturday, my name will be placed in nomination for president-elect of the State Bar of Georgia, to serve as president in June 2011 to June 2012. The Georgia Bar clearly is not one of those "failed institutions" about which Noonan writes. It has had a long string of sound leadership and outstanding continuity of sound professional management by top staff. 

But no institution is safe if its leaders forget their purpose. We can ill afford for anyone serving as president to drop the baton.

The stated purposes of the State Bar of Georgia are: 

(a) to foster among the members of the bar of this State the principles of duty and service to the public;

(b) to improve the administration of justice; and

(c) to advance the science of law.

That is a broad statement of the mission of the organization, but one we should not forget.  We must do the things implicit in those purposes, and we must do them well.

"Mission creep" can be the kudzu of any institution. As we review our programs and budget, we should keep the purposes of the Bar in focus. When we consider attractive, idealistic proposals that do not clearly relate to the core purposes of the Bar, we must ask whether they are appropriate uses of Bar members' mandatory dues.

Ken Shigley, an Atlanta attorney, is a national board member of the Interstate Trucking Litigation Group. His practice focuses on representing people who are catastrophically injured, and families of those killed, primarily in commercial truck and bus accidents. Mr. Shigley also has extensive experience representing parties in  products liability, catastrophic personal injury, wrongful death, brain injury, spinal cord injury and burn injury cases. He is a Certified Civil Trial Advocate of the National Board of Trial Advocacy,  has been listed as a "Super Lawyer" (Atlanta Magazine), in the Bar Register of Preeminent Lawyers (Martindale), and among the "Legal Elite" (Georgia Trend Magazine).

Mr. Shigley is currently unopposed as a candidate for president-elect, of the 41,000 member State Bar of Georgia, of which he has served as secretary and treasurer.

 For criteria to be considered in selecting an attorney, see The Smart Consumer's Guide to Hiring a Great Lawyer.

Originally posted at Atlanta Injury Law Blog . Please visit http://www.atlantainjurylawblog.com/ .

By Atlanta Injury Law Blog , Ken Shigley.

Too often I hear of injury victims who were directly solicited by phone or in a hospital by "runners" working for lawyers in Atlanta or elsewhere in Georgia. If you or a loved on is solicited after suffering an injury, you should know that any lawyer who participates in that sort of solicitation is subject to disbarment if caught.

Georgia Rule of Professional Conduct 7.3 provides, in part, as follows: 

(d) A lawyer shall not solicit professional employment as a private practitioner for the lawyer, a partner or associate through direct personal contact or through live telephone contact, with a non-lawyer who has not sought advice regarding employment of a lawyer.

Solicitations of accident victims by mail are improper within the first 30 days after the injury. Rule 7.3 also provides:

(a) A lawyer shall not send, or knowingly permit to be sent, on behalf of the lawyer, the lawyer's firm, lawyer's partner, associate, or any other lawyer affiliated with the lawyer or the lawyer's firm, a written communication to a prospective client for the purpose of obtaining professional employment if: . . .

(3) the written communication concerns an action for personal injury or wrongful death or otherwise relates to an accident or disaster involving the person to whom the communication is addressed or a relative of that person, unless the accident or disaster occurred more than 30 days prior to the mailing of the communication;

I have seen instances of even out of state firms that are not licensed to practice law in Georgia directly soliciting a widow before the spouse's body is buried. They are subject to reciprocal discipline in their home state for violation of these rules in Georgia.

The maximum penalty for a violation of  Rule 7.3 is disbarment.

Would you really want your important case to be handled by a bottom feeding scumbag of a lawyer so unethical and desperate that he is willing to risk losing his license to practice law if he is caught in that solicitation?

If you receive such a solicitation, get the name and number of the caller and then immediately call the State Bar of Georgia Office of General Counsel  at (404) 527-8720, and offer to assist in investigation and file a grievance for violation of Rule 7.3.

The State Bar needs to enforce the ethical rules and uphold virtue in the legal profession, but it cannot make strong disciplinary cases against such unethical lawyers without evidence required to support a prosecution.

Ken Shigley, an Atlanta attorney, launched the first law firm web site in Georgia in 1996, and the second lawyer blog in the state. He is a national board member of the Interstate Trucking Litigation Group. His practice focuses on representing people who are catastrophically injured, and families of those killed, primarily in commercial trucking and bus accidents. Mr. Shigley also has extensive experience representing parties in  products liability, catastrophic personal injury, wrongful death, brain injury, spinal cord injury and burn injury cases. He is a Certified Civil Trial Advocate of the National Board of Trial Advocacy,  has been listed as a "Super Lawyer" (Atlanta Magazine), in the Bar Register of Preeminent Lawyers (Martindale), and among the "Legal Elite" (Georgia Trend Magazine).

Mr. Shigley is currently unopposed as a candidate for president-elect, of the 41,000 member State Bar of Georgia, of which he has served as secretary and treasurer.

 For criteria to be considered in selecting an attorney, see The Smart Consumer's Guide to Hiring a Great Lawyer.

Originally posted at Atlanta Injury Law Blog . Please visit http://www.atlantainjurylawblog.com/ .