Chatham County
injury lawyer.

Why crashes
happen here.

Chatham County combines the highest population in the region with the highest concentration of commercial truck traffic in Georgia outside metro Atlanta. Container freight leaving the Port of Savannah feeds continuously onto I-16 and I-95, and that traffic shares the same roads as local commuters, tourists heading to Tybee, and students. The Abercorn corridor in particular produces a steady volume of intersection and rear-end collisions.

Roads we see cases on

• Interstate 16 and its downtown terminus
• Interstate 95 through the western county
• Abercorn Street and the Southside corridor
• DeRenne Avenue
• Highway 80 to Tybee
• Islands Expressway
• Bay Street and the port approaches
• Veterans Parkway

Chatham County Courthouse, Montgomery Street, Savannah.

The courts
in Chatham.

Chatham County is the entire Eastern Judicial Circuit. It does not share judges with any other county, which is unusual in this part of Georgia and it means the calendar is set locally rather than around a circuit rotation.

Injury cases here can be filed in either State Court or Superior Court. State Court has concurrent civil jurisdiction with Superior Court without regard to the dollar amount, so the choice is a strategic one rather than a jurisdictional one. It turns on the judge, the calendar, and the nature of the case.

Civil filings in both courts are electronic. If your case ends up in federal court, Chatham sits in the Savannah Division of the Southern District of Georgia.

Where things are

• Superior Court, Chatham County Courthouse, 133 Montgomery Street
• State Court, Eugene H. Gadsden Courthouse, 400 W. Oglethorpe Avenue
• Eastern Judicial Circuit, Chatham County only
• Federal: S.D. Ga., Savannah Division
• Municipalities: Savannah, Pooler, Garden City, Port Wentworth, Bloomingdale, Thunderbolt, Tybee Island, Vernonburg

The largest pool
in the region.

Chatham has more than three hundred thousand residents, which makes it the fifth largest county in Georgia and several times the size of any of its neighbours.

Practically that means a deeper jury pool and a court system built to handle volume, with two courts carrying concurrent civil jurisdiction. Cases here generally move to trial on a more predictable schedule than in the surrounding counties.

Predictability is worth something in negotiation. An insurer that knows a case can actually be tried within a reasonable window behaves differently from one that knows a trial date is years away.

Chatham by the numbers

• Population above 300,000
• Fifth largest county in Georgia
• Its own judicial circuit
• State and Superior Court both hear civil cases

Not every case
involves a truck.

Commercial vehicle work is the centre of this practice, but it is not the whole of it. If you were hurt because someone else was careless, the call is worth making regardless of how it happened.

If a matter is outside what I handle, I will tell you that on the first call and point you toward someone who does handle it. That costs you nothing and it beats guessing.

Also handled

• Slip, trip and fall
• Premises liability
• Pedestrian and bicycle collisions
• Motorcycle collisions
• Dog bites and animal attacks
• Medical malpractice
• Wrongful death