Discovery · Privilege
Why Georgia law requires question-by-question invocation rather than case-wide stays, and how to brief against overbroad motions to freeze discovery.
Sovereign immunity · State constitutional law
How the Open Courts and Wrongful Death clauses set a 1895 ceiling on legislative immunity, why the 1888 Territorial Code defeats the typical defense framing, and how to allocate the historical burden in a response brief.
Damages caps · State constitutional law
How a half-page 1808 nisi prius report became the modern myth that common law barred wrongful-death recovery, what the older record actually said, and how to put the historical correction into a brief defending the jury-trial right against statutory damages caps.
Damages caps · State constitutional law
How a state property-protection clause that operates above the takings clause forecloses prospective redefinition of traditional property — why noneconomic damages qualify under Nestlehutt, how Tyler v. Hennepin County maps onto the state-law question, and a brief-writer's frame for running the property-rights argument alongside the jury-trial-right argument.
Service of process · Due process
How conflating the service statute with the due-process inquiry lets defendants escape on a notice-quality theory the statute does not contain, the two-box analysis that pulls the questions apart, and the structural arguments — textual reading of "address," the "if his address is known" conditional, and actual notice through other channels — that the framework makes available. Open in Georgia after an unsigned, non-precedential affirmance in Abebe v. Ikard, A25A2042.
Service of process · Statute of limitations
When a Georgia trial court treats the filing of the return of service as if it were part of service itself, it can manufacture a statute-of-limitations dismissal that the law does not authorize. The Civil Practice Act treats filing, service, and proof of service as three separate acts, and OCGA 9-11-4(h) says in plain terms that '[f]ailure to make proof of service shall not affect the validity of the service.' McPherson, Lewis v. Waller, Newsome, Cosby, Kemron Environmental, and now Perry v. Pearson all hold that a late return is not a basis for dismissal where service itself was timely. The article walks through the statutory architecture, the binding precedent, the misreading of Jones v. Bibb Brick that produces the wrong result, the asymmetric remedy that § 4(h) actually provides, and the practice points for plaintiff's counsel facing a § 4(h) dismissal motion. Drawn from the appellant's briefs in Perry v. Pearson, A25A1075.
Statutory interpretation · Sovereign immunity
The derogation-of-common-law canon, traceable in Georgia to Tuttle v. Walton (1846), is a textualist brake on statutes that displace common-law rights — not a license for harsh readings or unwritten requirements. A worked treatment of the directional language in West, MLK, and Moultrie, the engine of the canon in OCGA 1-1-10(c), the textualist threshold from Turner and Glover, and the inversion pattern in which "strictly construed" is invoked to add the very requirements the canon was designed to keep out, drawn from the author's briefing in Frazier v. City of Albany.
Medical malpractice · Evidence
Why "this has never happened before" testimony from defense witnesses in medical-malpractice trials is irrelevant to the standard of care, why the trial-court "background facts that might have influenced decision-making" rationale collapses into a residual grant of relevance the Evidence Code does not authorize, and how the unfair-prejudice analysis runs in a chilling direction the standard caselaw is not built to address. Drawn from the cross-appellant's brief in Keel v. Georgia Bone & Joint Surgeons, A25A0382.
Damages caps · Medical malpractice · State constitutional law
When a statute that interferes with a fundamental right has to clear strict-scrutiny means-end fit, the inquiry is empirical. On Georgia's medical-malpractice damage caps, decades of professional literature point the same direction on both purposes the legislature declared in 2005 Ga. SB 3: caps don't lower premiums (premiums move with the insurance industry's investment cycle, not with payouts), and after-the-fact studies of states that adopted caps in 2003-05 show non-fatal patient-safety events worsened. Drawn from the author's amicus brief on behalf of Paul Kogut in the appeal in which the appellants ask the Georgia Supreme Court to overrule Atlanta Oculoplastic Surgery v. Nestlehutt.
Medical malpractice · Summary judgment
OCGA 51-1-29.5 gives ED defendants a special, defense-friendly standard of care. It does not apply to every ED case. It applies only when the patient's symptoms were so severe that any short delay of medical attention would have caused serious harm. The defense wants the higher standard, so the defense has to prove the predicate. The proof has to be expert testimony — the predicate is a question of medical causation, and Cowart v. Widener has required expert testimony on medical causation for decades. No expert means partial summary judgment under OCGA 9-11-56(d) takes the gross-negligence instruction off the table before the jury hears it. Drawn from the plaintiff's motion for partial summary judgment in Barnett v. Johnson, State Court of Cobb County.
Bad faith · Insurance · Legal ethics
When an insurer refuses to settle a serious case within policy limits, the plaintiff's lawyer has a brief real-time window to make a possible future bad-faith or malpractice case easy to bring. Contemporaneous correspondence to coverage counsel and defense counsel — written in summary form, in the persona of an objective lawyer rather than a partisan — leaves the basic facts plain on the face of the documents themselves rather than reconstructed later from diverse exhibits or testimony. The technique is consistent with Rule 4.2 and Formal Advisory Opinion 86-4. Persona on the page does the work: objective, direct, factual, not heated.
Bad faith · Insurance · Choice of law
When an out-of-state insurer invokes a policy choice-of-law clause to drag the bad-faith tort claim into a remedy-poor jurisdiction, two doctrines applied in sequence keep the case in the forum state's bad-faith law. First, the recurring three-verb construction ("subject to, governed by and shall be construed in accordance with") is ambiguous as applied to disputes; insurance ambiguities are construed against the insurer; the clause confines itself to disputes that require policy interpretation. Second, even on a reading that reaches the tort, the difference between full tort remedies (forum) and a $60,000-and-fees cap (chosen state) is fundamental within the meaning of the conflicts rule, and the Restatement § 192 cmt. e supports refusing enforcement. The article walks through the two steps, the unreasoned ipse dixit pattern in the defense's lead cases, the closely-related and group-policy moves, the role of California decisions in states that borrowed their bad-faith doctrine from California, and the certification fallback. Drawn from the plaintiff's reply brief in Brower v. Great-West Life & Annuity Ins. Co., D.S.D. 4:25-cv-04040-RAL.
Discovery · Sanctions
In a meaningful corner of trial-court practice, written discovery has drifted into a register of evasion: hedged objections, sworn responses that hedge clear factual questions into ambiguity, sworn answers the responding party knows are not true. Georgia law does not converge there. Sworn discovery responses are sworn testimony the receiving party is entitled to rely on (Resurgens v. Elliott, 301 Ga. 589 (2017)). Discovery relevance is issue relevance, not party-favorable relevance (OCGA § 9-11-26(b)(1); Omni Healthcare, LLC v. Stacy Young Excavation, Inc., 377 Ga. App. 85 (2025)). The duty to supplement is real and continuing (OCGA § 9-11-26(e)(2)(B); Anglin v. Smith, 346 Ga. App. 456 (2018)). A substantively false response is a total failure to respond, sanctionable under OCGA § 9-11-37(d) without first compelling (Foundation Contractors v. Home Depot, 359 Ga. App. 26 (2021)). The article walks through the five-rule framework, two illustrations (the harmful document the producing party did not want to produce; the sworn answer that cannot be true), the predictable defense objections and why each fails, and concrete brief-writer moves for both withholding cases and false-answer cases. Anchored in the Court of Appeals's recent sanctions decision in Bridges v. Gupta, Case No. A26A0095, 2026 Ga. App. LEXIS 205.
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