Forest Park
Personal Injury Lawyer

To understand injury risk in Forest Park, start with what moves through it. I-75, I-285 and I-675 all touch the city, alongside US 19, US 41 and State Routes 3, 54 and 331. I-75 Exit 235 is Old Dixie Highway and Exit 237 is SR 331, Forest Parkway; the I-75/I-285 interchange is Exit 238, one mile north of SR 331. Forest Parkway itself runs 3.28 miles, from SR 85 south of the airport east to SR 54 at Lake City and Fort Gillem.

The freight picture

Atlanta State Farmers Market

150 acres, run by the Georgia Department of Agriculture, open 24 hours a day — one of the largest of its kind in the United States

Gillem Logistics Center

A 1,168-acre industrial and distribution park on the former 1,465-acre Fort Gillem

Kroger

A $175 million, 1-million-square-foot distribution centre there, plus a 375,000-square-foot e-commerce facility

Interstates

I-75, I-285 and I-675

Courts

Clayton County, in Jonesboro

A truck case is not a car case with a bigger vehicle

A commercial vehicle claim runs on a different set of records: hours-of-service logs, maintenance and inspection files, driver qualification files, dispatch and load paperwork, electronic data from the vehicle itself. None of it is in the police report, and all of it sits with someone other than you.

That is why the weeks after a truck collision are not a waiting period. A preservation letter has to reach the right entity, and there is often more than one — the driver, the motor carrier, the broker, the shipper. Working out who those parties are, and where each of them resides, is also what decides which county the case can be filed in.

Twenty-four hours a day

The Atlanta State Farmers Market covers 150 acres, is operated by the Georgia Department of Agriculture, and is open around the clock — one of the largest markets of its kind in the country. Gillem Logistics Center occupies 1,168 acres of the old 1,465-acre Fort Gillem, where Kroger built a $175 million, one-million-square-foot distribution centre and a 375,000-square-foot e-commerce facility.

Places like that are workplaces as well as destinations. Dock work, yard moves, forklifts and pallets produce injuries that are sometimes a workers’ compensation claim, sometimes a claim against a third party who was not your employer, and sometimes both running side by side. Which one you have is worth answering before anybody signs anything, because the two are governed by different rules and pay for different things.

Where a Forest Park case is heard

Forest Park is in Clayton County, so the county’s Superior, State and Magistrate Courts in Jonesboro are the starting point. Superior Court is a court of general jurisdiction with exclusive jurisdiction over felony jury trials, divorce, equity and title to land; State Court hears misdemeanours including traffic, and civil actions outside that list. Either can hear an auto negligence case.

Where the defendant lives in Georgia, the county is chosen by that residence (Ga. Const. Art. VI, Sec. II, Para. VI), and where several at-fault parties reside in different counties, O.C.G.A. § 9-10-31(b) allows the case in any county where one of them lives. Interstate freight is the situation in which that default most often gives way, because the defendant frequently does not live in Clayton County, or in Georgia.

Georgia has a separate rule for exactly that. O.C.G.A. § 40-1-117(b) provides that an action against any resident or nonresident motor carrier may be brought in the county where the cause of action, or some part of it, arose — and it is cumulative of the other venue rules rather than a replacement for them. So a Forest Park truck collision can be heard in Clayton County even when the carrier has never had an address in the state. Which of the available counties to file in is then a decision, and it is made early. Two years to file; four for loss of consortium (O.C.G.A. § 9-3-33).