Legal Question in Personal Injury in Georgia

Lawyers have years of experience to file such lawsuits, and it would take hours and hours, with many more facts, to guide you through it. If it is a viable case with a good chance of recovery one of those lawyers will take the case.

You need to hire a lawyer. You will get eaten by wolves if you try to file your own lawsuit. That would be an absurd waste of your time, and will not lead to positive results.

If you must know, you get a form called a complaint. Then you draft several pages of allegations about what happened. Warning: those allegations must satisfy elements of any cause of action, or the highly experienced defense attorney will get your case dismissed. Next you need to file that complaint with the court, complying with thousands of pages of rules and court opinions. You also need to serve the defendant (make sure you pick everyone who should be a defendant, and get their proper address for service). There are another thousand pages (or more) of rules related to proper service of process. Again, if you break them, case dismissed. You also need to file in the proper venue, and make sure you don't have a federal versus state case. If you file in the wrong venue or jurisdiction, again, case dismissed. These are all the easy issues in cases.

Next comes the hard part: discovery. You have to gather evidence in accordance with many more thousands of pages of rules. You can submit questions to the defense counsel, but there are rules governing what you can ask, when, and how you must ask those questions. There are numerical limits, too. The defense attorney will also be sending you questions. And you can ask for documents, and schedule recorded statements called depositions. Those cost a lot of money, which we pay for our clients, even if they recover nothing.

In the meantime, the defense attorney might file any number of long complicated documents called motions, asking to limit your discovery, or seeking sanctions against you for not complying with discovery rules. The judge will grant those if you screwed up. The defense also might file motions seeking to limit the evidence that can be admitted in compliance with another thousand + pages of evidence rules. Meanwhile, you will have no idea how to file your own motions in reply.

You also need to hire and consult the right experts. This includes medical experts who charge 10K per day for their time, give or take. And their opinions need to comply with all kinds of rules.

You also must collect enough evidence to get to a jury (during discovery) or the judge will dismiss your case, and might even grant sanctions against you for causing the defense attorney to spend too much time responding to non-compliant requests.

This goes on and on for another several hundred thousand pages of instructions, which is what we lawyers learn in law school.

Filing a lawsuit isn't like painting your living room walls.