The summer is here, and watersports on Georgia waterways are a fun way to cool off and have some adventure. Wakeboarding and waterskiing are extremely popular summer recreational activities, though there are certain potential dangers that confront those that engage in these forms of watersports.

We have all seen young teenage drivers behind the wheel of Pizza delivery vehicles in our community. Many people never consider the possibility that these young and inexperienced drivers who are rushing to deliver pizza while it is still hot may be involved in serious Georgia car accidents with pedestrians and other passenger cars, trucks, motorcycles or SUVs. A San Diego, CA jury recently returned a verdict of $10.8 million against a teenage pizza delivery driver and her employer, Pizza Hut, for a head-on collision that resulted in serious injuries to an 87 year-old mother and her daughter, who was a passenger in her car.

An off-duty police officer, and the restaurant that served her alcohol despite obvious signs the driver was intoxicated, have settled a wrongful death lawsuit to compensate the families of four young people killed and one man injured in a traffic crash in Des Peres, Missouri for $2.55 million. The bar and the driver settled for the combined total available limits of their insurance coverage. A wrongful-death lawsuit, brought by the deceased victims' families and the survivor, alleged that the female officer, who was off duty at the time, drank "a high quantity" of alcohol at O'Leary's Restaurant & Bar, and then drove her car into oncoming traffic.

A Baltimore, MD jury awarded $2.8 Million to the family of Daniel Edwards, a forklift operator who died in 2008 of mesothelioma, which was contracted after years of exposure at his place of work. Edwards worked unloading bags of raw asbestos with a forklift for 6 years at Charlotte, North Carolina-based National Gypsum Co.

A $15 million dollar verdict in a slip and fall lawsuit against Wal-Mart is believed to be the largest slip and fall verdict in the country. The case provides an example of the complex factual issues that can make these cases difficult to litigate as well as the types of evidence that must be uncovered to prevail. The plaintiff in the case was Holly Averyt, a self-employed trucker who delivered frozen goods to a Wal-Mart store in Greeley, Colorado.

A jury awarded $132.5 million in a wrongful death lawsuit for the tragic death of promising Mets prospect Brian Cole. The basis of the lawsuit was that the defective design of the Ford Explorer caused the SUV to rollover when Cole swerved to avoid another vehicle that had pulled into his lane which forced him to go onto the median before returning to the highway. The maneuver was a routine driving maneuver that is executed safely on a regular basis by drivers in other vehicles.

A federal court returned a verdict for $15 million to accident victims in a tractor-trailer case where the truck driver was intoxicated and had exceeded his hours of service without adequate rest periods. Stanislaw Gil, a truck driver, plowed his fully loaded 18-wheeler into a car in a construction zone.

A jury in Texas awarded seven passengers who were injured or killed in a 15 passenger van rollover accident $124.5 million dollars. 15 passenger vans are notorious for being prone to rollover because they have a high center of gravity. Government statistics indicate that over 1,500 people have been killed in 15 passenger van accidents since 1990, with approximately twenty-five percent of those accidents being rollover accidents.

Many people are aware of the serious danger posed by occupational exposure to asbestos, which is effectively the exclusive cause of mesothelioma cancer. Mesothelioma cancer is caused by exposure to asbestos fibers or dust and primarily strikes persons who worked with asbestos products in an occupational setting. It is a type of lung cancer that takes many years to develop and produce symptoms. What many people do not realize is that asbestos exposure can create a risk of second hand exposure to asbestos for those who have never worked around asbestos.

Tragically, an eight year old boy drowned while in the care of camp counselors. Prior to the child attending the camp, his parents had signed a waiver releasing the camp from liability. The attorneys representing the camp attempted to use this as a defense to accepting liability for the negligence of the camp counselors, but their argument was not successful.  $4.8 Million Dollars was recovered for Montlick & Associates' client.