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This is marvelous! And long overdue! A college education is overrated and overpriced. After 4 years of a liberal arts education, in 90% of our colleges and universities, the graduate still has no skills. I had no skills!! And furthermore, the students have been fed a pack of lies by their ultra-liberals college professors that has heavily influenced the graduate’s world view. Vocational training gives many high school graduates excellent opportunities to find a field of training so they can actually find quality employment after the training. And they will not have to earn a graduate degree before possibly become employed! According to what I am now reading as reported in all news outlets, FedEx, General Motors, Home Depot, IBM, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, and a number of other companies signed a pledge to expand aprentenship programs, increase on the job training and educate both high school students and workers to transform their careers.

America is a country of working people, hard-working people indeed. For years, we have been sold a “bill of goods” that the only way to really be successful in our choice of careers is to go to a 4 year college. Then, if we want to genuinely be successful, we will attend graduate school in business, the law, medicine and engineering or computer sciences. The astronomical debt that is accumulated achieving this level of education causes an unbelievable amount of stress on the graduates, some with $200,000 or more of student loans to pay back over the next 20 years (while interest accumulates as well).

About two weeks ago I began interviewing for another paralegal for my law office. I have been quite worried that I will not be able to find a person with a soft heart and who exhibits grace and mercy. It is my fervent desire to find such a person, to continue the wonderful tradition of my current staff who does exhibit these qualities. I want my potential and active clients to be able to call in to my office and “feel” positive and welcoming energy from whosoever is on the other end of the call.

The second President of the United States of America was John Adams. He wrote: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Religious convictions, acknowledging an Almighty God, is the foundation of our Country. Morals, learned and passed down through religious teachings, are the guardrails to our behavior.

Many times Judges at all levels in the court system, either in the workers’ compensation system or in the state court in automobile accident cases or the Court of Appeals, would like to tell us lawyers a “thing or two” about how we present our cases to them.

There is a group of liberal lawyers, members of the American Bar Association, who are trying to get the rest of us lawyers to “protect our courts.” What they really are trying to do is to resist the many judicial appointments President Trump has made (with consent by the US Senate) to the Federal Court system.

Section 104 (a) (1) of the Internal Revenue Code clearly states: “…amounts received under workers’ compensation acts as compensation for personal injuries or sickness are not taxable.” If so, then your receipt of a workers’ compensation settlement is NOT taxable.

I had a Nurse Case Manager e-mail me recently, stating she needed my permission to work directly with my injured client. This is the law. However, the NCM can speak to the doctor without my permission. I hate that Rule that allows this!

For your lawyer to be awarded assessed fees in a case that goes to court means that the insurance company's defense of your case was UNREASONABLE.

I got a call from a potential client who lives and works in Covington, Georgia. It is about an hour’s drive from Atlanta. She said she had a lawyer but fired him because he didn’t care about and didn’t spend any time on her case. This lady worked in a manufacturing company and made good money. She described a lifting and twisting incident that caused her immediate low back pain.

We have all heard of carpal tunnel syndrome. That is a tightening of the muscles around the nerves in a person’s wrist. Once the muscles tighten due to extended repetitive motion such as production work, then that could be considered a job injury. There are many other situations like this with regard to someone’s low back or elbow or neck. However, people tend to think that unless they have a specific one-time incident of lifting or falling or twisting, then their injury will not be considered a job injury. That is wrong. Job injuries occur whenever a person’s need for medical treatment is the result of their job duties. There are many people who fail to report this type of injury or who believe they have not had a job injury or they just don’t want to get into a fight over whether they have actually had a job injury.

A very frustrated Hispanic client came to see me just recently. He signed a contract with a law firm in Atlanta but never met with the actual lawyer. He was represented by this law firm for about one month. He dealt with two different legal assistants and they were giving him conflicting legal advice. First of all, this is a violation of the State Bar of Georgia’s Code of Ethics, which states that only a lawyer can give legal advice and practice law.[1] Additionally, attorneys are responsible for the actions of their non-lawyer assistants and must keep in mind that they “do not have legal training and are not subject to professional discipline.”[2]

Many folks in the US today want instant gratification. They want to tap the cellphone and get news, sports, entertainment and weather in an instant. Click on Google and get your question answered instantly. Unfortunately, that is not how the law works. I wish I could tell you that “One Call Gets It All”, as some of the big TV advertisers suggest. This catchy phrase is so far from the truth that I think almost everyone now understands this.

There are many of time when a client comes to me in an automobile accident case and they are treated by a doctor who has not ordered any diagnosis testing. How on earth can one establish a diagnosis when the doctor will not take the time to order a CT scan, an MRI, EMG, or a nerve block or any other diagnostic testing? It just cannot be done.

How many of us measure our work by what job we do? American society measures too quickly our worth this way. There is a separation between mental and physical work. Those doing the mental work get paid more. Those doing the labor jobs, which are just as important as any other, get paid less. The mental jobs seem to have greater status.

In the case of Denise Hemmann, attorney in Jackson, Georgia, things did not go well. She has been sanctioned by the Supreme Court of Georgia four previous times for abandonment, failure to properly withdraw from representation and failure to communicate with certain clients about her withdrawal. All this was reported in the Fulton County Daily Report, Friday, November 1, 2019. Attorney Hemmann sought to receive public sanctions for her behavior, hoping that would be sufficient punishment. The Supreme Court said that was not enough of a punishment. The Court acknowledged that this being her 5th violation, disbarment was appropriate.

An American Bar Association’s National Task Force on lawyer well-being in 2018 reported that”…too many lawyers throughout the nation are expressing high levels of stress and are unhealthy and unhappy, which is adversely affecting their professional and personal lives.” (See the complete report @ www.lawyerwellbeing.net). Too many lawyers are depressed, dissatisfied with their career path, the type of clients they have, their office situation and this affects their personal life as well. Many lawyers resort to drinking alcohol, sometimes to excess and regularly so. This is never a good thing but it is socially acceptable to do so. Younger lawyers, having grown up in a different set of cultural circumstances, turn to marihuana to mask their depressive symptoms. They would vehemently disagree stating that marihuana in this age and time is for recreation only and has no other purpose and, of course, is not habit forming.

When I attend a legal seminar (lawyers are required to get for 12 hours of continuing legal education yearly) I usually learn a few new things, even in my areas of expertise. On November 8 and 9, Carmen and I attended a business builder seminar that was client centered in New Orleans. While it was not a “legal seminar” and I cannot receive credit for it as part of legal education, we both learned far more than any seminar I have attended in the last 5 years.

Big law firms, those TV law firms, who you see all the time on billboards and on TV ads at all hours of the day and night, enticing you to let them handle your automobile accident or job injury case, what are they really all about? The large law firms with 25 to 200 lawyers or larger might be great for big business clients, corporations and government. But for the little person who is injured, do not think for a moment you are getting better results because of the size of the law firm. Big is not better. In fact, I submit that you are worse off with a large law firm. He is why:

What should a new client expect from the time they pick up the phone to call the law offices of Thomas F. Brown? It is safe to say the caller expects a nice greeting from a person with a caring voice and not a receptionist who is just waiting to go to lunch or to go home at the end of the day. The caller does want to tell their story. They want a sympathetic ear. And they would like to tell it all to a lawyer.

When my office staff knows who is coming to the office on any given day, then the staff will greet the client by name when they enter. We do not expect a client to wait but 3 to 4 minutes for me. We offer the client something to drink and try to have a number of options to satisfy their tastes. We do not push a bunch of forms in front of my new clients to sign and complete that are on a clip board (like in all doctor offices). I have an intake sheet and I fill it out as we progress through the interview.

AT& T has a new ad campaign that tries to imply if you settle for their competitors, it is just OK services you will get, not exceptional services. A few of their commercials are great but, by and large, the consumer doesn’t make the connection that with AT&T you get great services. But there is a message here and it applies to the lawyer out there very clearly. Here is how the as runs.

As we think through some of our daily issues in life, wisdom and the application of it, does not always follow us as we make our important decisions. I define wisdom as the application of truth to life: to do the right thing in the right moment with the right power and with guidance from the Holy Spirit of God. Intellectual preparation is how you do your daily work. Spiritual preparation is to be in tune with the Holy Spirit.