“Truth and Excellence in Preparation and Strategy”

        Verum quod Excellentia in Paratus quod Intentio

 

Attorney Keith Prater Handles All Types of Personal Injury Cases.

 

Keith is South Atlanta’s Personal Injury and Products Liability Plaintiff’s Lawyer

 

“Perhaps the only attorney in the Coweta and Griffin circuits who has settled multiple product liability lawsuits in the last decade,” South Metro Atlanta Trial Lawyer Keith Prater talks about his recent experience in products liability litigation.

 

“Recently, I sued a Taiwanese helmet manufacturer whose products are sold worldwide, but whose true identity the company goes to great lengths to keep secret.  The helmet at issue appeared to have been the material cause of our client suffering a head injury that caused permanent damage.”  KP

 

Litigating with Big Law Firms requires going the extra mile…

 

“From the beginning we knew this was going to be an uphill battle.  The first question was whether the Chinese manufacturer was located in mainland China or on the island of Taiwan.  The former being subject to the Hague Convention which requires that a service copy of the lawsuit complaint be in Mandarin!  So I also engaged an interpreter fluent in Mandarin and had that person on standby to translate the complaint into that language if I needed it.  I spent days researching the company and finally found a shipping manifest that revealed an address in a city on the island of Taiwan.  I then spent three days cruising the streets of a city of two million people on Google Earth trying to locate and confirm the address of the helmet maker.  Finally, while watching a football game at home on the third day I found a small single door storefront with a window in which a small flag of the other brand of helmet in it could be seen; as I traveled around the storefront it was revealed from a single angle that the little door led back to a block wide manufacturing building that had storefronts all along the street of different businesses but looming above them was a continuous huge 4 story building. I had finally found the actual building where personal service could be made.    It was pretty cool to see the place right there on my computer.”  KP

 

Once served, the manufacturer defendant retained one of the most respected Atlanta based law firms in the country.  The distributor who was also in the suit for a number of reasons retained another Atlanta based law firm that was likewise highly respected throughout the country.  The ‘battle’ was on!  After litigating the case for over a year with the lawyers assigned to defend the case, and engaging a multitude of experts in the matter, the case was settled on confidential terms!

 

Opening Doors to the Truth often calls for ‘sweat equity’ …

 

“I had a client once who suffered a motorcycle accident by hitting a dog in a residential neighborhood.” Keith says about a difficult case.

 

“We went out and canvased the neighborhood and interviewed several neighbors.  The key to that case was clearly establishing that the dog, a beautiful golden retriever, was roaming around the neighborhood at will and that everyone knew it.”  KP

 

“My team and I knocked on more than a few doors to get the facts and get them we did.”  KP

 

That case ultimately settled with a substantial six figure sum that the client deserved.

 

“Our client and his wife in that case were and are great people, wonderful folks.  What the client went through was devastating and painful and in my opinion worth more than the ultimate settlement, but there was not enough insurance money to make he and his wife whole so we took what was there, all of it.”  KP

 

“The same thing had to be done in a recent dog bite case.  It occurred in the owner’s home so we had to canvas the entire neighborhood to determine whether the dog had been a menace.  We learned that not only had he been a menace, he had been terrorizing the neighborhood for some time.” KP

 

“I cannot over state how important having private investigators to help me has been in a multitude of cases.  My private investigator has frequently turned an ordinary case into a ‘large’ case.”  KP