As a father, I know from experience that every parent wants to provide for their children and give them the best life possible. As a bankruptcy lawyer, with more than 30 years’ experience helping families who are filing bankruptcy in Tennessee, I also know that sometimes short-term sacrifices and difficult decisions are what’s best for a child in the long run. Throughout my career, I have seen bankruptcy keep thousands of families together and actually make stability at home possible. No parent filing for bankruptcy looks forward to sharing the news with a young child. Many of the mothers and fathers I’ve helped have experienced fear or anxiety. They’re worried about losing their homes and other big life changes that
I often tell people that debt can happen to anyone. Throughout my 30-plus years as a Memphis bankruptcy lawyer, I’ve met thousands of people who are in debt through no fault of their own. Many of them are honest, hard-working men and women who were hit with an unforeseen medical emergency. A study released by the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2017 found that medical debt is the number one reason collection agencies contact consumers. Of the consumers in the report who had been contacted by a collection agency, 59% were for medical bills. In 2016, a report from the Kauffman Family Foundation concluded that more than 25% of Americans have someone in their household struggling to pay medical
NAS Children Suffering Brain Developmental Delays – TN Lawyers Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome has a devastating effect on Tennessee’s children. The most devastating way the opioid crisis affects Tennessee is in NAS children suffering brain developmental delays. NAS stands for Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome. NAS is a group of symptoms that babies born addicted to opioids suffer from. Opioid drugs pass onto a child in the womb if a mother takes them while pregnant. She may take these drugs for pain management or due to an addiction. When born, the child is cut off from the potent opioid drugs and quickly goes into painful withdrawal or NAS. NAS hurts children when they are first born, and long after. The initial symptoms
It’s getting harder to remember a time when you had to actually call a taxi. While there’s no denying the convenience, or the explosive popularity, of ridesharing services like Uber and Lyft, they can create some tricky situations from a legal standpoint: Who foots the medical bill if you’re a passenger in a ridesharing accident? The short answer is that it’s complicated. Here is my perspective as a Memphis auto accident lawyer. Ridesharing may not be as safe as it seems. Ridesharing companies like to tout their services as an affordable option for people who may have otherwise driven drunk, but the real story is a bit more complicated. Some studies have indeed found a decrease in alcohol-related car accidents
When credit card bills are piling up and car payments feel impossible, creating a budget is often the first step people take to get their finances back on track. If done correctly, a budget can do wonders, helping you save for your first home or even retirement. If you’ve filed for bankruptcy, budgeting is especially important. As a bankruptcy lawyer Memphis TN has counted on, I have seen this simple process change lives. Bankruptcy is the light at the end of a tunnel, offering a fresh start when you need it most. But if you continue to spend above your means after filing, rather than taking necessary steps to prioritize and focus your finances, you’ll end up right where you
Playgrounds are places of recreation and fun: smiling children, hide and seek, and swing sets. But one fall from the monkey bars can quickly ruin an otherwise perfect day at the park. Every year, more than 200,000 children visit the hospital for a playground-related injury; more than a tenth are treated for a traumatic brain injury. Here’s what you should know about playground accidents. The Most Common Causes Lack of Supervision Regular observation of a child at play is critical to preventing accidents. School teachers and daycare staff have a responsibility to prevent reasonable harm to those under their care, but understaffing is a big issue. If a child is injured on the playground due to negligent supervision, those responsible
Transcript: “Hello! I’m Darrell Castle. I’m an attorney licensed to practice law in the state of Tennessee, and one of the areas of practice that I utilize is medical negligence, or medical malpractice, if you will. “A lot of times, people will come to me, and they’ll ask me the question, ‘how long does a medical malpractice case taker?’ Because that’s of a concern to them. And my answer to that usually is, ‘Well, it takes a while. I’ll be honest with you; it takes a while,” because medical negligence, if you’re going to accuse a doctor or a hospital or other medical provider of negligence, you’re really stepping into territory that you need to know what you’re doing.
At this point, a college degree goes hand in hand with staggering loan debt more often than not — and recent statistics show the problem isn’t going away any time soon. The average student loan debt for Class of 2016 graduates was $37,172, 6% higher than the year before. Debt of this magnitude is downright debilitating. For many young people, it’s a barrier to buying homes or starting families of their own. It often feels impossible to pay off, and in some cases, it is. The number of defaulted federal student loans continues to climb. In 2016, approximately 8 million borrowers gave up on paying more than $137 billion in student loan debt, a new high. Many people don’t realize
Determining the responsible party for a car accident isn’t as easy as it seems. In fact, it’s even possible for both drivers to share fault equally. Here in Tennessee we have something called comparative negligence, a legal concept relevant to situations in which both parties share responsibility. With comparative negligence, fault is compared and assigned to the two different drivers in an accident. Insurance companies often use a defense of comparative negligence to try to save money on claims, shifting some of the fault onto the victim. For example, if you’re assigned 20% fault in an accident where the recovery is $10,000, you would be entitled to $8,000. However, in Tennessee, if the fault is 50% or more, neither driver
USA Today’s The Tennessean is reporting that a 19-year-old truck driver has been arrested in connection with a crash on February 14 that took the life of a motorcyclist. The driver also fled the scene of the deadly crash. According to Metro crash investigators, Leon W. Duke, from Nashville, was driving a friend’s pickup truck when he caused the deadly crash at the intersection of Anderson Lane and Gallatin Pike in the Madison neighborhood of Nashville. Duke was coming from a bar in the Rivergate area at the time of the incident. The report from law enforcement shows that Duke turned in front of the motorcycle driven by Curtis Kevan, a 59-year-old man from Bethpage, who died as a result