Lawyers from Scrudder Bass are appealing a professional negligence sanctions order that ordered them to pay a half-million dollars in attorney fees after they ended their representation in a case because of a conflict of interest their client made them aware of during voir dire.
The plaintiff in the underlying case, Rhonda Barken, sued the City of Atlanta and 21 city employees when her husband was killed in an accident on Decatur Street in Atlanta, alleging a malfunctioning reversible lane signal was responsible for the incident. According to the city’s opening appellant brief, during discovery, it produced service requests with information about the lane signal in question that indicated they were created by defendant Ann Green, who then worked as a traffic systems operator.
