Joe Fried

Joe Fried says he was always the kid who disliked bullies and had “a heart for the underdog.” After losing friends to DUI crashes in high school, he interned with the local police department and became a police officer for five or six years. Watching courtrooms, he saw that the quality of a lawyer mattered and that justice is not blind. A judge who called him into chambers, which he assumed meant trouble, instead befriended him and steered him toward law school.

Joe has seen the courtroom as a police officer, a federal law clerk, a part-time judge and a trial lawyer, and he says he surrounds himself with people who will challenge him rather than yes people. He asks his team, “How can the other side be a hundred percent right, and I still win?” He became a student of trucking, hiring instructors to teach him truck driving and taking a private course from a North American Transportation Management Institute safety-director instructor.

Joe calls his Ford litigation his coming-of-age case. It began with a Mustang that was hit from behind and caught fire, killing the occupant 40 days later, and led to a decade spent on fuel-system design. He tried the case for two months away from his family, a small team against an army of defense lawyers, and Ford changed the Mustang’s design. He believes people are alive today who would otherwise have burned to death. His clients, he adds, taught him that “a phoenix can rise from the ashes.”

Joe’s closing argument is that becoming a trial lawyer is really the journey of becoming the best person you can be. He admits he struggles with fears, anxieties and worries about how others see him, and he urges lawyers to embrace that struggle rather than banish it, because it helps them understand other people. He charges lawyers to leave their courtroom, community and home better than they found them, and when they fail, to own it quickly and apologize fully.

Fried Goldberg handles truck wreck, bus crash and commercial vehicle collision cases, and Joe Fried has handled trucking cases in 44 states. Nearly 20 years ago, when he began calling himself a truck crash lawyer, there were no billboards for such cases and colleagues thought he was crazy; his moniker became “truck crash cases are not the same as car crash cases.” His current focus is Amazon’s delivery network, where he says a facade of independence hides the company’s control over its drivers.

Joe earned his B.A. summa cum laude from Oglethorpe University in 1990 and his J.D. from the University of Georgia School of Law in 1993. He clerked for Judge Avant Edenfield of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia in 1994, then served as a part-time magistrate judge in Fulton County, Georgia, from 1994 to 2014. He is a member of the state bars of Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Texas and New York.

At Fried Goldberg in Atlanta, Georgia, Joe has recovered more than $1 billion for clients in more than 35 states, including a $24.6 million wrongful death verdict in Tampa, Florida, and a $1.6 million settlement for hip injuries in Daytona, Florida. He co-founded the Academy of Truck Accident Attorneys in 2006, played a leading role in establishing the National Board of Trial Advocacy’s board certification in truck accident law in 2016 and has delivered more than 600 presentations. The firm’s website is friedgoldberg.com.