From Little Acorns Mighty Lawsuits Grow

By Katheryn Hayes Tucker
Daily Report
September 27, 2013

Sitting in an upstairs conference room at Savannah’s biggest law firm, HunterMaclean, it’s hard not to notice just outside the window the branches in the top of a grand old live oak tree on East Saint Julian Street. The bark is nearly covered in tiny green ferns.

“Those are resurrection ferns,” partner John Tatum explains when asked. “They turn brown when it doesn’t rain for a couple of days. Then after it rains, they’re green again.”

“Which means they’ve been green all summer this year,” notes partner Bradley Harmon.

A conversation starts about a recent accident involving that tree. A passing tall truck knocked off one of the branches. The partners marveled at how fast police and rescue workers arrived, and how many of them. No one was hurt. The concern was for the tree.

“In Savannah,” says Tatum, “trees are sacred.”

Indeed, some of them have names, listings on the National Register of Historic Trees and are thought to be more than 300 years old, according to the Savannah Tree Foundation website www.savannahtree.com, which also lists tree tours.

Another tree made the headlines of the Savannah Morning News that same day. It’s falling limb led to the biggest personal injury verdict in the city’s history, $12 million, and it’s still standing. “No one even suggested it should be cut down,” says city attorney W. Brooks Stillwell III, who accepted the job last year, leaving HunterMaclean after 41 years.

The two-week trial focused on the condition of that century-old tree: whether it should have been trimmed, whether it was damaged by sidewalk work in the area, whether it and others in poorer parts of town are as carefully maintained as those in the historic district where the one outside HunterMaclean’s office happens to be located. The city’s position was that the plaintiff’s injury was a tragic accident. Stillwell says that it was a green limb.

Stillwell says if the city cut all the live oak limbs suggested by plaintiff’s attorney Howard Spiva, Savannah would lose its famous tree canopy and cause a public outcry. The city plans to appeal the $12 million verdict.

Meanwhile, tourists continue to snap photographs of the Spanish moss-draped live oaks all over the city with their massive limbs floating over the heads of pedestrians.