Law Offices of Joe Steffen

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Law Offices of Joe Steffen Serving clients in Georgia & Virginia in the areas of bike law, higher education, & personal injury.

10/11/2026

More than a hockey guy, I am and always have been a history guy, and so when the naming contest for this team turned up Savannah Ghost Pirates, I got a little loud about it.

Travis made the obvious case in our conversation. Savannah is a port city, we have a pirate museum, and we call ourselves the most haunted city in the world. Good marketing. All true. But the name reaches back further than that, roughly 200 years, to something that actually happened on our waterfront, and I'd wager most people who own the jersey don't know it. That's the clip.

I'll add that I was one small voice among many partners on that decision, and I'm glad the room agreed. Whoever designed the logo and the merchandise did something right, because in one of our early seasons this franchise led the ENTIRE league in merchandise sales, all 27 teams. That says something about the work our ownership group did. It says more about Savannah, and how badly this city wanted a home team to get behind.

Consultations are always free. joesteffen.com | (912) 999-8444

10/09/2026

I want to give credit where it belongs before you watch this one. Our majority partner, Andy Kauffman, and our local manager, John Thompson, have an excellent sense of what a fan wants from a night out, and the standard you see in that building is theirs.

Here's the thing people sometimes miss about the Savannah Ghost Pirates. We are a professional league, two steps below the NHL, and that makes us fundamentally different from an entertainment product. Nobody scripts the ending. On any given night we can stink it up on the ice and there is not one thing ownership can do about it in the moment ( a good owner stays out of the coach's business anyway ). What we can control is everything around the game.

That said, I do have two expectations for our coach and our hockey operations people. Win more at home than you lose, because nobody wants to cheer for a last place team. And never get run out of our own building. If we fall behind, I want to see our players keep pushing to the final minute out of respect for the jersey.

I'll admit that mindset sounds familiar from my day job. No honest lawyer can promise you how a jury will come out. What we control is the preparation and the effort, EVERY single day.

Consultations are always free. joesteffen.com | (912) 999-8444

10/08/2026

I'll say up front that I don't know if I'm in the majority on this, and I love soccer, so this isn't a knock on anybody else's sport.

But there are a few things hockey has that the others don't, at least in person. The rules are simple once you get past icing and offsides. You skate, you play offense and defense, you try to put the puck in the net. The seats are close, ALL of them, in a way that football and baseball can't match. At an SEC game with anything but field level seats, you might see a big hit but you won't hear it. At a hockey game you hear it, and you very nearly feel it. That's why I'll tell anyone that hockey is a better sport in the building than it is on television ( football is probably the reverse ).

And then there's the calendar. There's an old line that two thirds of everything that happens in Savannah happens in October, and I still believe it. From there until St. Patrick's Day, there isn't much else to go out and watch. We have those winter months more or less to ourselves.

In the clip I make the case for why people who come once tend to come back.

Consultations are always free. joesteffen.com | (912) 999-8444

10/07/2026

People see me in the Savannah Ghost Pirates and assume I'm a season ticket holder who got carried away. The truth goes back a good deal further than that, about 30 years now, to a time when I was a young lawyer in Virginia who still missed playing pond hockey in Chicago.

What the clip doesn't get to is what happened after those two French Canadian fellows and I put a team in Roanoke. I was not the largest shareholder. I ended up as the managing partner anyway, mostly because I was the one in the room with the legal and business background, and so I sat on the league board and learned how minor league hockey ACTUALLY works from the inside ( the good years and the lean ones ). I sold my share before that franchise fell on harder times, and I was fortunate in the timing.

Then I moved to Savannah, and the story took another 20 years to come back around. More on that in the clips to follow.

I'm a trial attorney first. But if you've ever wondered how a personal injury lawyer ends up with a piece of a professional hockey team, this is where it starts.

Consultations are always free. joesteffen.com | (912) 999-8444

How long will my case take? Here's the honest shape of it.Most cases wrap up in a little less than a year, and a lot of ...
09/17/2026

How long will my case take? Here's the honest shape of it.

Most cases wrap up in a little less than a year, and a lot of them resolve at mediation, which usually comes about a year in. Only about 5 to 8 percent go all the way to a judge or a jury ( or a workers' comp hearing ), and those take longer, especially in Chatham County, where the system is crowded. That's not slow judges. That's too much business for the number of judges we have.

The part people don't expect is that most really good cases never see a courtroom. The insurance company knows which lawyers will actually try a case, and that knowledge shapes what they offer long before trial is on the table.

Consultations are always free. joesteffen.com | (912) 999-8444

09/15/2026

I try not to take credit for things I can't prove.

Over the last several months, a number of our cases have settled fairly quickly and, frankly, generously. Now, I don't KNOW exactly why. It could be that some of the insurance companies have gotten better at telling the good cases from the bad ones. It could be that after 35 years, the reputation for taking cases to trial and pushing them to the end has started doing some of the work for us. My guess is it's some of both.

But here's what I do know, because I've watched it for a long time. Insurance companies pay attention to which lawyers will actually try a case and which ones settle cheap. ( Some of the bigger TV firms don't have trial lawyers at all. When a case has to go to court, they refer it to people like me. ) So when your lawyer's name goes on the file, the other side already has an opinion about how this is likely to go, and that opinion affects the number.

And so when people ask me what to look for in an attorney, I keep coming back to the same question. Does this lawyer actually go to court? You may never need them to. But the other side needs to believe they would.

Consultations are always free. joesteffen.com | (912) 999-8444

People sometimes assume a firm known for bicycle and motorcycle cases only handles bicycle and motorcycle cases. Not so....
09/11/2026

People sometimes assume a firm known for bicycle and motorcycle cases only handles bicycle and motorcycle cases. Not so.

Right now about 60 percent of what's on my desk is automobile accidents. Somewhere between 10 and 15 percent is bicycles and motorcycles, which is a much bigger share than those riders make up on the road ( and that's on purpose ). The rest is work injury and the occasional unusual case, like exposure to a toxin through a water supply.

And I'll say this because it's true, not because it sounds good: all of our clients' cases have equal value to us, whether it's a big case money-wise or a small one. That's not a cliché in this office.

Consultations are always free. joesteffen.com | (912) 999-8444

09/09/2026

People like to ask about the big courtroom win. And I understand why. But in 35 years on the plaintiff's side, I can tell you the landmark verdict is not an every year thing, for me or for anybody who's being honest with you.

There's a truism in this business that most of your really good cases never see a courtroom. The insurance company can usually read a strong case the same way we can, and so those cases settle. The ones that end up in front of a jury are the ones with some warts on them, where the other side believes they can win and we believe we can too.

Now here's the part I want you to take from that. Something like 5 to 8 percent of our cases go all the way to a judge or a jury. But the insurance company knows which lawyers will actually try that small percentage and which ones won't ( some of the bigger TV firms don't have trial lawyers at all ), and that knowledge shapes what they put on the table for every other case, long before a courtroom comes up.

So when we win a jury trial, and over the years we've had really good success with them, I'm proud of it. But the more IMPORTANT effect of being willing to try a case is what it does for the cases that never get there.

Consultations are always free. joesteffen.com | (912) 999-8444

09/04/2026

I got asked two questions about Savannah the other day, so let me take them in order.

The first was why cases move so slowly through the courts in Chatham County. And the honest answer is that it's not slow judges. It's a crowded system, and maybe not enough judges for the amount of business coming through the door. That's a systemic problem, not a personal one, and it means patience is part of the job for us and for our clients.

The second was whether I'm seeing more of anything in particular. Yes. Around the country, and no less here in Savannah, we're seeing more people hurt on the self-propelled bicycles and the little scooters. People aren't riding these things for recreation anymore. They're using them as vehicles, to get from one place to another, and that changes the risk. I saw a fellow yesterday doing about 25 miles an hour the wrong way on a bike path, no helmet, and I thought, that guy has no chance. Nobody's looking for him from that direction.

I've handled injury cases for 35 years, a lot of them on two wheels, and the lesson doesn't change. Bicycles and motorcycles are already hard for drivers to see. On one of these devices you're even LESS visible and you're moving faster than most cyclists can pedal. So the job of making yourself seen ( the direction you ride, the helmet, whatever gets a driver's attention ) falls even harder on you. It's why our message to riders has always been the same four words: work to be seen. I'd much rather you never need my number.

Consultations are always free. joesteffen.com | (912) 999-8444

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223 W. York Street
Savannah, GA
31401

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