Cassie Preston Gailmor

Fault Is a Legal Determination

In December 2024, six crashes on the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway involved more than fifty vehicles — four pile-ups on the northbound bridge, two on the southbound, one of them alone involving more than eleven vehicles. Fog, a twenty-four-mile span with no shoulder to speak of, and dozens of drivers who had done nothing more that morning than leave for work.

When reporters wanted the collisions explained, Cassie Preston Gailmor's point was the unglamorous one: "Fault is a legal determination and it can take time to figure out." Six crashes are six separate legal events. A roadside apology and a police diagram are evidence, but neither one allocates responsibility; that takes the vehicle positions, the electronic data, the ownership and employment relationships behind each commercial truck, and the insurance actually available — compared, not assumed.

Gailmor's earlier defense work taught her to treat fault as a record-building question rather than an assumption made at the scene.

The Other Side of the File

Before moving to plaintiff-side work, Gailmor represented trucking companies, insurers and other defendants in transportation, premises and commercial cases, becoming a partner at Deutsch Kerrigan in 2018.

Her defense experience informs which records she seeks and where — dispatch, driver qualification, maintenance, vehicle data — and how she expects a defense team to test a claim: early statements, treatment gaps, prior medical history, comparative fault. A serious collision scatters its proof among people with different incentives — the driver, the carrier, the insurer, the police, the hospitals — and her preservation demands and record requests go to the custodian who actually holds each piece. The letter arrives before the evidence can age, addressed to the person who cannot claim not to have it.

She anticipates the defense from memory of how those files are built.

The Docket

Gailmor represented Herman Lewis in a premises-liability action against Walmart, removed from Jefferson Parish to federal court in New Orleans in 2023. She carried it through the forum fight, discovery and depositions, prepared the witness and exhibit lists, and opposed Walmart's request for more discovery time; the parties settled on December 13, 2023, against a developed trial record, and the court closed the case the next day while retaining jurisdiction to enforce the agreement.

She served as co-counsel for Edmond Nelson and Levell Bagneris in a federal transportation action against a driver, a trucking company, a construction company and an insurer, coordinating discovery across defendants who each held different parts of the record — the layered defense structure she once worked within, now approached from the other side.

After Hurricane Ida, she appeared for policyholders in the Eastern District of Louisiana's coordinated property-insurance docket — 935 Dumaine v. StarStone Specialty Insurance, JK Southern Realty, and Riche v. Safeport Insurance among them — and represented property entities in Residence Inn matters using the court's settlement-conference and mediation procedures. Within the shared case-management structure, each building kept its own evidentiary file: the storm was one event, but every roof, every policy and every adjustment was its own case, and she treated it that way.

Practice

Gailmor founded Gailmor Law Group in New Orleans in 2024, handling motor-vehicle collisions, work injuries, premises liability and insurance disputes.

Her bar work runs deep in the city's legal community. She serves on the Executive Board of the New Orleans Bar Association, having chaired its Young Lawyers Section in 2023, chairs the Solos and Small Firms Section of the Louisiana State Bar Association, and co-chairs the Women's Caucus of the Louisiana Association for Justice. She has served through the New Orleans Bar Foundation, the New Orleans Bar Association's Personal Injury Committee, the St. Thomas More Inns of Court and the Association of Women Attorneys.

She studied at Louisiana State University, took her law degree from Loyola University New Orleans, and was admitted in Louisiana in 2010. Before law she worked in fashion, retail and real estate.

Her move to plaintiff-side practice carried a decade of defense experience with it. She spent those years learning where the defense keeps its files, then changed sides carrying the map.