Cassie Preston Gailmor
Personal Injury, Transportation, Premises Liability, and Insurance Litigation
Fault is a legal determination and it can take time to figure out.
Fault Is a Legal Determination
On the morning of December 17, 2024, fog closed over the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, the twenty-four-mile bridge between Metairie and Mandeville that runs its whole length without a shoulder to speak of, and six crashes involving about fifty vehicles shut both spans: four pile-ups on the northbound bridge, two on the southbound, one of them alone taking in more than eleven vehicles. Thirty-three people were taken to hospitals; the Causeway's general manager, Carlton Dufrechou, said fog was among the causes; and the drivers had done nothing that morning but leave for work. The northbound lanes reopened that afternoon before the evening rush, the fog came back the next morning, and Causeway police ran rolling convoys across the bridge to hold speeds down. When reporters asked Cassie Preston Gailmor to explain who would answer for it, her point was the plain 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 from each truck, the ownership and employment relationships behind every commercial vehicle on the bridge, and the insurance actually in force, compared rather than assumed. She took the same question onto WDSU, the city's NBC station, in a segment on the insurance claims that follow a pile-up.
Where the Defense Keeps Its Files
Her sense of what a fault determination takes came from more than a decade of building the other side's file. After Louisiana State University and a law degree from Loyola University New Orleans, with admission in 2010, she went to Deutsch Kerrigan, where she represented trucking companies, insurers and property owners in transportation, premises and commercial cases, and on January 5, 2018 she became a partner there, one of seven lawyers elevated that day, with a practice in civil litigation, trucking and transportation, premises liability and personal injury and a commercial-collections practice for businesses pursuing open accounts. Before law she had worked in fashion, retail and real estate. The defense years taught her which records decide a transportation case and where each one lives: dispatch logs, driver-qualification files, maintenance histories and the data a truck records about itself, held by a driver, a carrier, an insurer, a police department and a hospital who do not share an interest in producing them. They also taught her how a defense team tests a claim, through the injured person's earliest statements, gaps in treatment, prior medical history and comparative fault. Her preservation demands and record requests now go out early and to the custodian who actually holds each piece, and she reads a defense file from the memory of having built one.
A Ceiling Leak in Harvey
On June 27, 2021, Herman Lewis slipped on liquid leaking from the ceiling of a Walmart store in Harvey and was seriously injured. Gailmor sued for him in Jefferson Parish; Walmart removed the case to the federal court in New Orleans in 2023, where it was assigned to Judge Greg Gerard Guidry, and she carried it through the forum fight, discovery and depositions, prepared the witness and exhibit lists and opposed Walmart's request for more time for discovery. The parties settled on December 13, 2023, against a developed trial record, and the court closed the case the next day while keeping jurisdiction to enforce the agreement. On April 20, 2022, a commercial truck driven by Bryan Eugene Irvine struck the car carrying Edmond Nelson and Levell Bagneris from behind; Irvine worked for T. Lambert, Inc., doing business as J.L. Barnett Trucking, or for 3D Construction, and Great West Casualty Company carried the liability coverage. Gailmor served as co-counsel for Nelson and Bagneris in the federal court in Baton Rouge, coordinating discovery across a driver, a trucking company, a construction company and an insurer who each held a different part of the record, the layered structure she had once worked within; when the defendants moved to compel on December 8, 2022, Magistrate Judge Richard L. Bourgeois Jr. sent the parties to confer in good faith by January 20, 2023 before he would rule, with supplemental briefs due a week later on anything that remained in dispute. After Hurricane Ida she appeared for policyholders in the Eastern District of Louisiana's coordinated property-insurance docket, in 935 Dumaine v. StarStone Specialty Insurance, JK Southern Realty and Riche v. Safeport Insurance among others, and for property entities in the Residence Inn matters, using the court's settlement-conference and mediation procedures. The storm was one event, but every roof, every policy and every adjustment was its own case, and within the shared case-management structure she kept a separate evidentiary file for each building.
A Firm of Her Own
In 2024 she founded Gailmor Law Group in New Orleans, taking motor-vehicle collisions, work injuries, premises liability and insurance disputes for the people on the other side of the files she used to build; the docket runs to rear-end collisions, intersection wrecks and distracted or impaired drivers, to slip-and-falls, inadequate security and unsafe property conditions, and to construction-site injuries from contractor negligence and equipment failures. "My job isn't to make a case disappear with a quick check," she has written. "It's to make sure the people who hurt my client can't look away from what they did." She serves on the Executive Board of the New Orleans Bar Association, whose Young Lawyers Section she chaired in 2023, chairs the Solos and Small Firms Section of the Louisiana State Bar Association, co-chairs the Women's Caucus of the Louisiana Association for Justice, and has served through the New Orleans Bar Foundation, the New Orleans Bar Association's Personal Injury Committee, the St. Thomas More Inn of Court and the Association of Women Attorneys. Sixteen years after her admission, the work is the one she described on the Causeway: find who held the wheel, who owned the truck, who wrote the policy and what the data say, and let fault be determined rather than assumed.
