Joseph A. Fried

Joseph A. Fried closed his examination of the man who owned Fly Fella Logistics with a question about control. Fly Fella delivered packages for Amazon under a contract that called it an independent business, and Amazon’s defense in Bradfield v. Amazon Logistics rested on that contract. The owner was a retired military man who had never owned or worked at a delivery service before he became an Amazon delivery partner, and he took pride in running his own business. Fried has recounted his last question this way: “So you agree that while you had some control as the employer, Amazon also had the same control, so you both had control.” As Fried recalls it, the owner answered, “Well, I don’t like the word control, but yes.”

Fried and his law partner, Michael Goldberg, had planned to follow the owner with a witness from Amazon. After that answer, Fried has said, they decided that “this jury got this,” and asked themselves what they would risk by leaving Amazon off the stand. The exhibits they had planned to offer through Amazon’s witness, Fried got into evidence during the owner’s testimony. The lawyers expected that if they did not call Amazon, Amazon would not call its own people either, and that the jurors would then see a company that “doesn’t even care enough to put a real person up in front of you to talk about this case.” That, Fried has said, is how it went. Amazon’s representative in the courtroom was a risk manager.

The jury in Bradfield v. Amazon Logistics answered two questions about Amazon. It found that Amazon had failed to train the man driving an Amazon delivery van through a Georgia subdivision in 2022, and it assigned Amazon 85 percent of the responsibility for what the van did to an eight-year-old boy. It also found that Amazon exercised enough control over Fly Fella Logistics, the company that employed the driver, to be liable as his employer for the driver’s own share of the fault. The verdict, returned in the State Court of Gwinnett County in August 2024 after a four-day trial before Judge Jaletta Smith, came to $16.2 million.

Amazon’s defense to the second question was the contract. Fly Fella, the trade name of Thompson & Carter Entities, was one of the companies Amazon calls Delivery Service Partners, and Amazon argued that the driver worked for Fly Fella, an independent business, and not for Amazon. Georgia’s statute states the rule behind that defense: “An employer generally is not responsible for torts committed by his employee when the employee exercises an independent business and in it is not subject to the immediate direction and control of the employer.”

Fried, an Atlanta trucking lawyer, founded Fried Goldberg LLC with Goldberg. At trial he questioned Fly Fella’s owner to eliminate any legal presumption that the delivery partner was an independent contractor, and after both defense lawyers had closed, he gave the last argument the jurors heard. Goldberg led the trial, opening the case and making the first closing argument, and Nathan Gaffney, a partner at the firm, researched the law of dual employment.

A Cul-de-Sac in Fayette County

The crash happened in 2022 on a cul-de-sac at the back of a Fayette County subdivision. Gabe Bradfield, who was eight, was riding an electric bike. Jawonn Cowan, driving for Fly Fella, had stopped his van to let a group of children cross the street. Three of them crossed. As Cowan accelerated from the stop, the van struck Gabe, ran over him, and dragged him 21 feet. He suffered a broken pelvis and a degloving injury to his leg that required multiple surgeries and skin grafts and left him with permanent scars.

Gabe’s father, Philip Bradfield, brought the suit and testified at the trial. He works with counselors in the foster care system. Fried has said that when Gabe was hurt, his father was at home taking care of a two-month-old foster child, “literally in arms himself.”

Each defendant gave the jury an account of the crash that put the fault somewhere else. Wayne Satterfield of Hall Booth Smith, representing Fly Fella and Cowan, told the jurors that Cowan pulled away only after the group of five-year-olds had crossed, that he never saw the boy on the bike, and that the child entered the street too quickly and at an angle that made the collision impossible to avoid. “What else was he supposed to do?” Satterfield asked. R. Dal Burton of Wilson Elser, representing Amazon, put the fault on the adults, Gabe’s father among them. The boy had been playing outside at a neighbor’s home, and Burton told the jury that the neighbor had acknowledged leaving him and three five-year-olds outside unattended. She would testify, Burton said, that she would have stopped the boy had she been outside, and he called that “an admission that this accident never happens.” In closing, Burton argued that poor supervision had given the child access to a bike that was wrong for his age. Gabe, he told the jurors, had taken the unlocked bike from the garage after the neighbor went back inside, and it was built for riders thirteen and older.

In jury selection, Goldberg had screened out prospective jurors who blamed parents for children’s accidents. After the verdict, Fried called Amazon’s supervision argument “a ridiculously unfair attack.” He has since put it as a question: “This guy was hands-on with a two-month-old and they’re going to make that guy into a bad parent?”

Visible the Whole Time

Fried Goldberg brings an accident reconstructionist into its cases early, Goldberg has said, and in this one the reconstructionist went out to the cul-de-sac and found “a 21-foot scrape mark across the cement where the child was under the van and had been dragged.” Police body-camera footage let him place the van at the point of impact and where it came to rest. A reenactment showed that Gabe would have been in Cowan’s view whichever way he had come, unless packages on the dashboard blocked it. Fried has said the body-camera video showed packages stacked on the dash.

Amazon tried to make the case about the direction Gabe had come from. Fried and Goldberg would not argue it. “Be careful what you undertake to prove,” Fried has said. “If we had accepted Amazon’s efforts to make this case about which direction Gabriel was coming from, and we had fought that fight with them, that’s the way you can lose a case like this.” The evidence left the jurors three possibilities, as Goldberg described them: Cowan did not look, did not look properly, or looked and could not see past packages that were not supposed to be on the dashboard. “Either way, we win the case.”

An Independent Business

Fried knew how Amazon’s delivery cases usually ended. “Historically, around the country, Amazon has not allowed cases to go to trial,” he has said. “They’ve resolved them, and they’ve insisted on confidentiality from every litigant, including us.” The trial team had already handled a number of cases against Amazon before this one reached a jury, and Fried expected this one, too, to settle close to trial. Amazon, he has said, is “really, really, really aggressive” about keeping its operations confidential.

Fried, Goldberg, and Gaffney answered the contract with the way Amazon ran the work. They argued that Amazon’s control over its delivery partners—mandatory training, a proprietary app the drivers used, performance metrics, and standards for the vehicles—made Amazon the driver’s employer in fact. Under Georgia law, a company that controls the time, method, and manner of someone’s work can be treated as that person’s employer even when the contracts call the worker an independent contractor. The jury had to decide whether Amazon held that control over Fly Fella and its drivers.

Fly Fella’s place of business, as registered with the secretary of state, was inside Amazon’s facility, Goldberg has said. Once a driver arrived at that facility, in Fried’s words, “the app is telling the driver what’s next for you.” Fried has described a contract that reached the delivery partner’s business structure, payroll, paid time off, policies, and discipline, and under which Amazon could tell the partner to discipline or retrain a driver. Goldberg has pointed to the Mentor app, which “grades the driver’s driving behavior to see if they are a safe driver.” “Technology can have just as much control over a worker as a manager,” he said.

Fried kept the proof to what the jury needed. In cases like this one, he has said, lawyers often file motions to get into Amazon’s computer systems “to look for the inner workings of how the sausage is made.” He decided this case did not need that. “I have what I need to establish control,” he said. “Why go through fights and delays and a lot of expense?”

Fried bought a marionette for the trial, from Amazon. The figure at the top would be Amazon, the next the delivery partner, the last the driver, and the words would be Amazon’s: “We don’t control the driver, we just control the strings. We just control the DSP.” If you control the strings, Fried meant to tell the jurors, you control the driver. In the end he did not use it.

He made the point through the owner. In Fried’s view, Amazon had sold the man “this bill of goods of, you’re your own independent businessman,” and Fried began by reassuring him. “Sir, I want you to understand, nobody here is here to take away from you that you own your own business,” he recalls telling him. “Nobody here is saying that Amazon replaces you as the employer here.” Then he asked whether Amazon, which had trained the owner on everything else, had ever told him that under Georgia law a company that controls the time, method, and manner of the work can be responsible in addition to him. By Fried’s account, the owner said, “No, no, no, no one ever explained that to me.” Fried has said the man had been prepared not to acknowledge control. The questions tracked the dual-employment law Gaffney had researched, under which Amazon could answer for the driver alongside Fly Fella.

Jason Stewart, another Wilson Elser lawyer on Amazon’s side, then cross-examined the owner to establish that the business stood apart from Amazon. Amazon’s position, as Goldberg later described it, was that software did the directing. “Amazon tried to say we had no control over [drivers] because it’s really the tech telling them what to do,” he said. “It all comes through an app on a phone.” Companies that make that argument, Goldberg said, ignore “the fact that the tech they set up is controlling every aspect of time, method and manner of the work.”

Seventeen Days After the Crash

The second claim was negligent training. Burton opened for Amazon with images from its training videos, arguing that Cowan had followed all the safety training that applied to him. Goldberg answered with a date. “You will hear that, 17 days after this accident, Amazon made him go through training,” he told the jurors in his opening. The course covered motorcyclist, bicyclist, and pedestrian awareness. “But they didn’t give it to him before this accident,” Goldberg said. Goldberg later questioned an Amazon witness to show that the driver had not been trained on the hazards of children in residential areas before the crash.

The plaintiffs identified two gaps. Amazon had not trained Cowan on how to handle children in a residential neighborhood, or on how to drive the vehicle he had that day, a rental van instead of the usual delivery van. The rental had none of the shelving Amazon’s vans use for staging packages. “He testified he was using the front seat, the dash, the floor, because he didn’t have any place else,” Fried said afterward. “Amazon had this system they had trained on but then they didn’t train this guy on what to do in a temporary van.”

Cowan was twenty-one. “He needs to make 187 deliveries in a single day, which is kind of inhumane,” Fried said. “Let that sink in. One hundred and eighty-seven. Not packages. One hundred and eighty-seven deliveries.” Fried has said Cowan was between his 142nd and 143rd delivery when the van hit Gabe, and that he “hadn’t taken a single break.” Goldberg pointed out that Cowan had gone six hours without a break and was running late.

At one point the lawyers considered abandoning the training claim. “There was a time when we thought we’d drop the training claim and just stay with the control claim alone,” Fried said. “It’s a good thing we didn’t.” The training claim carried the jury’s 85 percent finding against Amazon.

Hungry, Tired, Running Late

Fried and Goldberg presented Cowan to the jury as a young man Amazon had put in an impossible position. “The driver was such a nice young man,” Fried has said. After the trial he explained the choice. “Some drivers are bad guys. Many, many are not,” he said. “And in this case, if we had tried to make this young man into anything other than kind of a victim of the system, it would have been a big mistake.” Goldberg said the team concentrated on “letting the story be told and not beating up the driver, but pointing out that what the driver did was a mistake.” Fried put it in one sentence: “If the system is really the problem, then you don’t need to vilify the driver.”

Goldberg’s closing built on that choice. “This system is flawed,” he told the jurors. “The system they set up is to put young, inexperienced drivers out there, and make them try to do the impossible, while they’re hungry, tired, running late, trying to make as many deliveries as they possibly can.… That system was always doomed to fail.” He put the training duty on Amazon: “It was their responsibility to train the drivers about what to do when you encounter children.” Gaffney, who considered the closing the most important moment of the trial, recalled that Goldberg called up a morning scene the jurors knew: the stop for gas at a QuikTrip, where people with service jobs rush around getting their lunch for the day.

Amazon’s first and only offer had come the week before trial, with one day to decide, and Philip Bradfield had turned it down. “While I was doing closing arguments, Amazon made their lawyer send the same offer to us as a folded note,” Goldberg said later. The family turned it down again. “Our client was the rock of our team,” Goldberg said.

Satterfield told the jurors that Cowan had let the children clear the road, looked both ways, and pulled away slowly. “That is reasonable. He did not breach a duty.” Burton went back to the neighbor, the garage, and the bike.

Fried closed last, after Satterfield and Burton. He told the jurors: “You have had one of the rare looks behind the curtain at what Jeff Bezos has created.” In his telling, he went on: “For our community, you’re the ones who have gotten to see this. It’s usually sealed up and confidential and nobody gets to look at it.”

Liable as the Employer

The jury assigned 85 percent of the responsibility to Amazon on the training claim, 10 percent to Fly Fella and Cowan, and 5 percent to the neighbor who had been supervising the children. It found that Amazon exercised enough control over Fly Fella to be liable, as an employer, for the driver’s share as well. It awarded $16 million for Gabe’s pain and suffering, $4 million for the past and $12 million for the future, and about $206,000 for his past medical expenses. Goldberg had asked for $25 million in his opening.

Naming the figure in the opening is something the firm has done for a while. Fried has said it pops the bubble on a subject that is hard to talk about: jurors who think the number is a lot of money have from opening to closing to absorb it. “It’s not like this shock punch in the face: You’re asking for how much?”

Fried has described one of Goldberg’s choices about the damages proof. “Many lawyers say, ‘I’m going to hire a bunch of people to prove this,’” Fried said. “What Michael said was, ‘I’m going to trust regular people to get it. People know that kids are cruel. I don’t need some doctor with a Ph.D. to say kids are cruel.’” Goldberg has said what the scars mean to a parent: “You spend all this time praying your kids don’t have any issues where they’ll get made fun of when they’re teenagers and in high school and everything else, and this kid’s always going to have that.”

Amazon had refused to mediate, Goldberg said after the verdict. Fried complimented Judge Smith and her staff on how they had run the case. “This trial provided a rare glimpse into how Amazon controls its Delivery Service Providers,” Fried said. The verdict, in his words, “sends a powerful message that Amazon is responsible for the system it created and that companies cannot avoid responsibility by labeling someone an independent contractor who is not truly independent.” Goldberg tied the finding to the app: “If you control the tech, you are going to be responsible for the people that are using it.”

Fried framed what came next as Amazon’s choice. “Amazon is going to have to make a decision now,” he said. “Do they want to continue this facade of no control, or do they want to own the control and change their internal business and insurance practices to adjust for this? Because they cannot win a control case.” The parties had entered a confidential high-low agreement before trial, Goldberg said later, and the case has since settled.

Ten Years Early

Eight years before Bradfield, Fried and Goldberg tried a damages case together in Cobb County. In 2013 a tractor-trailer driven by John Teal for Moore Freight Service ran a red light on Cobb Parkway in Kennesaw and struck the car carrying Ehsan Khan and his wife, Ghulam. Khan had emigrated from Pakistan in 2009 and become an American citizen. The crash left him with permanent brain damage. He could no longer walk, bathe, or feed himself, and he depended on his wife and children for his care.

Moore Freight and Teal admitted liability, so the August 2016 trial in the State Court of Cobb County, before Judge Carl Bowers, went to damages alone. Fried opened the plaintiffs’ evidence, questioning Michael Smith, Khan’s conservator, and then a physician, Dr. Said Elshihabi. The Khans asked for $24.8 million. Roger Harris of Swift Currie, defending the company and the driver, told the jurors, “This case has a value. It is not $25 million.” He argued that the life care plan overstated the cost of Khan’s care because his family provided much of it, and that the crash had shortened Khan’s life, which should lower the damages.

Fried gave the first closing and turned the life-expectancy argument around. “Folks, if [the defense] is right, this is not a $25 million case, but not for the reason they’re saying,” he told the jurors. “I would say it’s a $40 million case, because you destroy somebody’s life for years and years, and then you kill them 10 years early. If you want to accept their position [on Khan’s life expectancy] you can’t just discount the fact that they’re taking 10 years [away].” Harris closed for the defense, and Goldberg gave the rebuttal.

The jury deliberated for less than four hours and awarded $20 million: $16.25 million to Smith as Khan’s conservator and $3.75 million to Ghulam Khan on her claim for loss of consortium. The Khans are Muslim, and Goldberg said afterward that the lawyers had worried whether the jury could look past that. The jurors, he said, “looked at the evidence and put aside all prejudices and sympathies.”

A Truck Stopped on I-285

In December 2023, in the State Court of DeKalb County, Fried and Goldberg tried a case in which the system at issue was a truck’s own braking technology. They tried it with Karina Deochand and Romi Jayswal of the Deochand & Jayswal Law Group. In August 2021, on Interstate 285 in Decatur, Evans Tshongwe, driving a Brown Trucking tractor-trailer, braked abruptly to avoid a van passing through his lane, and the truck’s emergency braking system brought it to a stop in the middle of the highway. Avnish Dalal, who was 21, was driving behind it. He swerved, clipped the truck, struck another tractor-trailer, and ended up beneath the Brown Trucking rig. He suffered a traumatic brain injury and severe injuries to his arm.

John Dixon, defending the company, used video and vehicle data to argue that Tshongwe acted appropriately and had too little time to weigh other maneuvers as the van passed through his lane. Goldberg, who led the plaintiff’s team, opened and then cross-examined Tshongwe. He argued that Tshongwe violated industry standards by not braking as soon as the truck’s acoustic warning system sounded and by failing to accelerate once the van had left the lane. “Brown Trucking created this emergency. The white van didn’t create the emergency,” Goldberg argued.

The plaintiff’s lawyers also had to overcome jurors’ assumptions about fault in rear-end collisions, and Fried has said that countering them required trucking-industry standards and statistics. “Any time your plaintiff hits the rear of a vehicle ahead, there are going to be big liability challenges,” he said after the verdict. “We had to overcome the bias that, if you hit someone from the rear, you are liable.” Fried gave the last closing argument, after Dixon.

After about five hours of deliberation, the jury returned a $16.66 million verdict. It found Brown Trucking 60 percent responsible and Dalal 40 percent, an apportionment expected to bring the award to about $10 million. The trucking company’s insurer had offered $2 million before trial; Goldberg said it would not negotiate above that figure and refused a high-low agreement. “They never should have put our client through this,” Dalal’s lawyers said afterward. “I am just happy that we didn’t let him down.” Fried expected the braking technology to produce more such litigation: “You’re going to start seeing a lot more cases that involve some failure of that system because it’s not intuitive.”

Three O’Clock One Morning

Fried came to trial work from law enforcement. In high school he lost friends in drunk-driving crashes and took an internship with the local police department, and he spent about five or six years in law enforcement before law school. “I always had a heart for the underdog,” he has said. Early on he noticed that the quality of a lawyer made a big difference in how a case was handled. “I recognize that justice really isn’t blind,” he said. A judge called him into chambers, befriended him, and steered him toward law school.

He graduated summa cum laude from Oglethorpe University in 1990 and cum laude from the University of Georgia School of Law in 1993, and in 1994 he clerked for Judge Avant Edenfield of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia. He served as a Fulton County magistrate judge from 1994 to 2014; the judge who had steered him to law school, he has said, was closely involved in getting him appointed.

A burn case changed his practice. A woman was hit from behind and her Ford Mustang burst into flames; she lived 42 days in a burn center. Her family asked Fried to search the wrecked car for their mother’s jewelry. He found that the Mustang had “a fuel tank that was just six inches inside the rear bumper.” He went looking for others and, by his account, found hundreds of people who had burned in Mustangs; at one point he had seven or eight of the cases going at once against Ford. Ford settled them. “After I woke up the day after all those cases were settled, I had no cases,” he said in 2021. “For a lawyer, that’s a scary place.”

He spent about a year, by his account, working out what to do next. Then, at “three o’clock one morning,” he decided to focus on truck crash cases. Describing that time in 2025, about two decades later, he said that “there were no such thing as Truck Lawyer. There wasn’t a single billboard out there, a single advertisement for truck cases, nothing.” He has described the morning a call came for him a little after 8 o’clock: a woman asked for him by name and told him that her husband had died at 3 a.m. on the side of the road.

He set out to learn the industry he would be suing. He went to truck-driving school, hired an instructor certified by the North American Transportation Management Institute, which certifies trucking-company safety directors, to take him privately through the course, and spent time with law-enforcement officers trained by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to inspect trucks at the roadside.

An Army of People

“If I teach an army of people how to do this better,” Fried has said, “that we can affect the world.” He and Goldberg founded their firm in Atlanta in 2008, and most of its cases come through other lawyers who bring it in as co-counsel. Fried has handled cases in more than 35 states and is licensed in Georgia, Florida, New York, Tennessee, and Texas. With Goldberg he wrote Understanding Motor Carrier Claims, now in its seventh edition, which covers theories of liability, hours-of-service rules, and electronic control module data; the firm gives copies to plaintiffs’ lawyers free. The firm runs a litigation-skills clinic for lawyers with seven or fewer years of practice and an annual symposium on commercial-vehicle cases.

Fried attended the Trial Lawyers College in 2002 and has taught on its faculty since 2005. He served on the executive board of the American Association for Justice’s Trucking Litigation Group from 2010 to 2019 and chaired it in 2016 and 2017. He has been a founding co-chair of the National Board of Trial Advocacy’s National Board of Truck Accident Attorneys since 2015 and is board-certified by the National Board of Trial Advocacy in truck accident law. He co-founded the Academy of Truck Accident Attorneys and has given more than 1,000 presentations to audiences of lawyers, judges, police officers, and people in the trucking industry. His recorded programs for trial lawyers include one titled Proving Vicarious Liability for “Independent” Amazon Drivers: Lessons From Trial, and another titled Simple Wins: Stop Trying to Prove the Wrong Things.

“I view myself as mama bird,” he told Bill Kanasky in a 2023 interview. “I’ve got to go find the worm, pick the worm, half digest the damn thing, and then feed it to the jurors in bite-sized pieces.” It should be, he said, “a very rare opening statement that’s more than 30 minutes long.” He ties his largest verdicts to the offers that came before them: “Every huge verdict I’ve ever gotten is because somebody hasn’t given me what I thought was a reasonable, uh, settlement.” In Dalal, Brown Trucking’s insurer had offered $2 million; in Bradfield, Amazon had refused to mediate.

In the same interview he described how he deals with the lawyers on the other side. “I look for reasons to get along, not reasons to not get along,” he said. “I believe that we can be adversaries when it comes to a case, but we should really never be adversaries when it comes to safety.”