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.

10/17/2026

I hear this all the time: "If I get a lawyer, I'm going to net less because I have to pay the lawyer." On the surface, the math seems straightforward. I understand why people think that.

But the truth of it is that as your case moves through the steps within the insurance industry, you're opening up more piles of money that are potentially available. The lowest-level adjusters have very limited authority to pay you. People smarter than me have studied this, and the empirical evidence is clear: you net more money with a lawyer, except in the very, very smallest cases.

If all you have is one little bill out there, a lawyer probably isn't going to move the needle much, and I'll tell you that. But in cases involving moderate or severe injury, it makes a big, big difference.

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

10/16/2026

I have three favorite Savannah Ghost Pirates memories, because one isn’t enough.

The clip is the first one, opening night, which I still can't quite believe went the way it did. The second is more recent: last season, our first ever playoff game. Anybody who follows hockey knows the playoffs are a different sport. The intensity goes up several notches, and to see that happen in Savannah, in our building, with our name on the jerseys, was something I'd waited a long time for.

The third memory is the one that gets made almost every night, and it's the players with the little kids. I'll save that for another clip.

I'll add one thing I probably take too seriously. As a Savannahian, I feel a real pride in what this team does on the ice, because that jersey says SAVANNAH on it. In five seasons we have never been a pushover, never the team other clubs were glad to see on the schedule. That matters to me more than it probably should.

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

10/14/2026

What would I say to somebody in Savannah who has always been curious about a Savannah Ghost Pirates game and has never gone?

My answer is in the clip, and I'll stand behind every word of it. What I'd add is the part that's easy to overlook when you're looking at a minor league schedule. The ECHL is essentially the Double A level of professional hockey. Most of our players are in their early twenties, and I hope every one of them still sees himself playing in the NHL someday, because that dream is what makes a young man skate hard on a Tuesday night in February in Savannah, Georgia. Some of them will get there. When they do, you'll pay a great deal more to watch them.

Season five opens in October. This city, from the mayor's office to the community organizations to the folks across the river in South Carolina, has supported this team beyond anything I expected when I signed on. Come see what they've been cheering about.

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

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

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Savannah, GA
31401

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