Elliot Bourne

A Trial Lawyer From the Start

Elliot Bourne knew he wanted to be a trial lawyer before he ever sat for the bar. That conviction shaped law school. While many of his classmates rotated through civil firms and corporate internships, Elliot spent his time in courtrooms — interning at the Fulton County Solicitor’s Office and the Forsyth County District Attorney’s Office, where he second-chaired hearings, drafted motions, and watched prosecutors cross-examine witnesses in real cases. It was an unusual pairing for a law student, but the logic was simple: every hour spent in court was an hour learning the only craft he actually wanted to practice.

That apprenticeship carried straight into private practice. After earning his bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Georgia and his Juris Doctor from Georgia State University College of Law, Elliot joined Bourne Law Firm in 2016. He has been a trial and appellate lawyer here ever since, representing injured Georgians in workers’ compensation, car wreck, and other personal injury cases — and he has never practiced any other way.

Frett v. State Farm: The Biggest Workers’ Comp Case of the Decade

The Georgia Supreme Court hears very few workers’ compensation cases. Most years, only a handful even make it to the Court of Appeals; fewer still are accepted for review by the Supreme Court. So when Frett v. State Farm went the full distance — from the State Board of Workers’ Compensation, through the Court of Appeals, and onward to the Georgia Supreme Court — the stakes were enormous. Whatever the Court decided would govern Georgia workers’ comp law for a generation.

Elliot did the research and briefing that drove the case. For 85 years, since the 1935 decision in Ocean Accident & Guarantee Corp. v. Farr, Georgia courts had denied workers’ compensation benefits to anyone injured on a scheduled lunch break. The rule had nothing to do with the text of the Workers’ Compensation Act. It was a judge-made doctrine, patched together out of a misreading of the statute, and it had been repeated so long that most defense lawyers treated it as untouchable. The client had been hurt on a routine break — exactly the kind of injury the old Farr rule barred — and the lower tribunals had denied the claim.

Elliot’s briefs traced the 85-year lineage of the Farr rule, showed the statutory text it had strayed from, and argued that the doctrine had never been properly reasoned in the first place. The Supreme Court agreed.

The case took more than three years to work through the appellate system. It is, by any measure, the most significant workers’ compensation decision of the decade in Georgia, and it is already reshaping how the Act is applied. Every time a Georgia worker is paid benefits after falling in a break room or slipping on the way back from lunch, that outcome traces back to Frett.

McKay v. Inalfa: Turning a Sword Back Into a Shield

If Frett was about rewriting a bad rule, McKay v. Inalfa was about stopping the misuse of a good one.

Elliot took McKay on because the result below struck him as a miscarriage of justice — a case in which a defense designed to protect employers from fraud had been quietly weaponized against an injured worker. The defense at issue, known as the Rycroft defense, has three strict prongs: the employee must have knowingly misrepresented her physical condition, the employer must have relied on that misrepresentation in hiring her, and there must be a causal connection between the misrepresentation and the injury. The test was written to protect honest employers — and, just as importantly, to protect injured workers from a much harsher common-law fraudulent-inducement defense.

In Ms. McKay’s case, the employer had learned of the alleged misrepresentation after it hired her but before she was injured — and chose to keep her on the job anyway. Then, after she was hurt, it turned around and used the Rycroft defense to deny her claim. The State Board accepted that argument. Under the Board’s logic, an employer could learn that a worker had lied on her application, return her to work again and again, and still invoke Rycroft every time she got hurt. It was, as Elliot put it, an “unlimited get-out-of-jail-free card” — a defense meant to shield employers from fraud, turned into a sword to be used against an employee the employer had already chosen to retain.

The Court of Appeals agreed. Its decision in McKay is a common-sense restoration of the rule’s original purpose, and it is already being cited by claimant attorneys across the state to defeat over-broad applications of the defense. For Elliot, it was one of the more personally satisfying wins of his career — not because the legal issue was novel, but because it corrected something that should never have happened.

In His Own Words

What do you love about practicing law?

The thing I love about practicing law is that it’s one of the few places left where an ordinary person — a roofer, a nurse, a delivery driver — can walk in, sit down across from a billion-dollar insurance company, and make them answer for what they did. Most of my clients have never been inside a courtroom in their lives. They’ve been denied, cut off, lied to by adjusters who assumed they’d just give up and go away. Then they hire a lawyer, and for the first time it’s a fair fight. That’s the part of this job I’ll never get tired of — watching the playing field level out.

What do you attribute your success to?

Reading. Everything I can get my hands on — appellate decisions and legal treatises, sure, but mostly books that have nothing to do with the law. Novels, biographies, history, the occasional theology book when I’m feeling ambitious. You don’t learn how to represent a welder by reading the Workers’ Compensation Act. You learn by understanding what his life actually looks like before he ever walked into your office — what his wife is worried about, what his pastor told him on Sunday, what he’s thinking about at 4 a.m. when his back is on fire and he can’t sleep. Every one of my clients comes from a world I don’t live in. Reading is how I get close enough to those worlds to tell a client’s story the way it deserves to be told.

The Georgia Legal Foundation

Elliot’s interest in appellate practice is not limited to his own files. He serves on the board of the Georgia Legal Foundation, the amicus committee that weighs in on significant cases pending before Georgia’s appellate courts on behalf of the Claimant’s bar. When a case comes up that could reshape the law for injured Georgians — questions of evidence, causation, or insurance coverage — the Foundation drafts amicus briefs to give the court a fuller picture of the stakes. Elliot contributes his time to that work because appellate practice is one of his genuine passions and because a single well-written amicus brief can help a lawyer he will never meet win a case for a client he will never represent. That, to him, is the point.

Teaching Other Lawyers

Elliot is regularly invited to speak at continuing legal education seminars on developing areas of Georgia law, including:

• Annual Georgia Workers’ Compensation Seminar — presented on Frett v. State Farm, walking practitioners through the case’s history, the Supreme Court’s reasoning, and the practical consequences for claim handling after the scheduled-break defense was abolished.
• Georgia Legal Foundation Seminar — presented on the use of AI tools in workers’ compensation practice, including how retrieval-augmented models can be used ethically and effectively to research case law, draft briefs, and evaluate awards.

Teaching, like amicus work, is part of how Elliot sees the job: a trial lawyer who learns something worth sharing has an obligation to share it. The AI-tools talk grew out of a project of his own — a retrieval-augmented search engine for Georgia workers’ compensation awards that Elliot built and now licenses to more than 20 law firms across the state.

Bar Admissions & Professional Memberships

Bar Admissions

• State Bar of GA
• Supreme Court of Georgia
• Georgia Court of Appeals

Board Memberships

• Georgia Legal Foundation
• Workers’ Compensation Claimants Lawyers

Professional Associations

• Georgia Trial Lawyers Association
• Georgia Injured Workers Association

Personal

Elliot lives in Forsyth County with his wife and three children.