Arlington Truck Accident Lawyer

Arlington Attorney Michael Grossman Discusses The Reasons to File a Truck Accident Injury Lawsuit

Our Arlington lawyers are aware of the overwhelming emotional and physical harm caused by truck accidents. Through our years of experience, we’ve discovered that plenty of truck accident victims are hesitant to pursue legal action since they don’t like the thought of putting a price tag on their injuries, and that process forces them to relive the trauma from the accident. While filing a claim can be an unpleasant experience, as we’ll see later in this article, quick action is essential in the success of your claim, so you must act as soon as possible after the wreck.

There are two objectives in using a lawsuit to resolve the harm inflicted by a truck accident: First is to allow the injured victim to heal from the financial and emotional trauma stemming from the wreck and punishing those whose negligence led to the accident. There’s no sum of money that can erase the damages incurred by your accident or erase the horrific memory from your mind, but there are still considerable financial burdens you need to handle. The only way in which to get your family back on track from that setback is to get compensated by those who liable individuals or parties. You probably have missed work because of your injuries, so paying for medical expenses to fix your injuries repair bills to repair your vehicle can be impossible unless you sue those who are responsible for your injuries.

Along with that, an Arlington truck accident lawsuit helps to decrease continued negligent actions by punishing those liable for the accident. People who’ve suffered considerable amounts of financial damage in truck lawsuits will usually not make the same mistake again. If you want to get someone’s attention - hit their pocketbook.

Typical Negligence-Based Causes of Truck Accidents

In order to discover who you should file a lawsuit against, you first need to discover how the accident happened and how the wreck happened. Lots of people are involved in the transporting of goods by truck, so in several truck accident cases, more than one group may have been negligent and factored into an Arlington truck accident happening. A qualified Arlington truck accident lawyer can use their wisdom gained over the years in working truck accident claims to properly determine how your accident happened and just exactly who all was involved. A slew of negligent parties could have caused a truck accident: the truck driver, the trucking company, makers of the truck or trailer, the company that developed the truck’s route, the company that loaded the truck, or other third parties. For instance:

• Truckers - Truck drivers work long hours moving up and down the highway and in a lot of truck accident cases, they are liable either totally or partially for the injuries. Truckers cause accidents with intentionally negligent behavior like: driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol, speeding, ignoring stop signs, or crazy swerving. Other times, truck accidents happen because drivers are simply worn out. Drivers, according to federal law, must take mandatory rest breaks, but a lot of truckers ignore these rules so they can meet required time deadlines. According to studies, chances double of a trucker getting into a wreck double after eight straight hours behind the wheel, and 20 percent of truckers admit to falling asleep at the wheel more than once in the month before they participated in the survey. Whether or intentional or by accident, it a trucker’s accident led to an accident that hurt you, then you can sue him or her.

• Trucking Companies - Texas adheres to a concept known as respondeat superior that holds employers liable for the actions or non-action of their employees. If the trucker’s negligence caused your wreck, then the trucking company would also be liable. So if a trucker has a history of DUI convictions and causes an accident while drunk, then the trucking company is definitely liable for any injuries resulting from the accident.

  Along with that, it’s key to note that the trucking company doesn’t have to be negligent on its own right to be held liable for the negligent behavior of its truckers. That means as long as the trucker is found negligent, a lawsuit can be pursued seeking damages from the trucking company. A lot of times the trucking company is the desired defendant that plaintiffs pursue damages from because they have far more resources than truckers do.

• Manufacturers - Truckers and trailers are made of thousands of parts - big and small - that are woven together to ensure that the vehicle works safely. If any of these parts aren’t able to perform for their required purpose while the truck is working, then an accident can happen. If this malfunction was due to a design defect or manufacturing error and a wreck occurs, then anyone hurt in the accident has the ability to get compensation from the manufacturer.

• The Company that Planned the Route - Not all roads and neighborhoods are built for trucking and lots of bridges have weight and height restrictions for passing underneath them. So they can make sure things are safe, busy trucking companies often turn to contracting these jobs out to other companies. If this planning company maps a course that is determine to be improper and dangerous for trucks, then a lawsuit can be pursued against that company.

• The Company that Loaded the Cargo - In some cases, the company that owned the cargo puts it on the truck on their own, and a lot of times this is the responsibility of another company. If the company that put the cargo on did it improperly, this can lead to a wreck resulting in injuries that the company would be responsible for. Cargo in trucks has a weight limit of 80,000 pounds, but lots of companies try to carry more goods at a lower cost by not following this guideline. There’s a safety reason in place for weight limits because a truck that’s overloaded has a greater chance to topple and cause considerably more damage when an accident takes place.

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  When the company that puts the cargo on doesn’t do it properly, the cargo can loosen during transport, causing a load shift that topples the trailer and leads to an accident with other cars. When you’re dealing with flatbeds, poorly loaded cargo can spill onto the road and create incredible havoc for the cars with suddenly shocked drivers who are nearby.

• Other Drivers - Just because a truck was a part of an accident doesn’t mean the truck or its driver was the main cause of the wreck. A lot of times, other motorists disregard their duty to ensure the safety of others on the road, and an accident with a truck follows, causing damage and injuries to additional drivers on the road. In that case, the victims can pursue damages from this third party.

Any of these groups or a combination of lots of them could have entirely or somewhat caused the truck accident that hurt you. You need the assistance of a veteran Arlington truck accident lawyer who can spot the cause and all of the potential defendants, so you can obtain compensation you deserve from all the parties that hurt you through their negligence.

A Truck Accident Cannot Be Won Without Proper Investigation

A thorough, detailed investigation is critical to your Arlington truck accident case if you want to get all the necessary evidence to determine all of the responsible individuals and be able to be prove your case. Since several parties could have played a part in the accident that injured you, a prompt and accurate investigation is need to discover all the liable parties and their degree of negligence. You’re going to need to proof to persuade the jury to rule in your favor, and evidence begins to vanish quickly following any truck accident in Arlington. It’s key that you put your Arlington lawyers on the trail of evidence as quickly as you can. Every day that passes where you don’t find a lawyer you’re comfortable with, you’re doing immense damage to your case because the required proof you need is vanishing - witnesses disappear or their memory lapses, videos get deleted and the accident scene will evolve physically.

Our Arlington truck accident lawyers at Grossman Law Offices have spent two decades learning how to properly investigate accident cases. As soon as we’re hired to be your legal representation we’ll go to the accident scene at no cost to our clients, so we can look for any evidence that proves our client’s case. We do what’s necessary to get to the bottom of the truth - securing and looking at all the vehicles involved, taking photos, looking for video evidence, examining police records, measuring the length between skid marks and points of impact, doing forensic tests, locating and conducting interviews with witnesses and cataloguing any evidence we find so it can eventually be used in court.

Chances are you’ve fallen behind the defense’s investigation they’ve mounted. A lot of times, the trucking or insurance company sends their works to the accident scene the second the truck reports it. The defense investigators aren’t focused on figuring out how the accident occurred; they just want to compile evidence that show your injuries were due to your own negligence. If you don’t have your Arlington attorneys on the scene doing their own work, you have no way of discovering if the defense engaged in evidence tampering or doing an ethical investigation. If they find evidence to prove your negligence, then they can toss your insurance claim if they can show you were completely responsible or decrease the damages owed if they can prove your contributory negligence.

One case we recently dealt with in Arlington illustrates the need for a quick and complete investigation. In this particular situation, our firm was hired by a driver of a passenger car after he was involved in a nighttime accident with an 18-wheeler. The trucking company said that our client didn’t have any headlights in their car when the accident happened. By the time we began working the case, our client’s demolished car had been taken from the accident scene and over to a salvage yard close by. When our Arlington attorneys found the car at the junkyard, they saw that it was indeed missing headlights. Immediately our concern turned to our client being able to get compensated, and our investigators located a surveillance camera in the salvage yard and got a tape of the footage. With this kind of surveillance, the memory was programmed to be taped over every 48 hours and we were able to get the footage before it was deleted. What we saw: A representative of the trucking company illegally removing and taking off with our client’s headlights. Later when the trucking company’s lawyers attempted to say at trial that our client’s car didn’t have any headlights in when the accident occurred, we had the physical proof to point out their deception and get compensation for our client. If our client had made the mistake of waiting much longer to retain us, the video would have been lost, the chances of getting restitution would have been obliterated and the trucking company would have been able to commit felonious evidence tampering and get away with it.

Our Arlington attorneys often encounter lies and deception in truck accident cases, so you need to obtain a lawyer so he or she can start a quick and thorough investigation as quickly as possible. A lot of times, our investigators can still unearth the necessary proof long after an accident has occurred, but the quicker we start investigating, the better our odds are of finding necessary proof to get the compensation you’re owed. Don’t delay any longer before talking with an Arlington truck accident lawyer.

Common Obstacles that Plaintiffs Must Overcome

Just because you’ve filed an insurance claim after a typical car accident doesn’t mean you’re ready to handle your truck accident on your own. Trucking insurance policies are valued at 50 times your typical automotive insurance policy. Because of the enormity of commercial trucking insurance policies, litigation to settle truck accidents is considerably more complex than a regular passenger car case. Plaintiffs who try to save a buck on lawyer’s fees by handling their own case wind up costing themselves considerably more than they saved with diminished or outright declined compensation. Citizens with zero law experience and lawyers who just graduated are often befuddled when they try to pursue lawsuits following truck accidents due to plenty of common obstacles: establishing the burden of proof, the insurance policy size, self-insured trucking companies and lying truckers.

Burden of Proof

The law doesn’t require the defendant of defendants to pay you a dime after you’ve been hurt in a truck accident unless you (known as the plaintiff in the legal world) can show they have to. In order to obtain the proper restitution for your injuries, you’ll need to prove your case with credible, factual evidence. Even when alternative methods of negotiation are used to settle a claim, evidence must be discovered to pressure the defense or insurance to negotiate in good faith. You’ll need to establish each of these four parts in a truck accident case:

• Duty - The first step will be to prove that the defendant owed you a duty to ensure your safety by acting reasonably. The legal duty for certain circumstances has been established by the law and for each individual depending on their relationships. In Arlington truck accident cases, meeting this part usually is pretty easy, since all drivers have to operate their motor vehicles in a manner that adequately ensures the safety of other drivers, pedestrians and passengers on the road.

• Breach - If you want to prove your case, the next step is to show the defendant or defendants violated the responsibility of care they owed you. This usually occurs when the defendant put other citizens at risk with an action that a regular person wouldn’t do or inaction when a normal person would be expected to not sit back. You’ll need to locate evidence that proves the defendant disregarded his or her legal duty of care by action or inaction if you want to prove this breach of duty. Besides that, you’ll also need an Arlington truck accident lawyer who knows how to use the evidence in a manner to prove to the jury that the defendant or defendants behaved unreasonably.

• Causation - Besides being able to establish the defendant or defendant’s breach of legal duty, it’s also necessary to prove your injuries resulted because of this breach. Since lots of different parties could have caused or played a part in any trucking accident, it takes strong evidence to make a jury see that a relationship exists between the defendant’s violation of his or her responsibility to you and the ensuing harm that occurred. If you’re unable to do this, then the defendant can defeat your case by casting blame on someone else for your injuries. A lot of times, the defendant or defendant’s best chance of avoiding blame is to put the fault directly on the victim, arguing it was their own negligence that caused his or her injuries.

  

• Damages - After you’ve established the first three parts for a successful truck accident lawsuit, you have to then be able to prove damages that the defendant should owe for your injuries. Legally, damages in this case aren’t about your injuries or destroyed property, but are referring to the compensation the defendant owes for the harm they’ve inflicted. The plaintiff can pursue damages for such things as medical expenses, lost income, pain and suffering, inability to earn income, property damage and other losses that took place in the accident.

  The tough part is that you can’t just ask the court for compensation you need and think it’s coming immediately. You’ve got provide evidence that doesn’t just prove your losses but also that you totaled the monetary value of these damages. Most of the time, defendants will fight the amount of compensation the plaintiff is seeking and will counter with their own estimation of damages owed, which will probably decrease the total fiscal amount of harm the plaintiff dealt with. In order to properly show that the defendant was short-changed on the estimated damages, you’ve got to present rock-solid factual proof to show your numbers are spot on.

  What is the cost of my case? Keep in mind that damages dealing with pain and suffering or loss of earning capacity are incredibly subjective and open to interpretation, but totaling damages can be very puzzling for anyone who’s inexperienced. It’s very tough to put a price on pain and suffering or try and figure lost earning capacity by determining the total value of potential raises and inflation. In court, you only have one shot to total the amount of equitable compensation you deserve. For the past two decades, our Arlington truck accident lawyers have been figuring damages, and we have developed enough familiarity with other cases like yours to know how to factor in your losses to come to an eventual estimate of compensation that properly provides the restitution you need.

The inability to establish any of these four things guarantees you will also not be able to get compensation you’re wanting for the harm done to you. You need the assistance of an Arlington truck accident lawyer - especially if you head to trial. Years of experience trying truck accident cases has help our lawyers discover how to form a strong legal strategy to meet the burdens of proof and persuade any jury to rule for you.

Commercial Truck Liability Policies are High-Value Policies

Federal regulations state that trucking companies have to purchase big insurance policies to protect against accidents, injuries and fatalities that may happen because of doing business with big rigs. As a result, many people falsely assume they’ll be able to be compensated quickly and not encounter issues. The majority of the time that’s just not true. Insurance policies for trucks are usually 50 times that of normal passenger car coverage, the insurance companies will usually invest 50 times the resources and time to protect their trucking policies.

With everything that’s on the line, insurance companies will turn to their shrewdest and most qualified insurance adjusters to work with settlement negotiations. You’ve probably not had to deal with truck accident claims before, but these adjusters are the best in their profession and work these claims on a regular basis. They are the best in taking an accident victim’s initial state of shock and basic trust in their neighborhood insurance agent, then using it against them to deny their claim. They offer up a fake friendship and try to persuade the victim they want to be there and ensure they get compensation - but first the victim needs to answer some easy questions. They really don’t want to help; they just want to improve company profits by getting your claim tossed. After that they’ll hit you with tons of questions that seem like it’s the same questions, just-reworded, which are designed to get you to admit your own liability in an accident. If they can get you to admit that, then your claim will be denied. It’s best if you limit your contact with an insurance adjuster, so you need to hire a veteran Arlington truck accident lawyer and let your legal team handle the harassing questions from insurance adjusters. In fact, it’s best for you not to talk to any representative of an insurance company without the presence of a lawyer, who can be a buffer. If you retain our firm, our attorneys will deal with all the conversations involving the insurance company and shield you from any chance of you admitting your own liability.

Sometimes aggressive adjusters will attempt to get accident victims to surrender their rights to sue in exchange for low-ball settlements. It’s usually a good idea to not deal with the stress and uncertainty of jury trials, but you don’t want to take an offer that doesn’t properly compensate you for the harm you’ve endured. Only an attorney with a length track record of success can get the insurance company to put forth a fair settlement, because they’re worried about losing additional money at trial.

The insurance company will also try to dodge liability for your injuries by turning to a skilled defense team that can spot the legal loopholes and procedural hurdles that would cause some plaintiffs to destroy their ability to get proper compensation. You need a veteran Arlington truck accident lawyer who can match the attacks of the defense attorneys. Our lawyers have won millions from every big-time insurance company in America, and we’ve learned how to anticipate every possible tactic they may use.

Self-Insured Companies Can Be More Treacherous

Rather than buy a regular insurance policy, some trucking companies budget an amount of their total assets in reserve to serve as their own insurance when accidents take place. While the federal government regulates the insurance industry, and requires that all companies be registered, adjusters carry licenses and ethical standards be followed, self-insured companies don’t have to be concerned with these rules. As a result, self-insured companies have earned the reputation of behaving unethically and being difficult when it comes to negotiations. A lot of times, if you want to negotiate with a self-insured company, you’ll have to deal with a worker from the company. Since this officer probably gets a portion of their salary from some kind of profit sharing, there’s plenty of logic behind them denying your claim. They would basically be handing over their paycheck if they let you get the restitution you are seeking. With their salary on the line, self-insured companies tend to put their own interests ahead of those who were injured and will turn to such despicable acts as bullying, changing or tampering with evidence and even threatening victims.

If a self-insured company has tried to bully you or harass you, then you can get them to stop with the help of an Arlington truck accident lawyer. Once we’re hired, our attorneys can see to it that self-insured companies act in good faith with the threat of legal action.

Truck Drivers Will Bend the Truth to Save Their License

We all want to believe that people are basically good and trustworthy, but the trucker who hurt you with his negligent behavior has plenty of reasons to lie. If the trucker had injured others while driving negligently, then they will probably get a pink slip soon, if they haven’t been canned already. Knowing that, a trucker that’s been proven negligent isn’t going to have an easy time getting a similar type job with a black mark like that on his or her record. When you factor in the state of the job market and the economy, the majority of honest and upstanding truckers will turn to lying so they can guard their jobs and their ability to take care of their families. To get the compensation you deserve, you need to be able to show the trucker is lying.

Our Arlington truck accident lawyers have learned the way to investigate and find proper evidence that brings the trucker’s lies to light. We will take apart their credibility with all the evidence we have to disprove their lies.

In the same way insurance adjusters attempt to get victims to admit negligence by barraging them with questions, our Arlington attorneys will develop a line of questioning for the deposition with the intent of getting the trucker to admit their own lie. The Arlington truck accident lawyers at Grossman Law Offices have deposed thousands of witnesses over the last two decades, and we know how to make up the right questions that will catch the truckers in their own lies.

How We Can Help

If you’ve been hurt, or a family member has died in the Arlington area, you need to retain an Arlington truck accident lawyer to protect your legal rights and help you get the compensation you deserve. From filing all the way to conclusion, our lawyers will deal with every detail of your case and make sure you’re updated on developments as they arise. We give you these services:

• An investigation to determine the cause of the accident.
• Determining all of the liable parties and filing comprehensive claims and lawsuits against them.
• Discovering the necessary evidence to meet your burden of proof.
  
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• Using our reputation to apply pressure on the defendants
• Shielding victims from harassing telephone calls and questions from insurance adjusters.
• Using strong investigative and deposition techniques to expose the lies of the trucker
• Developing a strong strategy to persuade the jury to rule in favor of our clients
• Getting self-insured companies to act ethically and negotiate properly
• Making sure our clients get the medical attention needed.

You should expect that the defendant has already concluded its investigation and case against you. Any further delay in getting a lawyer will only cause more permanent damage in your ability to get the compensation you deserve. Call us toll free today at 1-855-326-0000 for a free consultation and to see how we can assist you just like we have countless other Texans.