Dallas 18-Wheeler Accident Attorney

Dallas 18 Wheeler Truck Accident Attorney Michael Grossman is on Your Side

Even if it seems entirely obvious that you weren’t at fault in your 18 wheeler accident, recovering for your losses won’t be automatic. Under the law, the defendant owes you nothing by default. That means if you want to recover for your losses, you’ve got to fight for your rights.

The truth of the matter is that unrepresented accident victims almost never recover what their cases are worth on their own. In many cases, an experienced truck accident lawyer can make the difference between recovering nothing and recovering thousands or even millions of dollars for your injuries.

Even though recovering for your losses after an 18 wheeler accident isn’t automatic, it doesn’t need to be difficult. If you understand your rights and have an experienced personal injury attorney of Fort Worth or Dallas on your side, you’ll greatly increase your odds of winning your case and holding the responsible parties accountable for their actions. In this article, we’ll discuss some of the basics of 18 wheeler accident law to help you understand your rights. Topics we’ll cover include:

• The importance of litigation
• The two ways to win
• Identifying the defendant
• Conducting an investigation
• Obstacles to your recovery
• What Grossman Law Offices can do for you

This article is intended to explain only the very basics of truck accident law. In order to learn more about the legal implications of your specific situation, call us at 1-855-326-0000 (toll free). We’ll answer your questions about truck accident law and give you a free consultation.

The Importance of Litigation

Bringing a lawsuit or filing a claim against a defendant has two important purposes. First, doing so will enable you to recover financially for the losses you’ve suffered as a result of your accident. The law says that individuals injured in truck accidents are not automatically entitled to recover anything for their injuries. The scales of justice begin tilted in favor of the party who caused the injuries, also known as the defendant. In order to win, you’ll need to tilt those scales in your favor. The defendant has no obligation to volunteer to pay you anything, and you can expect that you’ll need to fight for what you deserve in order to recover.

Though some of your losses were likely physical and emotional, others were probably financial. Accident victims are often faced with high medical bills, costs of repairing their cars, and the financial strain of being unable to return to work after a wreck. Recovering damages from the person who caused your injuries will help ease this financial pressure and make it easier for you to get back on your feet again.

Additionally, filing a lawsuit will allow you to punish the person responsible for causing your accident. When you punish the defendant, you’ll ensure that he thinks twice before making the same mistakes in the future and putting other families in danger.

The Two Ways to Win

In most truck accident cases, there are two ways to win and recover damages for your injuries. Most cases settle outside of court when a plaintiff and a defendant reach an agreement without the need for intervention from a judge or jury. In some instances, however, parties can’t reach an agreement and a plaintiff needs to win at trial in order to recover.

• Settlements
  In a settlement, the defendant offers the plaintiff a certain amount of money in compensation for his injuries, even though no judge has declared that the defendant must do so. In exchange, the plaintiff agrees not to file a lawsuit against the defendant in order to collect more money for his injuries in the future. Accepting a fair settlement offer is beneficial to a plaintiff since it allows a plaintiff to get his money faster and without the uncertainty that’s always present whenever the fate of a claim is entrusted to a panel of randomly selected jurors.
  
  Since defendants know that they have no legal obligation to volunteer to pay you money, it can be challenging to elicit a fair settlement offer without a Dallas 18 wheeler accident attorney on your side. Having an experienced lawyer to handle your case will send a clear message to the defendants—if they don’t settle with you, they could lose big in court. When you make a defendant nervous that he’d lose in court, he’ll be much more likely to offer you a fair amount for your injuries without the need for trial. The lawyers at Grossman Law Offices know how to put pressure on defendants to settle your case. We’ve won verdicts and settlements against nearly every major insurance company in the country. Insurers know our name and our reputation. They’re usually eager to settle with our clients rather than face our attorneys in the courtroom.
  
  Be wary of bad settlement offers. You may get a bad settlement offer before you’ve hired an attorney. Defendants know that if you accept a settlement offer from them, you won’t be able to hire an attorney to sue them for more money in the future. They also know that most accident victims are strapped for cash, facing medical bills, repair bills, and the stress of lost wages. As a result, it’s common for defendants to dangle fast cash in front of accident victims, hoping that victims will accept these unfair offers and let them off the hook for full legal responsibility. Offers you’ll get before you’ve hired a lawyer are rarely fair, but they’re usually binding if accepted. If you’re considering accepting an agreement from an insurance company, make sure you have it reviewed by a Dallas 18 wheeler accident attorney before you accept. Our lawyers can tell you what your case is really worth, and whether you may be entitled to more money than what the defendants are offering.
  
  
• Trials
  For a variety of reasons, some cases don’t settle out of court. It’s usually necessary to take those cases to trial in order to recover. Since the accident victim has the burden of proof in a truck accident case, you’ll have the more difficult task at trial. To win your case, you must present evidence on each of the four elements of a truck accident claim. Those elements are duty, breach, causation, and damages.
  
  To prove duty, you must demonstrate that the defendant in your case owed you the duty to behave with some level of caution so as not to cause you harm. This is usually fairly straightforward since most individuals owe each other at least the duty to act as a reasonable person would act to avoid harming others. This may involve refraining from doing unreasonably dangerous things, or it may require taking affirmative precautions to protect others from harm.
  
  Next, you must show that the defendant’s conduct constituted a breach of the duty of care that he owed you. If the “reasonable person” duty of care applies in your case, this usually means proving that the defendant did something that a reasonable person wouldn’t have done. To prove breach, you must bring evidence to court to show the jurors precisely what the defendant in your case did or did not do. The jurors will consider all of the surrounding circumstances and will determine whether or not the defendant’s actions constituted a breach of the applicable duty of care.
  
  Third, you must prove causation. It isn’t enough to show that the defendant breached the duty of care that he owed you; you must also demonstrate that the defendant’s actions caused your injuries. Proving this element also requires extensive evidence. Many parties play a role in preparing a truck for the road, and any one of these parties may make mistakes which could contribute to causing a crash. Since so many individuals may potentially be to blame, it’s common for a defendant named in a lawsuit to try to argue that a third party, or even you, was responsible for causing the wreck. If you haven’t got evidence sufficient to pin the blame on the defendant, you won’t succeed in your lawsuit.
  
  Finally, you must prove your damages. The term “damages” refers to the money you’ll collect from the defendant if you are successful in proving the other three elements of your claim. Damages can compensate a plaintiff for his pain and suffering, loss of earning capacity, lost wages, medical bills, repair bills, and other losses that he’s suffered as a result of the accident. In order to recover damages, you must both calculate how much you are owed and bring evidence of your losses to court in order to support your calculations. It’s likely that the defendant in your case will also calculate how much he thinks he owes you. If his number is greater than zero, it’s sure to be smaller than yours. It takes strong evidence to prove to the jury that you’re not just looking for a handout and that the defendant’s calculation is merely a last-resort attempt to evade his legal responsibility.
  
  Often, calculating damages can be a complex process. If your medical treatment is ongoing, it can be challenging to estimate how much your bills will ultimately amount to on your own. Putting a price tag on ambiguous losses such as pain and suffering is frequently difficult for non-lawyers, and calculating long-term losses such as loss of earning capacity can become very complex once the time value of money and other factors are accounted for. Grossman Law Offices’ personal injury attorneys of Fort Worth know how to account for all kinds of losses. We’ve been calculating damages for the past twenty years. We can tell you how much a jury is likely to determine that your case is worth.

Whether your case is settled out of court or goes all the way to trial, our Dallas 18 wheeler accident attorneys can help. We know how to pressure defendants into offering our clients settlements and we know how to prepare a bullet proof trial strategy in case your claim ends up in court.

Identifying the Defendant

In any litigation, identifying the defendant in your case is one of the first steps in the legal process. Identifying the defendant in a trucking accident case can be particularly complex since, as we’ve mentioned, so many individuals are responsible for preparing a truck to make deliveries. Any of these individuals may make a mistake behind the scenes that can ultimately lead to an accident. In many instances, multiple errors will be made. If more than one individual caused your wreck, all responsible parties may be named as defendants in your lawsuit.

In truck accident cases, there are several individuals who are frequently responsible for making errors which lead to injuries. Those parties are truckers, trucking companies, manufacturers, companies that load trucks, and companies that plan routes. Below, we’ll describe the role these parties often play in causing accidents.

• Truckers
  Truckers are often among the parties most directly liable for causing an accident. Sometimes truckers make mistakes on the road. They roll through stop signs, speed recklessly, make illegal turns, and otherwise drive carelessly in a way that could put others in danger. In other instances, truckers skip their mandatory rest breaks in order to meet unrealistic delivery schedules. When truckers skip their rest breaks, they increase the likelihood that they’ll fall asleep behind the wheel or be involved in a wreck. Whether the trucker in your accident made a careless error or chose to prioritize his delivery schedule over your safety, a reckless trucker can be named as a defendant in a lawsuit.
  
  
• Trucking Companies
  It’s unusual that a trucker would take all the blame for an accident. In most instances, if you can sue the trucker you can also sue the company that owns the truck. There are two legal theories that make this possible. First, you can often hold a trucking company responsible for your accident under the theory of direct liability. A trucking company is directly liable for your injuries if it did something negligent itself, and this negligence led to your injuries. For example, if a trucking company fails to maintain the brakes on one of its trucks, and the faulty brakes lead to the accident which causes your injuries, you may be able to hold the trucking company directly liable for their carelessness.
  
  In other circumstances, it may appear that the trucking company didn’t do anything wrong, and that the trucker was 100 percent to blame for the wreck. In these cases, the trucking company can usually still be held accountable under vicarious liability. The doctrine of respondeat superior makes this possible. “Respondeat superior” is a fancy-sounding Latin term which boils down to one thing—an employer is responsible for its employees’ on-the-job actions, even if the employer didn’t do anything wrong itself. In trucking accident cases, this usually means that you can sue a trucking company whenever you can sue a trucker.
  
  
• Manufacturers
  Sometimes, manufacturers cause accidents by producing products with design defects or manufacturing flaws. Trucks are made up of lots of components, and many of those components must operate properly in order for the truck to be safe and roadworthy. If a truck’s tires or straps holding cargo in place are flawed and unsafe, the truck may pose a danger to other motorists. If these critical parts are defective as a result of something that a manufacturer has done, the manufacturer can be held responsible for injuries resulting from the defective parts.
  
  
• Companies that Load Trucks
  Sometimes it isn’t a component of the truck itself that makes a truck dangerous, but rather the way the truck is loaded. By law, most trucks can’t be loaded in excess of 80,000 pounds, yet many companies attempt to overload trailers in an attempt to save the cost of making extra trips. When trucks are overloaded, they’re more prone to tipping over when the truck rounds a turn. In other cases, companies loading trucks won’t fasten cargo sufficiently to a flatbed trailer. When this happens, cargo may come loose from the truck and pose a danger to other motorists. If overloaded or improperly loaded cargo caused your accident, the company that loaded the truck may be named as a defendant in your lawsuit.
  
  
• Companies that Plan Routes
  Trucks can’t travel along all the same roads that your car can. Many roads, tunnels, and bridges have height, weight, and cargo restrictions that need to be taken into account when a truck’s route is planned. Because of these complications, truckers rarely plan their own routes as they go. Instead, a company will be responsible for plotting a truck’s route in advance. If this company ignores important restrictions and sends a truck along a route which will cause it to pose a danger to others, the company may be held responsible for any injuries that result.

Truckers, trucking companies, manufacturers, companies that load trucks, and companies that plan routes are only a few of many individuals who may have been responsible for your wreck. It’s important to determine precisely which individual, or which combination of individuals, caused your accident in order to recover fully for your losses.

Conducting an Investigation

After an 18 wheeler accident, it’s usually necessary to conduct an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the accident. Conducting an investigation allows you to determine who caused your accident, and it allows you to gather the evidence you’ll need to prove who caused your accident in court. As we’ve discussed, the burden of proof at trial lies on you. Jurors don’t want to be told how to decide. They want to touch, see, and hear evidence that supports your position. Strong evidence gathered in an investigation isn’t just desirable-- it’s necessary to win your case.

The Dallas 18 wheeler accident attorneys of Grossman Law Offices have conducting an investigation down to a science. In fact, it’s our standard procedure to fly to the accident scene in nearly every trucking accident case that we handle. When we reach the scene of the accident, we get to work gathering evidence. Bits of wreckage, witness statements, police reports, photographs, measurements, test results, and other items may all be useful to proving your case. We find these things and preserve them in a way that makes them admissible in court.

The defense attorneys do much the same thing. They visit the scene of the accident and comb the wreckage for evidence that could be used to suggest that you caused the accident yourself. In most circumstances, defense attorneys are dispatched to the scene of the accident mere moments after a crash occurs. They take with them teams of accident recreation specialists and investigators. They get an early start on their investigations because they know that the longer they wait to look for evidence, the more likely it is that the evidence they need will have already disappeared.

One recent case that our lawyers handled illustrates this principle especially well. In that case, our client was being blamed for a collision with a truck that occurred after dark. The defendant was arguing that our client caused the wreck by driving without headlamps installed in his car. When the client called us for help, we went to the salvage yard where the remains of his car had been towed. We discovered, sure enough, that his car was missing headlamps. Unsatisfied by this discovery, we decided to check the salvage yard’s video surveillance tapes, which had been scheduled to be destroyed later that day. Just in time, we saw that the defendant had visited the salvage yard and removed the headlamps from our client’s car. Once we were armed with those tapes we were prepared to expose that the defendant had tampered with the evidence.

The moral of this story is one that the defense attorneys already know. It’s important to begin your investigation as soon as possible after your wreck since evidence tends to disappear as time elapses. Our lawyers are usually able to build solid cases even if we aren’t contacted until months after an accident, but the strongest cases are usually constructed when we’re called right away. Don’t waste time in getting a personal injury attorney of Fort Worth on your side.

Obstacles to your Recovery

At Grossman Law Offices, many of our clients are highly sophisticated and business savvy individuals who would be perfectly capable of picking up a textbook and learning the law on their own. Nevertheless, there’s much more to winning a truck accident case than merely knowing the law. As a result, unrepresented accident victims are almost never able to recover what their cases are really worth on their own. Below, we’ll discuss three of the obstacles that often prevent unrepresented accident victims from recovering what they could otherwise be entitled to.

• Lying Truck Drivers
  In any kind of litigation, the defendant will often have some motivation to lie, but in truck accident litigation, truckers have special motivation to bend the truth. Few trucking companies will employ truckers who have histories of causing accidents. Truckers know this, and know that if they’re found responsible for causing your accident they’ll likely lose their jobs. When given the choice of either lying or losing their livelihoods, many truckers will choose to make up a story in which you caused the accident rather than them. If you can’t prove that the trucker is lying about the cause of the wreck, you’ll recover nothing for your injuries.
  
  Our Dallas 18 wheeler accident attorneys have strategies for exposing the truth. In many instances, we’re able to collect large amounts of evidence to discredit the trucker. When forensic testing, witness statements, and video surveillance footage all corroborate your version of the events, it’s unlikely that a judge and jury will assign the trucker much credibility at all. In other instances, we use depositions to get to the bottom of things. In a deposition, an attorney is able to ask questions to the defendant’s witnesses. Our lawyers have taken thousands of depositions over the past twenty years. We’ve perfected questioning techniques that we can often use to get lying truckers to admit the truth far in advance of trial.
  
  
• Large Insurance Policies
  By law, trucking companies are required to carry insurance on their trucks. These insurance policies are worth around fifty times more than the policies carried on ordinary cars. Insurance companies stand to lose about fifty times more money after a truck accident than they do after an ordinary car accident, and can devote about fifty times more resources to defending against paying out on these claims. It’s easy to understand why the sheer amount of money involved in these cases can make it more challenging to recover from a truck insurance policy than a car insurance policy.
  
  Insurance companies use insurance adjusters to avoid paying out on truck accident claims. These adjusters aren’t the same individuals who you may have dealt with if you’ve ever filed a claim against a policy held on a car. Instead, insurance companies reserve their most ruthless and experienced adjusters for work on truck accident claims. These professionals received their current positions by building records for denying accident victims’ claims. They have every intention of denying your claim as well. Frequently, the only thing these aggressive adjusters respond to is an experienced 18 wheeler accident lawyer.
  
  Be cautious when speaking with adjusters. They’ll probably call you to ask you innocent-sounding questions about your accident. They may seem nice, but their real intention is to get you to admit something that could be used to harm your case. Whatever you say to them may be recorded and used out of context against you. The best strategy for dealing with adjusters is not to deal with them yourself at all. At Grossman Law Offices, we don’t let adjusters call our clients and badger them with questions. Instead, we take all of their calls. That way, they never have the opportunity to use your words against you.
  
  Insurance companies also use specialized defense attorneys to help them avoid paying claims. These lawyers are experts in insurance defense law, and know dozens of legal technicalities that can be used to dismiss lawsuits brought by inexperienced plaintiffs and even inexperienced attorneys. The lawyers at Grossman Law Offices have been practicing in this area of law for twenty years. We know all the defense counsels’ tricks and how to respond to them.
  
  
• Self-Insured Trucking Companies
  Occasionally, an insurance company won’t be involved in a case at all. Some trucking companies choose to be self-insured. This means that they set aside a portion of their own assets for distribution to a plaintiff in the event that the company is ever successfully sued. If the trucking company in your case is self-insured, you probably won’t be dealing with any sort of traditional insurance adjuster. Instead, you’ll be negotiating directly with the officer of a self-insured trucking company. Though we’ve mentioned that adjusters can be aggressive and stubborn, officers are frequently far more difficult to deal with if you haven’t got a lawyer on your side.
  
  Officers’ salaries usually depend directly on the trucking company’s profit. If an officer elects to pay your claim, chances are his paycheck will take a direct hit. Since many officers are more concerned with their own finances than they are with yours, you can expect that their personal motivations may influence their treatment of your claim.
  
  Additionally, officers are not licensed professionals the way that adjusters are. While adjusters are bound to follow certain rules of ethical conduct in order to maintain their licenses, no such guidelines govern officers’ behavior. As a result, clients often hire us to help after they’ve been threatened or harassed by the officer of a self-insured trucking company. These officers are also known for tampering with evidence and taking other unethical steps to win their cases. For relief from these kinds of behaviors, call us right away. Our lawyers can use the law to put an end to unethical conduct.

What Grossman Law Offices can do for You

There’s a lot that a Dallas 18 wheeler accident attorney can do to help you with your case. One of the first steps we always take is to ensure that our clients receive the medical treatment they need. If a client is uninsured or otherwise unable to afford medical treatment, we can usually help that client see a doctor. Next, we handle every step of our clients’ cases and keep our clients informed at every step of the way. Some of the services that we offer in every truck accident case that we handle include:

• Investigating the cause of the accident
• Gathering evidence needed to meet your burden of proof
• Using our reputation to pressure defendants into settling
• Developing a strong trial strategy
• Protecting your case from being dismissed by defense attorneys
• Taking all calls from adjusters on your behalf
• Exposing truckers’ lies
• Making sure self-insured trucking companies mind their manners

These are just a few of our many services. Our goal is to handle everything so that you can concentrate on getting well and moving on with your life. To find out more about what we can do for you, or to get a free consultation regarding the specifics of your situation, call us at 1-855-326-0000 (toll free). We’re available seven days a week at all hours to take your call and answer your questions.