Dallas Truck Accident Attorney

Dallas Truck Accident Attorney Michael Grossman Explains What to do After a Truck Wreck

Dealing with the consequences of any accident can be difficult, but few accidents leave more devastating scars than truck accidents do. Trucks can weigh up to 80,000 pounds or more. When a distracted or tired trucker falls asleep at the wheel or makes a mistake in the driver’s seat of one of these big rigs, the drivers and passengers of other vehicles on the roadways generally bear the brunt of the accident.

If you or someone you care about has been involved in a wreck, you probably have a lot of medical and legal questions about your situation. Your first step after an accident should be to get the medical attention you need. It’s critical to both your health and your case that you see a doctor if you’ve been injured. If you are uninsured or if you aren’t certain whether you can pay for medical care, contact Grossman Law Offices for help. In many cases we’ll be able to refer you to a doctor who will take your circumstances into consideration.

When you’ve begun to receive the care you need, you’ll need to start thinking about your legal rights. After a truck accident, the party at fault has no automatic legal duty to compensate you for your injuries. The law requires you to fight to protect your rights, and to seek compensation from the responsible defendant if you want to recover for your injuries. Since you’ll recover nothing by default, it’s important to have an experienced Fort Worth injury lawyer on your side and to understand your legal rights. In this article, we’ll discuss some of the basics of truck accident law, including:

• The purpose of bringing a truck accident injury lawsuit
• Parties commonly responsible for a truck accident
• The importance of a prompt investigation
• Obstacles that trip up many unrepresented plaintiffs
• How a Dallas truck accident attorney can help

These are only the basics of truck accident law and there is never a real substitute for getting personalized legal advice from an attorney. If this article doesn’t answer the questions you have about your legal situation, or if you want to learn more about the strengths and weaknesses of your case, call us at 1-855-326-0000 (toll free) for a free consultation.

The Purpose of Bringing a Truck Accident Injury Lawsuit

Families affected by truck accidents frequently face serious emotional and health consequences. In many instances, the thought of reliving the accident through litigation, beginning a lawsuit while injuries are still fresh, or putting a dollar amount on suffering endured may seem unappealing. As we’ll later discuss, however, it’s important to get started pursuing your case as soon as possible after your accident, even as the healing process is ongoing.

Truck accident injury lawsuits serve two important purposes. First, filing one of these claims allows you to recover financially for the losses you sustained as a result of your injuries. It goes almost without saying that no amount of money can ever compensate you and your family for your emotional and physical losses. Accident victims usually suffer financially as a result of their accidents, however, and recovering money from a defendant can go a long way to help get a family affected by tragedy back on its feet again. The medical and repair bills resulting from a truck accident are often daunting, especially for victims who are unable to return to work as a result of their injuries. Suing the responsible party can often help an accident victim to deal with these financial losses.

Second, truck accident injury lawsuits permit plaintiffs to punish and hold wrongdoers accountable for their actions. When you sue the individual or company that caused your accident, you’ll be ensuring that the defendant in your case will think twice before making the same mistake and putting others in danger in the future.

Parties Commonly Responsible for a Truck Accident

There’s a lot that can go wrong to cause a truck accident. One of the first steps to winning your case is to determine exactly what went wrong, and whose fault it was. Because many individuals work behind the scenes to prepare a truck for a delivery, there are many different individuals whose mistakes may have led to your accident. An experienced Dallas truck accident attorney knows all the usual suspects and how to figure out what really happened in your accident. Truckers, trucking companies, a company that loaded a truck, a company that planned the truck’s route, manufacturers, and others may all have been to blame. Below, we’ll explain the role that some of these individuals and entities may have played in causing your wreck.

• Truckers
  Truckers are often directly responsible for causing wrecks. In some instances, truckers are simply careless. Truckers may speed, miss stop signs, swerve between lanes, or even drive under the influence of alcohol. In other cases, truckers cause accidents when they attempt to drive on insufficient sleep. Strict government regulations require that truckers take regular rest breaks in order to ensure that they are able to drive safely. When truckers choose to skip these rest breaks in order to comply with unrealistic delivery deadlines, serious consequences can result. In fact, truckers who drive for more than eight hours straight approximately double their likelihood of being involved in a wreck. One survey found that around twenty percent of long-haul truckers admitted to having fallen asleep behind the wheel at least once in the preceding month. Whether your accident was due to a trucker’s fatigue, or simply to his careless mistake, you may be able to name the trucker as a defendant in your lawsuit.
  
  
• Trucking Companies
  It’s rare that the trucker will be the only defendant involved in your lawsuit. Often, the company that owns the truck can also be held responsible either directly or vicariously. A trucking company is directly liable for your accident when it has done something negligent itself which resulted in your injuries. For example, if a trucking company hires a driver without discovering his long history of DUI convictions, it may be deemed to have negligently hired the driver and may be held directly liable for any injuries that its driver causes while intoxicated.
  
  In other instances, a trucking company may be held indirectly or “vicariously” liable for your injuries, even if the trucking company hasn’t done anything wrong itself. This is made possible through the legal doctrine of respondeat superior, which says that employers are almost always responsible for the on-the-job actions of their employees, regardless of whether the employer played a role in causing the employees’ conduct. In a truck accident case, this means that you can usually sue the trucking company any time that you can sue the trucker, as long as the trucker was working when the accident occurred.
  
  
• Companies that Load Trucks
  Companies that load trucks are sometimes responsible for a wreck. The company that loads a truck is usually different from the trucking company. By law, most trucks are only supposed to be loaded up to 80,000 pounds. Sometimes, however, companies may overload a truck in an attempt to deliver more cargo at a lower cost. When a truck is overloaded, it becomes more likely to tip over and cause serious damage to other drivers and their passengers.
  
  In other cases, a truck will not be overloaded, but its cargo will be improperly secured. When straps aren’t tight enough or cargo is otherwise not secured properly, cargo can become loose if the truck is involved in a minor accident, or may even become loose entirely on its own. Falling cargo, or cargo strewn about the surface of a road can create a serious danger for other drivers.
  
  
• Companies that Plan Routes
  Many roads aren’t suitable for truck traffic. Bridges may have weight limits and cargo restrictions. An underpass may not give a truck carrying large cargo sufficient clearance to pass beneath. As a result, truckers rarely create their own routes. Instead, routes are preplanned by companies. If a truck is sent, for example, under a bridge which it doesn’t have clearance to pass beneath, cargo from the truck may be knocked loose. When environmental obstacles cause your injuries, you may be able to hold the company that planned the route responsible for your injuries.
  
  
• Manufacturers
  Trucks are comprised of many components. A number of these components must be in safe working order for the truck to function properly. Occasionally, a manufacturer will produce a product with a design defect or a manufacturing flaw which makes the part unsafe for use. If one of the critical components of the truck involved in your accident made the truck inoperably dangerous, you may be able to name a manufacturer as a defendant in your litigation.

Truckers, trucking companies, companies that load trucks, companies that plan routes, and manufacturers are just a few of many individuals and entities which cause wrecks. In order to recover the money you deserve and to hold the proper party accountable for his actions, it’s important to identify the right defendant in your lawsuit.

The Importance of a Prompt Investigation

After your accident, it’s necessary to conduct a thorough investigation of the circumstances of your wreck for two reasons. First, your investigation should reveal which parties caused your accident. This will allow you to determine which individuals you should name as the defendants in your lawsuit. Because so many individuals may potentially have played a role in causing a truck wreck, it’s particularly important to conduct an investigation in a truck accident case. Second, conducting an investigation will allow you to gather the evidence you need to prove the defendant’s liability in court. Jurors don’t like to be told how to decide. They like to see, touch, and hear proof instead. Your investigation will allow you to gather pieces of wreckage, documents, photographs, 911 call recordings, and other evidence that you can present to the jury to help them see things your way.

The Fort Worth injury lawyers at Grossman Law Offices are experts at conducting investigations. In fact, when we’re hired on a truck accident case, it’s our standard procedure to fly to the scene of the wreck to investigate at no out-of-pocket cost to our clients. When we get to the accident scene, we record measurements, take photographs, conduct forensic testing, talk to witnesses, gather police reports, and otherwise find and preserve evidence proving your case.

It’s important to conduct your investigation as soon as possible after your accident, and you don’t need to take our word for it. Just ask the defense counsel in your case. The lawyers for your opposition probably visited the accident scene on the day that the crash occurred. They combed the scene for evidence too, except that they were looking for clues that tend to prove that you caused the wreck. They know that the longer they wait to look for evidence to prove their case, the more likely it is that the evidence they need will have already disappeared.

This very concept is well-illustrated by a case recently handled by our Dallas truck accident attorneys. In that case, the defendant had been claiming that our client caused his own collision with a truck because he didn’t have headlamps installed in his car at the time of the wreck. When we were hired on the case, we went to the salvage yard where our client’s car had been towed to investigate. Just as the defendants had claimed, the car was missing its headlamps. We weren’t satisfied, so we obtained the surveillance footage from the salvage yard’s security system. The tapes were scheduled to be destroyed later that day, but we got to them just in time to discover that the defendant had visited the salvage yard and stolen our client’s headlamps from his car. With the tapes in our possession, it was easy to prove that the defendant had tampered with the evidence, but if our client had waited even one more day before calling us, the tapes would have been destroyed.

This case and the defense attorneys’ conduct illustrate just how important it is to perform a thorough investigation as soon as possible after your accident. Usually, our Fort Worth injury lawyers can find enough evidence to support your case even if it has been several months since your wreck occurred. The strongest cases, however, are built when we’re contacted as soon as possible, so don’t waste time in calling a Dallas truck accident attorney after your wreck.

Obstacles that Trip up Many Unrepresented Plaintiffs

Just as a truck accident is no ordinary car accident, a truck accident claim is no ordinary car accident claim. Many people who have been involved in an accident with an 18 wheeler mistakenly believe that handling their case will be much like filing a claim after an ordinary fender bender. This is a common misconception. Because of the tremendously high stakes involved, truck accident litigation is usually much more complex than litigation involving a collision of two ordinary cars. In fact, plaintiffs who try to pursue their truck accident claims without attorneys almost never recover what their case is really worth. In the three sections that follow, we’ll discuss four of the barriers that most frequently come between unrepresented plaintiffs and their money. These barriers are the burden of proof, large insurance policies, self-insured trucking companies, and lying truck drivers. In many instances it takes an experienced Dallas truck accident attorney to overcome these hurdles.

Your Burden of Proof

In a truck accident case, the defendant is presumed to owe the plaintiff nothing until the plaintiff proves his case. That means that if your case goes to trial, you’ll need to bring evidence to court to tip the scales of justice in your favor before you recover so much as a dime for your injuries. Specifically, you’ll need to provide evidence to prove each of the four elements of a trucking accident case. Those elements are duty, breach, causation, and damages.

• Duty
  First, you’ll need to prove that the defendant owed you a duty of care to behave in a way that wouldn’t cause you harm. Proving that the defendant owed you at least some duty of care is usually fairly simple since most people owe each other a duty to behave as a reasonable person would in order to avoid harming others. The law dictates what duty of care is owed in any given circumstance, and the level of care we owe to others depends highly on the situation and relationship between the parties involved.
  
  
• Breach
  After you determine and prove what duty of care the law says that the defendant in your case owed you, you must present evidence to show that the defendant breached the applicable duty of care. In most instances, a defendant breaches his duty of care by putting others in danger by either taking some action that a reasonable person wouldn’t take or by failing to do something that a reasonable person would have done to protect others from harm. To prove that the defendant breached the duty of care he owed you, you’ll need evidence demonstrating exactly what the defendant did or did not do. In most cases the jury will consider this evidence and determine whether the defendant acted unreasonably under the circumstances.
  
  
• Causation
  Once you’ve proven the elements of duty and breach, you will have shown that the defendant in your case was negligent. This isn’t enough to win your case. You must also demonstrate that the defendant’s negligence was the cause of your injuries. Since so many people play a role in preparing a truck for the road, if you don’t have solid evidence proving that the named defendant caused your accident, the defendant may be able to weasel his way out of responsibility by blaming some third party for the wreck. In some instances, the defendant may even try to blame you for causing your own injuries. As a result, it’s critical to have evidence to prove causation at trial.
  
  
• Damages
  Once you’ve proved that the defendant’s actions caused your injuries, you’ll be in the position to demand damages. “Damages” refers to the money that a defendant pays to a successful plaintiff. Damages compensate the plaintiff for his pain and suffering, lost wages, loss of earning capacity, medical bills, repair bills, and other losses he has suffered as a result of his accident.
  
  In order to recover damages for your losses, it isn’t enough to simply ask for them, even once you’ve proven the rest of your case. Instead, you’ll need to calculate exactly how much the defendant owes you, and present evidence of your losses in order to substantiate your calculations. In all likelihood, the defendant will contest the amount of damages that you come up with, and will make his own calculations to argue that the amount he really owes you is much lower. As a result, it’s important to have strong evidence of your losses in order to demonstrate why your calculation is fair while the defendant’s is nothing more than a last-resort attempt to evade responsibility.
  
  Calculating damages isn’t always easy when you don’t have experience doing so. For example, many people have trouble knowing how to put a price tag on intangible damages such as pain and suffering. For others, it can be tricky to account for the time value of money and hypothetical raises or promotions when determining how much to demand in compensation for loss of earning capacity. Since you only get one chance to seek damages from the defendant in your case, it’s critical that you demand all that you deserve the first time around. Our Dallas truck accident attorneys have been calculating damages for decades. We know how to account for all of your losses and demand all that you’re entitled to.

If you provide insufficient evidence on even one of these elements, you’ll lose your case and recover nothing for your injuries. That’s why it’s so important to have a Fort Worth injury lawyer on your case, especially if you think you may be going to trial. Our Fort Worth injury lawyers have been trying cases for years. We know how to develop trial strategies that meet your burden of proof and do so in a way that’s persuasive to the judge and jury.

Large Insurance Policies

By law, trucking companies are required to carry large insurance policies on their trucks. On the surface, this may sound like good news to a plaintiff who hopes to recover by filing a claim against one of these policies. In fact, however, the sheer size of these policies can make it very difficult for unrepresented plaintiffs to recover what they should be entitled to. Insurance policies which cover trucks are usually worth around fifty times as much as the policies covering ordinary cars. This means that insurance companies stand to lose up to fifty times more money if they lose one of these high-dollar truck accident claims or cases. Furthermore, insurance companies can afford to spend around fifty times more resources to defend against paying claims brought against truck insurance policies as they can to defend claims brought against ordinary car insurance policies.

To protect these high-dollar truck insurance policies, insurance companies use special adjusters. Usually, the adjusters that work on truck accident claims won’t be the same adjusters that work on ordinary car accident cases. Insurance companies usually reserve only their most successful adjusters for cases involving truck accidents. These adjusters are generally considered among the finest in the industry, and have built their reputations by denying claims brought by accident victims like you.

Adjusters have many tricks up their sleeves to deny your claim or to pay you as little as possible for your injuries. Sometimes, adjusters will call unrepresented accident victims after an injury and ask them questions about the crash. Their questions may seem well-intentioned, but are nearly always calculated to get victims to admit something that could damage their claims. For example, an adjuster may be striving to get you to admit that you caused the accident or that you aren’t really hurt. If you say anything that could be twisted slightly or used out of context to hurt your case, it will be recorded and come back to haunt you. The best method for dealing with these adjusters is not to deal with the adjusters at all. Adjusters can’t call an accident victim who has a lawyer. When our Fort Worth injury lawyers take a case, we make sure that the adjusters leave our clients alone. We take their calls instead. This ensures that they’ll never even have the opportunity to ask our clients questions that could ultimately hurt their cases.

In other instances, adjusters try to convince unrepresented plaintiffs to settle their cases for much less than their cases are worth. When you accept a settlement offer, you’ll receive money from the defendant without the need to go to trial. This may sound like a good deal since you’ll avoid the time and uncertainty it takes to fully litigate your case. Indeed, accepting a fair settlement offer is often a good idea. When considering a settlement offer, however, you must be aware that accepting a settlement destroys your right to seek more money from the defendant in the future. Insurance adjusters know that if they get you to accept a low settlement offer before you hire an attorney, you won’t be able to get a lawyer later and collect what your case is really worth. For this reason, it’s important that you always have any settlement agreement reviewed by a lawyer before you sign it, even if the defendants tell you it’s their very best offer. These statements are rarely true, but if you accept a settlement its effects will likely be binding and could severely limit your legal rights.

Insurance companies also use experienced defense attorneys to evade legal responsibility. These lawyers are usually highly specialized in the area of insurance defense law, and are very experienced in defeating cases like yours. Because of their expertise, these lawyers know every loophole in the law that could be used to get their clients off the hook for compensating you for your injuries. Unless you know the law as well as they do, you risk having your case dismissed on account of some little-known technicality. The Dallas truck accident attorneys at Grossman Law Offices have the expertise to go head to head with these defense attorneys. In fact, we’ve won cases against nearly every major insurance company in the country.

Self-Insured Trucking Companies

Though most truck accident cases do involve an insurance company, some do not. Some trucking companies elect to be self insured rather than to purchase traditional insurance policies on their vehicles. When a company is self-insured, it sets aside a portion of its own assets for distribution to a plaintiff in the event that the company is ever successfully sued. If a self-insured trucking company is involved in your case rather than an insurance company, you’ll probably be negotiating directly with an officer of the trucking company rather than with a traditional insurance adjuster.

Though we’ve mentioned that insurance adjusters working on truck accident cases are usually aggressive professionals, officers of self-insured trucking companies can be even tougher on unrepresented accident victims. For one thing, a company’s officers’ salaries are usually dependent on how well the company does each year. If the officer of a self-insured trucking company elects to pay your claim, chances are that his paycheck will be a little bit smaller. As you can imagine, many officers are more concerned with their own financial situations than they are with yours.

Additionally, while insurance adjusters are licensed professionals bound by the rules of their profession to behave according to an ethical code of conduct, no such ethical restrictions apply to officers’ conduct. As a result, it’s fairly common that the officers of self-insured trucking companies will harass witnesses, threaten accident victims, tamper with evidence, and otherwise do whatever it takes to win their cases.

If you’re being harassed by a self-insured trucking company’s officers, or if you aren’t sure what the officers are up to behind the scenes, contact the Fort Worth injury lawyers for immediate assistance. It’s important that you put an end to unethical behavior before it has the opportunity to prejudice your case. Our lawyers are able to use the law to keep self-insured trucking companies’ officers in line.

Lying Truck Drivers

After a truck accident, truck drivers have special motivation to lie. Few reputable trucking companies would trust their fleet in the hands of a trucker who has a history of causing wrecks. Truckers know that if they’re found responsible for causing an accident, they’ll likely lose their jobs. To avoid this unhappy consequence, many truckers resort to lying about the cause of a wreck. Often, they’ll try to blame you for causing the accident in order to escape responsibility themselves. If you can’t prove that the trucker in your case is lying about the cause of the wreck, you’ll probably lose your case and recover nothing.

Our Dallas truck accident attorneys have methods of getting to the truth and exposing truckers’ lies. To start with, we can usually find enough evidence tending to substantiate your version of the events to convince the jury that the trucker is lying. With large quantities of particularly trustworthy evidence stacked up against him, the trucker will not seem very credible if he sticks to his lies before the jury.

In other instances, our Fort Worth injury lawyers use depositions to get to the truth. In a deposition, your lawyer gets to ask questions to the defendant’s witnesses before the trial. By asking the right questions, an experienced lawyer can usually catch a witness in a lie. The Fort Worth injury lawyers at Grossman Law Offices have taken thousands of depositions. We usually know the questions to ask to get to the truth.

How a Dallas Truck Accident Attorney can Help

If you or a loved one has been injured in a truck accident in the Dallas / Fort Worth area, you need to make sure that your legal rights are protected. Having a Dallas truck accident attorney on your side can mean the difference between recovering millions of dollars for an injury and recovering nothing. At Grossman Law Offices, our lawyers handle every aspect of our clients’ cases from beginning until end. Some of the services we provide in every case that we handle include:

• Investigating the cause of your accident
• Filing lawsuits and claims against all parties responsible for your injuries
• Gathering the evidence needed to prove your case
• Using our reputation to pressure the defendants into settling your claim fairly
• Taking all calls from insurance adjusters regarding your claim
• Using evidence and depositions to expose truckers’ lies
• Developing a trial strategy to persuasively meet your burden of proof
• Making sure that self-insured trucking companies officers’ behave ethically
• Ensuring that you get the medical care that you need

After your accident, the defendant has probably already begun to prepare its case against you. Don’t waste time in beginning to collect evidence you’ll need to prove your case. Contact one of our Dallas truck accident attorneys at 1-855-326-0000 (toll free) today. We’ll give you a free consultation and explain your legal situation when you call.