Mesquite Truck Accident Lawyer

Have You Been Injured in an Accident with a Commercial 18-Wheeler in Mesquite? Call our Law Firm Today

Our lawyers know about the traumatic emotional and physical harm that comes with truck accidents. Through our years of experience, we’ve noticed that plenty of truck accident victims are hesitant about taking legal action since they don’t like the notion of pricing their injuries and getting involved in this causes them to relive the accident. While it may not be enjoyable to file a claim, as we’ll see later in this piece, quick action is needed for the success of your claim so you can act as quick as you can following an accident.

Moreover, a Texas truck accident lawsuit also services to create further negligent behavior by punishing those who were responsible for the accident. Liable parties who’ve lost money in truck accident lawsuits will likely not do the same thing again. If you want to get something done - attack a person’s bank account.

Common Negligent Causes of Truck Accidents

If you want to figure out who you should sue, you’ve got to first figure out how the accident took place and who was responsible. Many different parties take part in the transport of goods by a truck, so in a lot of Mesquite truck accident cases, more than one group may have committed some degree of negligence that played a role or contributed to the cause of a Mesquite truck accident. A qualified Mesquite truck accident lawyer can use the lessons learned over years of working truck accident claims to properly discover how the accident happened and who was responsible. Any number of negligent parties could have been a factor in a particular truck accident: the truck driver, the trucking business, makers of the truck or trailer, the business that planned the truck’s route, the company that loaded the truck, or other third parties. For instance:

• Truckers - Truckers invest log tons of hours moving up and down the highway, and in most Mesquite-area truck accident cases, they are liable in all or part for the injuries. Truck drivers cause accidents with intentionally negligent behavior such as: driving under the influence or drugs or alcohol, speeding, ignoring stop signs, or crazed swerving. In other scenarios, truck accidents happen due to driver exhaustion. Drivers are mandated by federal law to take required rest breaks, but a lot of truckers disregard these safety standards so they can meet the company’s required deadlines. Studies reveal that the odds of a trucker being involved in a wreck double after eight straight hours behind the wheel, and 20 percent of drivers admitted to falling asleep at the wheel more than once in the month before we surveyed them. Whether intentional or by accident, if a trucker’s negligence led to an accident that hurt you, then you can pursue a lawsuit against that individual.

• Trucking companies - Texas follows what’s known as respondeat superior, which means that employers are responsible for the actions or non-action of their workers. If the truck driver’s negligence was the cause of your accident, then the trucking company would be equally responsible. That means if the trucker had a string of prior DUI convictions and caused an accident while drunk, then the trucking company will definitely be liable for any injuries resulting from the accident.

  Besides that, the trucking company doesn’t have to actually be negligent to be ruled liable for the negligence of its truckers. That means as long as the trucker behaves in a negligent manner, a lawsuit can be pursued to seek damages from the trucking company. In most cases, the trucking company is the preferred defendant from which to pursue damages because it has the ability to get far more resources than the truckers.

• Manufacturers - Trucks and trailers are made of thousands of parts that are bolted and wired together to make sure the vehicle safely operates. If any of these parts don’t perform properly for their intended reason while the truck is working, then an accident can follow. If this malfunction was due to a design flaw or manufacturing error and a wreck ensues, then those hurt in the truck accident have the ability to get compensation from the manufacturer.

• The Company that Planned the Route - Not every road and neighborhood is built for trucks, and many bridges have weight and height restrictions in place. To make sure safety exists, busy trucking companies will lean on other companies to plan safe routes for the trucks to take. If this planning company develops a route that is unsuitable and dangerous for trucks, then a lawsuit can be pursued against that company.

• The Company that Loaded the Cargo - In some situations, the company that owned the cargo sets it in the truck themselves, and other times another company has that duty. If the company that loaded the cargo did so improperly, this can lead to a wreck resulting in injuries the company is responsible for. Cargo in trucks has a limit of 80,000 pounds, but lots of companies try to carry additional goods at a lower cost by overlooking this rule. There’s a reason that weight limits have been established because an overloaded truck has a greater chance to overturn and cause considerably more damage when an accident takes place.

  
  Do you have a legal question?
  Enter your phone number below and let's talk.
  --

  When the company that loads the cargo doesn’t secure it well, the cargo can loosen during transport, causing a load shift that overturns the trailer and leads to an accident with other cars. If you’re dealing with flatbed trucks, improperly loaded cargo can spill onto the road and cause horrific problems and panic for tons of unsuspecting drivers.

• Other Drivers - Just because a truck was part of an accident doesn’t mean the truck or its driver was the source of the accident. Sometimes other drivers disregard this duty to ensure the safety of others on the road, and an accident with a truck occurs, causing damage and injuries to additional drivers on the road. When that takes place, the victim can seek damages from this third party.

Any of these groups or a combination of them could have entirely or partially caused the truck accident that hurt you. You need the assistance of a qualified Mesquite truck accident lawyer who can determine the cause and all of the potential defendants, so you can obtain the compensation you’re owed from all the parties who hurt you with their negligence.

Prompt Investigation is Essential

To get the required evidence to locate all of the liable parties and prove your case after you’ve been hurt in a Mesquite truck accident, a quick and thorough investigation must be done. Since so many different groups could have negligently contributed to the cause of the accident that hurt you, a thorough investigation is needed to figure out all of the responsible parties and their proportional degree of negligence. You’re going to need evidence to persuade the jury to rule in your favor, and evidence begins to vanish quickly after any accident. You need to get your Mesquite lawyer on the trail of evidence as quick as possible. For every day you procrastinate in finding a lawyer you’re comfortable with, you are doing serious damage to your case because the proof you need is vanishing - witnesses vanish or their memory fades, videos get deleted, and the accident scene changes quickly.

Our Mesquite truck accident lawyers at Grossman Law Offices have spent two decades learning the art of investigating accident cases. As soon as we’re retained we get to the accident scene immediately at no cost to our clients, so we search 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 pertinent vehicles, taking photos, looking for video evidence, examining police records, measuring the distance between skid marks and points of impact, doing forensic tests, locating and conducting interviews with witnesses and gathering any evidence we discover that can be used later in court.

Chances are you’ve probably already fallen behind the defense’s investigation efforts. Most of the time, the trucking or insurance company gets their investigators to the accident scene right after the trucker calls it in. The defense investigators aren’t concerned with determining how the accident took place; they just want to get the evidence that shows your injuries were due to your own carelessness. If you don’t have your Mesquite attorneys on the scene doing their own investigation, you won’t know whether or not the defense was involved in evidence tampering or if an investigation was conducted ethically. If they can locate evidence to show your negligence, then they can turn down your insurance claim if they can show you were completely responsible, or decrease the damages owed if they can prove your negligence was a contributing factor.

One case we had recently in Dallas County illustrates the importance for a speedy and first-rate investigation. In this scenario, our firm was retained by a driver of a regular vehicle after he was involved in a night time accident an 18-wheeler. The trucking company said our client didn’t have any headlights installed in his car when the accident happened. Once we joined the case, our client’s demolished car had been removed from the scene of the accident and transported to a salvage yard nearby. When our attorneys spotted the car at the junkyard, they discovered that it was indeed missing headlights. Worried about client’s chances to get compensation, our investigators discovered a surveillance camera in the salvage yard, so they obtained a copy of the footage. This particular system was made to tape over its memory every 48 hours, and we were able to snag the footage right before it was deleted forever. The video show us a worker from the trucking company illegally taking our client’s headlights and making off with them. Later when the trial began and the trucking company’s defense team was attempting to argue that our clients’ vehicle didn’t have any headlights installed when the accident occurred, we had physical, credible proof that revealed their deceptive tactics and managed to get compensation for our client. If our client had made the horrific mistake of waiting any longer to obtain us, the video would have been useless, the chances of getting proper restitution would have ended, and the trucking company would have been able to commit felonious evidence tampering and get away with it.

Our Mesquite Texas attorneys often deal with lies and deception in truck accident cases, so you need to get a lawyer so they can start a quick and complete investigation as quickly as possible. In some situations, our investigators are still able to get the needed proof long after the accident has occurred, but the quicker we can start investigating, the better odds we have of finding the proof needed to get the compensation you deserve. Don’t delay any further before talking with a Mesquite truck accident lawyer.

Common Obstacles that Plaintiffs Must Overcome

Just because you’ve had to file insurance claims after regular car wrecks doesn’t mean that qualifies you to work your truck accident lawsuit on your own. Trucking insurance policies are valued at 50 times that of a regular automotive insurance policy. Because of the huge size of trucking insurance policies, litigation to settle truck accidents is considerably more complex than a regular passenger car case. Plaintiffs who try and save money on lawyer’s fees by working the case themselves end up costing themselves way more than they saved with decreased or denied compensation. People with no legal background and lawyers straight from law school are often frustrated when they try to file lawsuits after truck accidents because of several common obstacles: establishing the burden of proof, the enormity of insurance policies, self-insured trucking companies and truckers who lie.

Burden of Proof

The law doesn’t require the defendant or defendants to you anything after you’ve been hurt in a truck accident unless you, the plaintiff, can show they have to. If you want to get fair restitution for your injuries, you’ve got to prove your case with strong, credible evidence. Even when other ways of negotiation are used to settle a claim, evidence needs to be found to get the defense or insurance to act in good faith. You’ll have to establish each of the four main components of a trucking accident case:

• Duty: The first step is you’ve got to prove that the defendant owed you a duty to ensure your safety by acting appropriately. The legal duty has been established by the law for specifically what’s owed with particular circumstances and parties - contingent on their relationships. In Mesquite truck accident cases, meeting this requirement usually comes pretty easily, since all drivers have to operate their motor vehicles in such a manner as to reasonably provide for the protection of other drivers, pedestrians and passengers on the road.

  

• Breach: If you want to prove your case, you next have to show that the defendant or defendants violated the responsibility of care they owed you. This usually occurs when the defendant put others at risk either with a choice that a normal person wouldn’t do or inaction when a regular person should be expected to take action. You’ll need to get evidence that proves the defendant disregarded his or her legal duty of care by action or inaction in hopes of proving this breach of duty. Furthermore, you’ll need a Texas 18-wheeler accident lawyer who knows how to use those facts to persuade a jury that the defendant or defendants behaved inappropriately.

• Causation: Not only do you have to establish the defendant or defendant’s violation of a legal duty to you, but also that your injuries directly stemmed from this breach of duty. Since lots of different parties could have caused or played a role in any truck accident, it takes credible evidence to make a jury agree a causal relationship was established between the defendant’s breach of his or her responsibility to you and the ensuing harm done to you. If not, then the defendant can defeat your case by shifting the blame to someone else for your injuries. Often, the defendant or defendant’s best odds of avoiding blame is to direct the responsibility on the head of the victim for causing his or her injuries with their own negligent behavior.

• Damages: After you’ve established the first three parts of a successful Mesquite truck accident lawsuit, you then have to prove the damages that the defendant owes for the injuries you’ve sustained. Legally, damages aren’t defined as the injuries you have or property damage, but instead refer to the compensation the defendant should owe for causing that suffering. The plaintiff can pursue damages for medical bills, lost income, pain and suffering, lost earning capacity, property damage and other sorts of losses that happened in the accident.

  The tough part here is that you can’t just ask the court to compensate you for what you deserve then expect to get it. No, you have to provide evidence that shows not just your losses but also how you totaled the monetary value of those damages. Usually, defendants will fight the amount of compensation requested by the plaintiff and will counter with their own figure of the damages owed that will probably decrease the total figure for the harm sustained by the plaintiff. In order to prove that the defendant has low-balled their estimate, you have to give rock-solid, credible evidence that shows your calculations are on the mark.

  What is the true worth of my case? Since damages like pain and suffering or loss of earning capacity are quite subjective open to debate, totaling damages can be very challenging for anyone who’s inexperienced. It’s very tough to put a number on pain and suffering or estimate lost earning capacity by determining the overall value of hypothetical raises and inflation. In court, you only get one shot to total the amount of equitable compensation that you deserve. For the past two decades, our Texas accident lawyers have been figuring damages, and we have become familiar enough with cases like yours to know how to factor in all of your losses and reach an estimation for compensation that properly gives you the restitution you deserve.

Being unable to show any of these four elements guarantees you will also be declined when trying to get compensation you’re seeking for the harm done to you. You need the assistance of a Mesquite truck accident lawyer - especially if you wind up at trial. Years of experience working truck accident cases in Mesquite has helped our lawyers learn to develop a strong legal strategy to meet the burdens of proof and persuade any jury to rule in your favor.

Enormous Insurance Policies

Federal regulations require that trucking companies obtain huge insurance policies to protect against the accidents, injuries and fatalities that happen due to doing business with big trucks. Because of this, many are under the false assumption that they’ll quickly get compensated and without hassle. Most of the time that’s just not true. Since insurance policies for trucks can be valued at 50 times that needed for a regular passenger car, the insurance companies will usually devote 50 times the energy and manpower to defend their trucking policies.

With everything that’s on the line, insurance companies turn to their shrewdest and most qualified insurance adjusters to work the settlement negotiations. While you are probably new to the world of truck accident claims, these adjusters are the elite in their field and work these types of cases on a daily basis. They are experts in taking an accident victim’s initial state of shock and basic trust for their neighborhood insurance worker, then flipping all that against them to deny their claim. They develop a fake friendship and attempt to convince the victim that they want to assist them with getting compensated - but first the victim has to answer some basic questions. They have no desire to help; they just want to help company profits by turning your claim down. Next, they hit you with a ton of questions that basically just re-word the same queries over and over in order to get you to slip up and confess to your own liability for the wreck. Once they get that, they can turn your claim down. The less interaction you have with an insurance adjuster the better, so you need a veteran Mesquite semi-truck accident lawyer. That way, your legal counsel will be able to handle the nonstop questions from the insurance adjuster. In fact, we tell clients you shouldn’t talk to a representative of the insurance company without a lawyer there to act as a buffer. If you retain our firm, our lawyers will take care of all the conversations with the insurance company and guard you from admitting your own liability.

In some situations, aggressive adjusters will even attempt to persuade the accident victims into giving up their right to sue, and in turn give them a low-ball settlement offer. It’s a good decision to avoid the stress and uncertainty that comes with a jury trial, but you don’t want to take an offer that doesn’t properly help you with the harm you’ve sustained. Only a lawyer with an extensive track record of success can get the insurance company to provide a fair settlement, since they already fear losing extra money in a jury trial.

The insurance company will also try to avoid liability for your injuries by using a skilled defense team that can locate legal loopholes and spot procedural hurdles that will cause some plaintiffs to destroy their chances at obtaining compensation. You need a qualified Mesquite accident attorney who can match the efforts of the defense specialists. Our accident attorneys have been awarded millions from every well-known insurance company in the country, and we’ve learned how to anticipate everything in their bag of tricks.

Self-Insured Companies can be More Treacherous

Rather than buy a standard insurance policy, some trucking companies choose to put aside some allotment of their assets for use as insurance with accidents. While the federal government regulates the insurance industry, and requires that all businesses be registered, adjusters be licensed and ethical guidelines be followed, self-insured companies don’t have to be concerned by these rules. That’s why self-insured companies have gained a reputation for acting dishonestly and being tough to negotiate with. A lot of times, in order to negotiate a settlement with a self-insured company, you’ll have to work with an officer from that company. Since this worker probably gets some of their income from profit sharing, there’s plenty of reason for them to turn down your claim. This officer would basically be giving you their own salary if he or she lets you get the equitable restitution that you deserve. With their income at stake, self-insured companies usually put their own interests before those of injured victims and will choose to do things like bully witnesses, alter or tamper evidence and even threaten victims.

If a self-insured company has tried to bully you or push you around, then you can get them to stop with the help of a Mesquite commercial truck accident lawyer. The moment we’re hired, our attorneys can force self-insured companies to negotiate in good faith with the threat of legal action.

Truck Drivers Can’t Be Trusted

We want to believe that everyone is basically nice and trustworthy, but the trucker who hurt you with their negligence simply has too many incentives to lie. If the trucker is found to have hurt others while driving in a negligent manner, then he or she will be pink slipped soon, if they haven’t been canned already. Along with that, a trucker who’s been proven negligent will have a tough time getting another job with a black mark like that on their record. When you take into account the job market and the state of the economy, most truckers who are honest and decent will decide to lie in order to save their jobs and their ability to take care of their families. To get the compensation you need, you have to be able to show the trucker is lying.

Our Mesquite lawyers excel at investigating and finding the proper evidence that shows the trucker’s lies. We’ll shatter the trucker’s credibility with all the available evidence that will take apart their lies.

In the same way that insurance adjusters attempt to get victims to admit their own negligence with a barrage of questions, our attorneys will formulate a series of questions to use in the deposition with intention of tricking the trucking into admitting their own lie. The Mesquite truck accident lawyers at Grossman Law Offices have deposed thousands of witnesses in the last two decades, and we know how to formulate the proper questions to show the truckers’ lies.

How We Can Help

If you’ve been injured or a family member has been lost in a truck accident in Mesquite TX, you need to obtain a truck accident lawyer to protect your legal rights and help you get the fair compensation you deserve. From when you file your first documents to the case’s resolution, our attorneys take care of every detail of your case and see to it that you’re kept updated on any developments as they arise. We’ll provide you with the following services:

• Doing an investigation to figure out the cause of the accident.
• Locating all of the liable parties and filing comprehensive claims and lawsuits against each group.
  
• Finding the pertinent evidence to meet your burden of proof.
• Using our reputation to apply pressure on the defendants.
  Do you have a legal question?
  Enter your phone number below and let's talk.
  --
• Shielding victims from the phone calls and questions that insurance adjusters fire at you.
• Using a great investigative and deposition strategy to expose the trucker’s lies.
• Developing a game-plan to persuade the jury to rule in favor of our clients.
• Forcing self-insured companies to behave appropriately and negotiate in good faith.
• Making sure our clients get mandatory medical care.

Odds are that the defendant has already completed and concluded its case against you. By waiting any longer to hire a lawyer, you are doing tremendous damages to your ability to secure the restitution you deserve. Contact us today at 1-855-326-0000 (toll free) for a free consultation and discover how we can help you much like we’ve assisted other Texans.