Trucking Accidents in Dallas

Mr. Grossman Discusses The Legal Process Following Trucking Accidents in Dallas Texas

If you or a loved one has been injured in an accident involving a truck, you know first-hand how devastating these accidents can be. Since trucks often weigh up to 80,000 pounds, it’s not surprising that involved cars and their passengers usually bear the brunt of a collision.

After a wreck, you may be able to recover compensation for your injuries. Getting a fair recovery is almost never automatic, but with a Dallas truck accident attorney on your side it doesn’t need to be difficult. In this article, Dallas trucking accident attorney Michael Grossman explains some of the complexities involved in truck accident litigation, and how our attorneys handle those complexities. We’ll discuss topics including defendants, investigations, settlements, trials, common obstacles to your case, and the benefits of hiring an attorney. This article deals with only the very basics of truck accident law. If you have a question that isn’t covered in this article or if you’d like more personalized legal advice tailored to your specific situation, call us at 1-855-326-0000 (toll free). We’ll gladly provide you with answers and a free consultation.

The Usual Suspects

When a truck causes damage on the road, who is to blame? This initial question in every truck accident lawsuit is not always an easy one to answer. Not only can things go wrong with a truck when it’s on the road, things can go wrong behind the scenes when a truck is being prepared to make a delivery. Since so many people play a role in preparing 18 wheelers for the road, it’s common that more than one party will be to blame for creating conditions which lead to a truck accident. If multiple parties caused your accident, they can all be sued for your injuries.

When a truck accident happens, there are several usual suspects that an attorney will often investigate first. Some of these individuals include truckers, trucking companies, manufacturers, companies that load cargo, and companies that plan routes. Below, we’ll describe these parties and the errors they make which often lead to accidents.

• Truckers
  Since truckers are often the individuals most directly responsible for causing truck accidents, you’ve probably already considered suing the trucker in your case. Sometimes, truck drivers make careless errors that put others in harm’s way. Truckers may speed recklessly, run stop signs, drive under the influence of alcohol, or otherwise drive dangerously. Alternatively, a trucker may fall asleep behind the wheel or drive inattentively because of fatigue. In one survey, around twenty percent of long-haul truckers admitted to having fallen asleep behind the wheel at least once in the preceding month. When truckers skip mandatory rest breaks and spend more than eight hours in a row driving, they approximately double their likelihood of being involved in an accident. If a trucker has prioritized his schedule over your safety, or if he’s made a careless error which led to a wreck, you may be able to name the trucker as a party in your lawsuit.
  
  
• Trucking Companies
  It’s rare that a trucker will be the only individual named as a defendant in a lawsuit. Often, trucking companies are responsible for accidents too. There are two ways for a trucking company to be named as a party in a lawsuit. A trucking company may be named as a defendant if it is directly or vicariously liable for a wreck.
  
  A trucking company is directly liable for an accident if it has done something wrong itself, and its negligence contributed to causing your accident. For example, if a trucking company failed to make sure its trucks were roadworthy or failed to ensure that its drivers were qualified to operate big rigs, it may be possible to hold the company directly liable for its actions.
  
  In other instances, a plaintiff can hold a trucking company vicariously liable for an accident, even if the trucking company didn’t do anything wrong itself. This is possible under the legal doctrine of respondeat superior. This stuffy-sounding Latin term represents a very simple concept—an employer is responsible for an employee’s on-the-job actions, even if the employer had nothing to do with those actions. What this boils down to in trucking accident cases is that usually a trucking company can be sued for an accident any time that a trucker can.
  
  
• Manufacturers
  Sometimes it’s not the trucker who causes an accident, but the truck itself. Like cars, trucks are composed of many different parts. The safe operation of many of these components is necessary to the safety of the truck as a whole. Suppose that a manufacturer produces tires with a manufacturing defect or a design flaw. If the error isn’t caught and the tires are put on a big rig, the truck may become unstable when the driver makes turns. If a component of the truck caused an accident and injured you, you may be able to name the component’s manufacturer as a defendant in your litigation.
  
  
• Companies that Load Cargo
  In other circumstances, the truck itself may be perfectly safe, but the cargo the truck hauls may be loaded in a way that makes the truck dangerous. By law, most trucks may not be loaded above 80,000 pounds, yet many companies try to overload trailers in order to deliver more goods at a lower cost. Overloaded trucks are more likely to tip over when trucks round turns and can seriously injure other drivers and their passengers. In other instances, a truck’s cargo will be improperly secured and could come loose on the road. A company that loads a truck may be held responsible when injuries result from loose or overloaded cargo.
  
  
• Companies that Plan Routes
  Unlike most other vehicles, trucks can’t travel on just any road. Certain roads, bridges, and tunnels have restrictions on height, weight, and cargo which prevent trucks from using those routes. As a result, a trucker rarely makes up his own route as he drives. Instead, a company will plan the route for the trucker in advance of the delivery. If one of these companies directs a truck under a low bridge or through some other environmental obstacle which presents a clearance issue, the company may be held responsible for any resulting injuries.

Truckers, trucking companies, manufacturers, companies that load cargo, and companies that plan routes are just a few of many parties which may have been responsible for your accident. In order to collect fully for your losses and hold the responsible parties accountable for their actions, it’s important to find out exactly who caused your wreck and how.

Uncovering the Truth, and Proving It

To win a truck accident case, it’s usually necessary to have a Dallas truck accident attorney conduct a thorough investigation on your behalf. Conducting an investigation has two purposes. First, it allows you to identify the party that was responsible for causing your accident. Since, as we’ve discussed, so many individuals have a hand in preparing a truck for the road, it’s not always a small task to determine which combination of them is liable. Second, conducting a skilled investigation allows you to gather the evidence you’ll need to prove the defendant’s liability in court. Jurors don’t like to be told how to decide. They like to see evidence which supports your position. Things like photographs, recordings, scraps of wreckage, and testimony of witnesses can go a long way to prove your case, and are frequently necessary to prevail.

Our Dallas truck accident lawyers have investigations down to a science. In nearly every truck accident case that we handle, we fly to the scene of the accident to search for evidence at no out of pocket cost to our clients. At the accident scene, we talk to witnesses, take pictures, record measurements, perform field and laboratory tests, examine wreckage, and otherwise find and collect evidence in a way that will make it admissible in court.

Defense attorneys do the same thing. Odds are that the defense lawyers in your case have already visited the accident scene themselves. In fact, in many instances defense lawyers are dispatched to the scene of a wreck mere moments after a crash occurs. They’ll often take investigators and accident recreation specialists with them. This team will search for evidence tending to prove that you were at fault for the wreck.

Defense attorneys get such an early start on their investigations because they know that the longer they wait to look for evidence, the more likely it will be that the evidence they need has disappeared. It’s important to start investigating your case as early as possible. One matter that our Dallas truck accident lawyers recently handled illustrates this concept especially well. In that case, our client had been involved in a collision with an 18 wheeler at night. The defendants claimed that our client was at fault for the wreck because he didn’t have headlamps installed in his car. When we were hired on the case, we traveled to the salvage yard where the remains of our client’s car had been towed. Sure enough, the car was missing its headlamps. We weren’t satisfied with this discovery, so we requested the surveillance footage from the salvage yard’s security system. The tapes were scheduled to be destroyed later that day, but we got them just in time to discover that the defendant had visited the salvage yard and stolen the headlamps from our client’s car. Armed with these tapes, we were easily able to show that the defendant was lying and had tampered with the evidence. If our client had waited even one more day before calling us, the evidence that turned out to be so critical to winning would have been destroyed

Take a lesson from this case and from the defense attorneys’ strategy; it’s important to begin your investigation as soon after your accident as possible. Our attorneys are usually able to build solid cases even if we aren’t contacted until several months after an accident occurs, but the strongest cases are usually built when we’re contacted as soon as possible after an accident. We recommend calling a Dallas truck accident attorney as soon as you can to get started on your investigation.

Two Ways to Win

There are two common ways to win a truck accident case. You may elicit a favorable settlement offer from a defendant or you may secure a judgment against a defendant in court.

• Settling out of Court
  Despite what television and movies would have you believe, most lawsuits never end up in court. Instead, they’re resolved out of court when parties agree to a settlement. In a settlement, the defendant volunteers to pay the plaintiff a certain sum of money, even though no judge has ordered him to do so. In exchange, the plaintiff gives up his right to sue the defendant for more money in court in the future. Accepting a fair settlement offer is beneficial to a plaintiff, who gets his money faster without the need for an uncertain jury trial. On the other hand, accepting an unfair settlement offer can be devastating to a plaintiff’s legal rights.
  
  Eliciting a fair settlement offer from a defendant is almost impossible without the assistance of a Dallas truck accident attorney. In a truck accident lawsuit, a defendant wins by default. In order for the accident victim to win instead, he needs to present evidence to prove his case. This means that the defendant has no obligation to pay you anything until a judge says otherwise. As a result, defendants are usually reluctant to volunteer money to unrepresented plaintiffs, and especially unlikely to volunteer a fair amount of money in compensation for your injuries. Usually, the only way to convince a defendant to offer you what your case is really worth without going to trial is to scare the defendant into believing that if your case hits the courtroom, you’ll win. Having one of our Dallas truck accident lawyers on your side does exactly that. Over the past twenty years, we’ve handled countless truck accident cases and won settlements and verdicts against nearly every major insurance company in the nation. Insurance companies recognize the name of our firm, and would usually rather settle cases with our clients than face our lawyers in the courtroom.
  
  If you haven’t got a Dallas truck accident attorney on your case, you might still receive a settlement offer from a defendant, but the offer will almost certainly be unfair. Defendants know that accident victims are often stressed with high medical bills, repair bills, and lost wages, and are resultantly vulnerable to settling cases for low amounts of fast cash. They also know that if you accept one of their unfair offers, you won’t be legally able to hire a lawyer to sue them for the true amount of your losses in the future. Be wary of offers you receive from a defendant before you’ve hired an attorney. These offers are almost never fair, but if you accept one it could severely limit your legal rights.
  
  
• Winning in Court
  If your case doesn’t settle out of court, it will probably be necessary to file a lawsuit against the defendant and take your case before a jury. As we’ve discussed, the plaintiff has the more difficult burden in a jury trial. The scales of justice are automatically tilted in favor of the defendant. In order to win, you need to tip those scales in your direction by presenting evidence supporting your claim on each of the four elements of a trucking accident case. Those four elements are duty, breach, causation, and damages.
  
  First, you’ll need to demonstrate that the defendant owed you a duty of care to behave in a way that wouldn’t cause you harm. Proving that the defendant named in your lawsuit owed you at least some duty of care is usually fairly easy since most people owe each other the duty to behave as a reasonable person would behave in order to avoid causing harm to others. Many individuals may have owed you the duty to behave reasonably, including truckers, trucking companies, manufacturers, and others.
  
  Second, you must prove a breach of the applicable duty of care. In most instances, the defendant in a truck accident case breaches his duty of care when he does something that a reasonable person wouldn’t do, or when he fails to take some precaution that a reasonable person would have taken. Would a reasonable person run a red light? Would a reasonable person have driven 25 miles above the speed limit? Would a reasonable person travel at night without his headlights on? The answer to these questions is probably no. In order to show that the defendant breached his duty of care, you’ll need to bring evidence to court to demonstrate precisely what the defendant did or did not do. The jurors will consider this evidence along with all of the surrounding circumstances, and will determine whether the defendant’s conduct deviated from the duty of care that he owed you.
  
  Third, you’ll need to prove causation in order to hold the defendant responsible for breaching his duty of care. Proving causation means demonstrating that it was the defendant’s breach of his duty that caused your accident or worsened your injuries. Since so many individuals may have the opportunity to make mistakes that ultimately could lead to a truck wreck, it’s common for named truck accident defendants to try to get off the hook for an accident by pinning the blame on a third party or even on the accident victim. If you don’t have the evidence it takes to prove why the defendant you’ve named in your lawsuit caused the accident, the defendant won’t owe you anything.
  
  Finally, once you’ve shown that the defendant was liable for causing your injuries, you’ll need to prove your damages. The term “damages” refers to the money that the defendant will owe you once you’ve proven his responsibility. Damages compensate accident victims for losses including pain and suffering, lost wages, loss of earning capacity, medical bills, property damage, and other losses resulting from an accident. To collect fully for your losses, you’ll need to calculate precisely how much you’re owed and provide evidence of your losses to support your calculations. The amount of damages is often contested in truck accident litigation. The defendant in your case has probably calculated how much he thinks you’re owed, just in case he is found liable for your injuries. His number will be a lot lower than your calculation, and it’s up to you to use evidence of your losses to demonstrate why your calculation is fair while the defendant’s is nothing more than a last-resort attempt to evade the consequences of his actions.
  
  Calculating damages is rarely straightforward, but it’s important to account for all of your losses in order to make a full and fair recovery. If your medical care is ongoing, it can be complex to estimate the expected costs of your full medical recovery, especially if the extent of the care you’ll need is still unknown. Additionally, calculating loss of earning capacity is frequently quite complex. Damages for loss of earning capacity account for the money that a disabled accident victim will not be able to earn over the course of his lifetime as a result of being unable to return to work. In order to calculate loss of earning capacity as accurately as possible, it’s necessary to account for the time value of money and the hypothetical raises and promotions that an accident victim would have received had he never been injured. A Dallas truck accident attorney, such as a lawyer from Grossman Law Offices, knows how to account for all of your losses and how to prove the damages you are entitled to.
  
  Because the burden of proof lies upon the plaintiff’s shoulders in a trucking accident case, it’s necessary for you to present evidence on all four of these elements in order to win. If you miss evidence on even one of these elements, you’ll lose your case. Our Dallas truck accident lawyers know how to find all the evidence you’ll need to meet your burden of proof and how to develop a trial strategy to present this evidence persuasively to a jury.

Whether we use our reputation to pressure the defendant into settling your case outside of court, or whether we end up taking your case to trial, the Dallas truck accident lawyers of Grossman Law Offices are prepared to protect your rights.

Roadblocks to Winning

Many truck accident victims have been involved in fender benders in the past, and have generally figured out the process of filing a claim. It’s a common misconception that a truck accident case is handled the same as a car accident case. In claims involving trucks, stakes are usually high and opposition is often intense. Many issues frequently come up in truck accident cases that don’t present problems in car accident cases. These issues often prevent unrepresented plaintiffs from recovering what their cases are really worth. Below, we’ll discuss some of those obstacles and how an experienced Dallas truck accident attorney can help you overcome them.

• Lying Truckers
  Just as truckers may create a danger to your safety on the roads, they can create a danger to your case in the courtroom. Defendants usually have some personal incentive to lie about the cause of an accident, but truckers are often particularly motivated to bend the truth. Few reputable trucking companies are willing to employ truckers with histories of causing wrecks. Truckers know this, and they know that they’ll likely be fired if they’re found responsible for causing an accident. Many truckers value their livelihoods above their integrity, and don’t hesitate to make up stories in which you caused the accident instead of them. If you can’t prove that the trucker in your case is lying, you’ll probably lose.
  
  Our attorneys have many methods to get to the truth regarding what really happens in trucking accidents in Dallas. Often, we’re able to collect so much evidence proving that the accident happened the way our client says it did that the trucker’s untruthfulness is glaringly obvious to the jury. In other instances, we use depositions to get to the bottom of things. In a deposition, we’re able to ask questions to the defendant’s witnesses. By using careful questioning strategies that we’ve developed over the course of twenty years of deposition taking, we’re usually able to ask the right questions to get a trucker to admit the truth or to catch him in a lie.
  
  
• Large Insurance Policies
  Insurance companies, motivated by their high potential liability under truck policies, often make it very difficult for unrepresented truck accident victims to recover. By law, all trucking companies must carry insurance on their trucks. The insurance policies held on most trucks are worth about fifty times as much as insurance policies held on cars. As a result, insurance companies stand to lose about fifty times more money if they pay a truck accident claim than if they pay an ordinary car accident claim. It only makes sense that the insurance companies are willing to devote around fifty times more resources to fighting claims brought against these high-dollar policies.
  
  Insurance companies use insurance adjusters to deny claims. These adjusters aren’t the same people you may have dealt with if you’ve filed a claim for a car accident in the past. Instead, insurance companies reserve their best adjusters for work on truck accident claims. These adjusters are generally considered among the best in their field and have solid track records for denying claims whenever possible. They’re hoping to do the same with your claim.
  
  Adjusters are stubborn in their positions and aggressive in their tactics. Frequently, they call accident victims after a wreck and ask them questions about the crash. They may seem friendly and well-meaning, but don’t be fooled by their demeanor. Their goal is to get you to admit something that could be used against you to deny your claim. If you say something that could be interpreted to mean that you were responsible for your accident or that you aren’t really hurt, your words will be recorded and come back to haunt you. Our Dallas truck accident lawyers have a strategy for dealing with insurance adjusters. We don’t let them call our clients. Instead, we take all of their calls. When they can’t talk to you, insurance adjusters don’t have even the slightest opportunity to trick you into saying something that could hurt your case.
  
  Insurance companies also use defense attorneys to protect their truck policies. These lawyers are usually highly specialized in the area of insurance defense law. As a result, they know every loophole in the law that could be used to get their clients off the hook for compensating you for your injuries. Even if your claim is entirely legitimate, these defense lawyers know dozens of ways to have your case dismissed on procedural technicalities. To protect your case, you need a legal expert on your side who knows the law as well as the opposing counsel.
  
  
• Self-Insured Trucking Companies
  Though most trucking accident lawsuits will involve at least one insurance company, some do not. Some trucking companies elect to be self-insured. This means that instead of purchasing a traditional insurance policy, a trucking company will set aside a portion of its assets for distribution to a plaintiff if the company ever loses a lawsuit. If the trucking company involved in your litigation is self-insured, you’ll probably be negotiating your claim directly with an officer of the company rather than with a traditional insurance adjuster. Though we’ve said that adjusters are an aggressive and stubborn bunch of professionals, the word “professional” often doesn’t serve to describe officers at all.
  
  While insurance adjusters must abide by certain ethical guidelines in order to keep their licenses to practice their professions, no such ethical rules bind the conduct of officers. As a result, it’s common for officers of self-insured trucking companies to tamper with evidence, harass accident victims, and even threaten witnesses. To make matters worse, the salaries of these officers are often directly linked to their companies’ financial success. If an officer elects to pay your claim, he’ll probably see a cut in his own pay. Since most officers are more concerned with their own financial situations than they are with yours, it’s not surprising that they’ll frequently go to great lengths to justify denying your claim.
  
  Don’t let an officer’s conduct interfere with your case or your sanity. If you or your witnesses are being harassed by an officer, or if you’re worried about what an officer might be up to behind the scenes, call one of our Dallas truck accident lawyers for help. We can use the law to make sure that officers mind their manners.

What a Dallas Truck Accident Attorney can do to Help

As you’ve probably gathered, unrepresented plaintiffs are almost never able to recover what their cases are truly worth, but there’s a lot that an experienced lawyer can do to help. At Grossman Law Offices, our first priority is to make sure that you and your loved ones have received the medical care that you need. If you’re uninsured, or if you can’t afford the care that you need, we’ll work to put you in touch with a doctor who will take your circumstances into consideration.

Once you’re getting the care that you need, we’ll go straight to work on your case. We handle every aspect of our clients’ claims from beginning until end and we keep our clients updated at every step of the process. Some of the services that we offer in nearly every trucking accident case that we handle include:

• Investigating the scene of the accident
• Finding out who caused your injuries and filing lawsuits against the responsible parties
• Gathering measurements, photographs, witness statements, test results, police reports, and other evidence that can be used to prove your case
• Putting pressure on the defendant to settle your claim
• Taking your case to court if necessary, and preparing a trial strategy to meet your burden of proof
• Exposing truckers’ lies by using evidence and depositions
• Dealing with aggressive adjusters on your behalf so they can’t use your words against you
• Going head to head with defense attorneys to make sure they can’t have your case dismissed on a technicality
• Making sure that a self-insured trucking company’s officers behave ethically

If you or someone you love has been injured in a trucking accident, call our lawyers for immediate assistance. We value communication with our clients and our potential clients, so we answer our phones around the clock, seven days a week. Call us at any time at 1-855-326-0000 (toll free) for a free consultation and answers to your legal questions.