RECENT SUCCESS STORY: $4,000,000 SEMI-TRUCK ACCIDENT SETTLEMENT
Who Investigates 18-Wheeler Accidents in Texas?
According to NHTSA statistics, Texas tends to see more fatal commercial truck accidents annually than any other state. It's obviously important to investigate each of those incidents carefully and thoroughly, both to help the victims and hopefully to reduce the number of future crashes. Those investigations can be quite complicated, however, and many different parties...
Should I Give a Recorded Statement to an Insurance Adjuster after a Truck Accident?
After a truck accident people tend to have a dozen or more urgent and immediate concerns, so answering some questions from an insurance representative may not make much of a blip on their radar. Despite that, the conversation they have with a claims adjuster after an 18-wheeler wreck could affect their lawsuit against the truck...
Can I Trust a Trucking Company’s Insurer?
Trucking insurance companies are most often responsible for paying injured victims after an 18-wheeler accident, but they'll do everything they can to avoid it. Their actions in pursuit of that goal may vary, but they'll try their damnedest to protect the company's assets and avoid honoring their client's commercial policy. That may lead people to...
How Do I Prove the Truck Driver Who Hit Me Was Intoxicated?
By their sheer size and bulk alone, tractor-trailers are already inherently more capable of inflicting harm when something goes wrong than most other vehicles on the road. The matter is made considerably worse when a truck driver is under the influence of drugs or alcohol. This raises the question: When someone is hurt or killed...
How Big of a Problem Are Unsafe 18-Wheelers?
Most people are aware that commercial truck drivers occasionally make serious or even fatal mistakes at the wheel, but concerns about those misbehaviors sometimes overshadow another major issue: malfunctioning trucks, particularly those in states of terrible disrepair. A significant number of trucks and trailers in bad shape hit the road every day, but how big...
What is an 18-Wheeler Accident Investigation Kit?
When a commercial vehicle accident occurs, information must be gathered. Most trucking companies provide their truckers with something called an accident investigation kit, aka a "compliance kit," which is ostensibly used as a tool to tell truck drivers what information they need to collect at the accident scene. In our view, however, the whole thing...
What Kind of Inspection Does the State of Texas Require for 18-Wheelers?
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) and state governments require 18-wheelers to meet certain minimum standards before they're deemed roadworthy. To be sure the trucks are in compliance, state and federal inspectors regularly evaluate them and their operators. That may lead some to wonder: What kind of inspection does Texas require for tractor-trailers? Answer:...
How Do Trucking Companies Cheat Electronic Logging Devices?
The regulations requiring truck drivers to rest after an interval of work are called hours of service (HOS) rules. Most modern truck drivers' hours of service are now monitored by federally-required Electronic Logging Devices (ELDs), which use data from an active 18-wheeler to create a picture of its movement and its driver's activity over a...
Are Side Underride Guards Required on 18-Wheelers?
An 18-wheeler's underride guard or "Mansfield bar" helps prevent a smaller vehicle from traveling underneath a semi-trailer during a rear-end collision. The standard guard design has room for improvement and a mixed success rate, but most would agree that something between a car and a trailer's undercarriage is generally better than nothing. The government seemingly...
Who Is Liable if an 18-Wheeler Underride Guard Fails?
A semi-trailer typically sits higher off the ground than the bumpers of many passenger vehicles, which means when a car hits the rear or side of that trailer there's a strong risk that it will travel underneath in what's commonly called an underride accident. Such collisions are often devastating to the people in the car,...