During a semitruck accident lawsuit, your legal team will investigate the crash, evaluate liability, and assess damages, and may negotiate a settlement on your behalf. While this process sounds simple on paper, suing a trucker or trucking company for accident injuries is complex, and it requires multiple experts, engineers, and reconstruction specialists to weigh in on the case facts.
Read on as our semitruck accident lawyers walk through what you can expect during a lawsuit. Each step in the litigation process plays an important role in protecting a victim’s interests and addressing the physical, financial, and emotional toll of these wrecks.
Litigating Semitruck Accidents
While you might question whether to sue for a car accident, trucking crashes often involve serious injuries or fatalities that often warrant litigation. Freight companies often quickly begin protecting their interests after a crash. They may even make early settlement offers, before you have time to consult an attorney, to try to minimize their financial exposure.
How Long Does an 18-Wheeler Lawsuit Take?
A lawsuit against a trucking company can take anywhere from 6 months to a year, depending on the evidence, injury severity, legal disputes, and number of potentially liable parties. Settlements and setbacks can happen at any time during the process, so no timeline is guaranteed.
What Kind of Lawyer Do I Need to Sue a Trucking Company?
An attorney experienced with trucking accident litigation is essential when pursuing a lawsuit against a freight company or truck driver. These legal professionals can examine industry regulations and access the necessary resources to investigate these complex crashes.
Truck Accident Investigation
Investigation plays a critical role in identifying the cause of a trucking accident. Evidence can identify whether driver fatigue, improper maintenance, poor training, or other negligence contributed to the crash. A semitruck accident lawsuit will feature several types of evidence, including:
Driving Logs and Records
Commercial vehicles must adhere to strict federal and state regulations. Electronic logging devices (ELDs) document hours of service and rest periods, mileage and location, freight details, and vehicle inspections. If a trucker failed to follow freight standards, logbooks can help support claims of distracted or fatigued driving, equipment failures, or other over-limit operation.
Black Box Data
Electronic control modules (ECMs), or “black boxes,” record speed, braking, engine activity, and other digital data that can provide vital information about the moments leading up to a crash. This data is useful for reconstructing the sequence of events and determining where failures occurred.
Witness Statements
The role of a commercial trucking accident expert witness is to help interpret GPS data, skid marks, and other technical evidence to explain the circumstances of the accident. With input from reconstruction experts and individuals who saw the crash in real time, it’s easier to clarify road conditions, traffic behavior, and the actions of each vehicle involved.
Visual and Physical Evidence
Crash scene photographs can show vehicle damage, road markings, skid patterns, signage, and weather conditions to help establish drivers’ actions, collision points, and other vital facts. Preserving physical evidence, including damaged vehicle parts, road debris, and cargo manifests, can also provide insights into failures that contributed to the crash.
Establishing Liability
Identifying the cause of the semitruck collision can help pinpoint the liable party or parties, but determining who is responsible isn’t always simple. For example, when a driver’s speed causes a crash, it may be realistic to blame their reckless behavior. But if that driver wasn’t properly trained, or was facing pressure from their employer to meet an unrealistic delivery schedule, the freight company could share some fault.
Who Is Liable for a Semitruck Accident?
Liability in a semitruck accident generally falls on the entity that is found to have acted negligently or failed to control the circumstances that led to the crash. The issue with trucking accidents is that multiple parties may have contributed and could share fault. When determining truck accident liability, our legal team could identify a combination of potential parties for various failures, such as:
- The commercial vehicle driver: For distracted, fatigued, or otherwise negligent behavior behind the wheel
- The trucking company: For negligent hiring, training, maintenance, or regulatory practices
- Maintenance contractors: For improper repairs or inspections that caused mechanical failure
- Freight loaders: For loading unbalanced cargo, not properly securing a load, or overloading freight
- Truck or parts manufacturers: For producing or selling defective brakes, tires, steering, or systems
Calculating Compensatory Damages for Truck Accident Injuries
Before beginning the lawsuit, you may need to wait until you’ve reached Maximum Medical Improvement (MMI) to ensure the full extent of your injuries is understood and accounted for. This can be particularly important if you’ve experienced traumatic brain injury, paralysis, or another serious condition that may have a long prognosis or life-altering effects. Courts consider compensatory damages in two categories, economic and non-economic.
- Economic: Tangible losses, such as medical bills, lost wages, reduced earning capacity, and out-of-pocket expenses
- Non-economic: Intangible losses, including pain and suffering, emotional distress, and mental anguish
While tangible losses can be evidenced by receipts, invoices, and wage-loss reports, intangible losses are harder to quantify. An attorney familiar with catastrophic injury cases is a good resource to help make sure your future recovery needs are accounted for in your claim.
Filing a Claim and Legal Proceedings
A demand letter precedes most trucking accident lawsuits. This outlines the claim and is supported by documentation of the truck accident injuries, compensatory damages, and liability. Insurance companies for the trucking company may respond with an offer or request more information. Some mediation resolves a case pre-trial, as we experienced with this fatal truck crash settlement. If no agreement is reached, you can proceed to file a lawsuit in the appropriate court.
Once filed, both sides proceed to discovery, a structured process of exchanging information, answering questions, and taking sworn depositions. From there, the case continues to motions, which are formal requests from representatives asking the judge to decide a point or make a ruling before trial.
Resolving the Case Through Negotiations or Trial
Some motor vehicle accidents are resolved with settlements, often during or after discovery, once evidence comes to light. These discussions may occur informally between attorneys or in a court-ordered conference. If no resolution is reached, the legal process continues toward judgment. Trial includes presenting arguments, examining witnesses, and following civil litigation procedures as required by law. There’s no guarantee which direction a case may take, but our attorneys are prepared to guide accident victims through either path.
If you’ve been harmed or lost a loved one due to a semitruck accident, we’re here to help. Contact an attorney at Davis, Bethune & Jones for compassionate, experienced representation.