How Are Texas Truck Accidents Different From Car Accidents?

Truck accident claims are more complex than car accidents in every conceivable way. Normally in a car accident you’ll have the police come investigate, the police will assign fault. There’ll be personal insurance policy at play. You may or may not need to hire an expert. Very straightforward type of litigation. Truck wrecks are completely different. First of all, you’re dealing with a truck, 18 wheelers, for example, that weigh 35,000 to 80,000 pounds. They have all kinds of equipment, they operate differently than cars, they’re subject to numerous rules, regulations, and statutes that don’t apply to your ordinary vehicle. The Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Act is a book this thick. It’s full of regulations and rules, so you need a lawyer that’s familiar with those, for example. Trucks have all kinds of electronics. Commercial vehicles and 18-wheelers have electronics that usually aren’t found in cars. Most cars and commercial vehicles have what we call a black box, an event data recorder that records some data, how fast you were going immediately before a crash, Crash Delta Vs, that’s just how hard the impact of the collision was, but they also have cameras. Some have cameras that face the driver so you can see what’s going on in the cab. Some have outward facing cameras. They have specialized software that records other data, as in heartbreaking events, near accidents, how much time they’ve been on the road. You’re gonna need a lawyer that’s familiar with that. That lawyer may need to hire an expert to help with, collecting that data, make sure it’s been preserved, make sure it hasn’t been tampered with. Fortunately, we see that sometimes in trucking cases, you’ve got in addition to statutes and regulations that govern the operation of the vehicle you have industry standards, so you need a lawyer that’s familiar with what is the trucking company’s latest standards on how they operate driver safety, how they train their drivers to operate their vehicles safe, how they do fleet safety, for example. You have issues with loading the vehicles and the loads. The loads have to be maintained and be loaded and each particular entity may have an obligation to load rather than transport the vehicle and have issues of how they’re loaded. If the load shifts during transport, you can cause collisions. You have issues with maintenance of the vehicles, maintenance of your cars basically keep oil and gas in it, keep your tires in good shape, and commercial vehicles have a tractor trailer, you have to maintain the trailer, the brakes, pneumatic air systems, all kinds of maintenance issues. You’re gonna need a lawyer that’s familiar with that. Time is a factor in commercial cases, more so than an ordinary car wreck. In a catastrophic injury or death case, when an 18 wheeler hits somebody, time is of the essence. A person needs to hire a lawyer and that lawyer needs to get on the scene with experts immediately. You need to hire accident reconstruction experts. They need to go out. They need to take physical measurements, tire marks, other physical evidence. They need to reconstruct the accident. They need to immediately download technical and electronic information. You need to hire people to help you with fleet safety. We have fleet safety experts we use. You need experts to begin looking at the information on hours driven. A lot of cases involve fatigue with commercial drivers, and there are very strict regulations that have to be followed by how many hours a driver can drive over a certain period of time, and there are various ways they can be recorded. You need to look at all those ways, you need to make sure that they did not drive over and were not fatigued or they did drive over, were fatigued and forged the records, which unfortunately happens sometimes. You have different issues with insurance coverage. For example, in a regular automobile case, you’ll just have one policy of insurance and probably one defendant, the driver that was negligent. In a commercial case, you may have multiple defendants. You may have the company, the trucking company, you may have the driver itself, you may have a broker or issuing agent may have liability depending on their relationship to the company. You may have various requirements on insurance that don’t apply to ordinary drivers, meaning they have to have a certain amount of insurance depending whether they drive interstate, meaning in different states or intrastate, meaning within one state, the state of Texas. There are statutory and contractual riders on some policies that provide extra coverage. Again., this is specialized knowledge. It takes someone who’s done these kind of cases before to know where to look. You have to know what you’re looking for. There’s a combination of factors that make an effective lawyer when it comes to these commercial cases. One, you have to have a firm that’s got experience and know-how, meaning they have to have handled these cases before and handle them in such a volume that they’re familiar with every aspect of the case. Two, you need a firm that’s got the financial resources to go up against these big companies, both monetarily, meaning have enough money to fund the case and fight the fight, and also the manpower, the lawyers, the staff needed to prosecute a big case like this. And finally it’s been our experience that you need the the will to win, the will to not be outworked. So I would say that your winning combination for that is experience, knowledge, resources, and the will to win, and that’s exactly what you get with the Lanier Law Firm.