Why Are Semi-Truck Accident Cases Different Than Regular Car Accident Cases?

The question is about semi accidents and what makes them more complex than regular accidents. And my first answer is how much time do you have? Everything is different. It’s not just you know two people who have a common sense knowledge about how they’re supposed to operate on the road, and one of them breaks that common sense knowledge. And everyone kind of automatically knows what the liability is. Sometimes you get that. I mean, semi- trucks can speed just like any other vehicle, and if they speed into the back of stalled traffic, it doesn’t take a genius to see what the liability is going to be there. But there are a lot of other factors that affect semi- truck drivers, not the least of which are the Federal Motor Carrier safety regulations that have tons of regulations for how semi- drivers have to allocate their time, how long they’re allowed to be on the road, both in the course of a day, but also in the course of a month. All kinds of rules about loads and how the loads are managed – managed within the trailer I mean. I mean there are so many different regulations that affect semi truck drivers that if you hire an attorney that doesn’t know those regulations fairly well, doesn’t know an expert in the industry that they can consult with on those regulations, you can wind up missing a liability on the semi-truck driver or the semi-truck company that another attorney would have found. Another way that those cases are very different is semi-truck carriers, insurance carriers are very, very aggressive. They actually have people that are on crack teams that go to the scene immediately upon when a wreck is reported by the driver, and that team will include experts, it’ll include their defense attorney, and they start gathering evidence right away with an eye toward mitigating the risk that they might be successfully sued. And I always wonder what evidence disappears or gets messed up as a result of all those boots on the ground going over everything. I always wonder what I don’t know about because that team was there and I wasn’t. By contrast, once you’re in court, if someone’s expert or attorneys want to look at something, the court has rules that make it so that everyone can be there at the same time, and each side can ensure that the evidence isn’t damaged or changed in any way. But that does not apply on the night of the wreck. And every single time, I would say a semi-truck company has a team out there. Another issue that can come up is when someone’s driving a personal vehicle, it’s pretty obvious who the defendant is and who the insurance carrier is. That’s not true in the case of semis where the truck may be owned by one company and insured by their insurance company, but then the trailer is owned by another company and is insured by that insurance company. There may be a middleman who organized the freight to be carried on that particular truck and trailer, and that may have its own insurance company involved. There are leases. There are all kinds of legal situations where just unraveling the knot to figure out who is the proper party to sue requires a lot of extra legal work that you just don’t have in a regular one-on-one personal vehicle collision. So if you do have a wreck that involves tractor-trailer, make sure that when you’re looking for an attorney, you’re looking for attorneys who, as their primary practice area is personal injury, but then they also talk about the fact that they’ve done semi- truck wrecks. I see from time to time, attorneys appear on billboards who talk about being semi-truck lawyers, and they’re not. So don’t go by a billboard. I would really do a deep dive into an attorney’s website and see if they’ve got examples on the website about tractor-trailer cases that they’ve had in the past.