Truck Accidents Are More Complex
Michael Babboni
Trucking Accidents
With most vehicular accidents, the circumstances of the case are fairly straightforward. If you are injured as a direct result of someone else’s negligence on the road, that other driver is usually responsible for the injury itself, while they or—and this is more common—their insurance company takes up the financial burden of compensating you for your injuries in the event of a successful court case.But this is only the case in accidents involving more conventional, private vehicles such as cars and motorcycles. In these cases, the people that are operating the vehicles are usually the owners, and while they may be driving for work related reasons, the driving itself is not actually a major component of their job description.
This is not the case where large, cargo hauling trucks are involved.
Truck accidents differ from smaller vehicular accidents in a number of ways. One of the most obvious is severity, especially for the smaller vehicle that goes up against a truck. In normal vehicle accidents where the hardware involved is similar in size, the severity of damage to one vehicle or another is almost entirely determined by where the vehicle is hit, and the speed with which both vehicles were at. However, as with a motorcycle going up against a car, when a car collides with a truck, the greater mass of the truck invariably assures the car of being much more damaged the accident, and the same goes for how severe the injuries will be to drivers and passengers of the car. Physics is simply on the side of the truck, and this is not a battle that a car—or its occupants—can win when speed and mass weigh into the equation.
However, where the biggest change in a car and truck accident comes in is if it’s time to go to court for a personal injury case, and blame has to be assigned to a responsible party. What in other accidents is a simple affair one driver versus another becomes a labyrinth of possible culprits trying to avoid blame and place it on someone else.
You Versus The Company
When a professional cargo hauling truck is involved in an accident, the driver is just one cog in a large, multi-faceted machine that includes different companies, manufacturers, experienced insurance companies, their agents, and lawyers that are well versed in protecting corporate interests. You, as an injured, private individual are partnered with your personal injury lawyer, but you are a normal person going up against a battery of different companies and interests.
The trucking company, or their insurance and/or legal teams will dispatch their own investigative teams to conduct research into the accident. While it’s unlikely that these teams will do anything to deliberately hide or destroy unfavorable evidence, they will also be aggressively looking for evidence that shifts blame away from them and, potentially to you. The goal of this investigation is to assess the extent of the damage and then decide what is the next step to take in the best interests of the parties involved.
This involvement is complex with a trucking accident. Depending on the circumstances of the accident, the driver may completely, partially, or not responsible at all. If, for example, the driver was fully rested, obeying all traffic laws, and the accident resulted from cargo coming loose and spilling onto the road to hit drivers behind the truck, the fault for the accident may lie with the manufacturers of the trailer, or with the manufacturers of the cargo itself. If there is a mechanical failure with the truck that causes the accident, the mechanics who worked on the truck or the company that solicits maintenance with the trucking company to keep up its vehicles may be to blame.
There are a great many more parties and variables at play in a trucking accident, and this is why you should have an experienced personal injury lawyer that is familiar with vehicular accidents. Going to court against a trucking company can be a grueling, complex affair. You should ensure that you are prepared to deal with it with a lawyer you can trust, like thestpetelawyer.com, who is ready to hear you out.