Who's Actually Liable in a Trucking Accident?
Who is actually liable after a truck accident? Attorney Jason Itkin of Arnold & Itkin LLP explains why suing the driver is almost never the whole case.
Jason Itkin explains who can be held responsible after a commercial truck hurts or kills someone, and why the answer is almost never just the driver.
The Mistake Most Lawyers Make
Many lawyers treat a truck crash like an intersection dispute: figure out the rear-end or the sideswipe, sue the driver, done. Jason’s point is that the collision is the last event in a longer story. The case that matters asks what allowed it to happen: why this driver was behind the wheel, why the brakes didn’t work, and what the trucking company was doing and why. Answering those questions is how our truck accident lawyers have won the biggest trucking results in the country.
“The question that you really need to look at for the family involved is, what allowed this to happen? Why was this driver behind the wheel? Why did the brakes not work on this vehicle?”
How We Find the Full Story
Getting that answer takes more than a police report.
It can mean accident reconstructionists establishing vehicle speeds, canvassing for nearby camera footage, and digging through corporate records to expose what Jason calls the shell games companies play with their legal safety obligations. In complex cases, more than one party is responsible: the trucking company, a loading company that overloaded or improperly loaded the trailer, and others up the chain. Our job is to get the full story and bring the truth to light.
“It may be digging deep into the corporate records to figure out the different shell games that the company’s playing and how they’re cheating and not following the legal requirements.”
Full Transcript
When a commercial truck hurts a family or maybe even kills someone, we will typically file a lawsuit against the trucking company and sometimes the driver of the truck, depending on the facts.
Oftentimes, a lot of lawyers make the mistake of just looking at it as, you know, what happened at the intersection, or how did someone end up sideswiping someone? You know, there’s a rear end, so we just, we’re gonna sue the driver.
But the reality is that the question that you really need to look at for the family involved is, what allowed this to happen? Why was this driver behind the wheel? Why did the brakes not work on this vehicle? What was it the trucking company was doing and why? And making sure that not only do we get the full story of what went wrong, but hopefully we can prevent that trucking company from doing it to another family or maybe even doing worse.
For more than 20 years, we’ve been winning the very best results for people who have been injured or in many cases killed by trucking companies that have taken shortcuts. And the way we’ve been able to get those top results is by making sure that we understand exactly what went wrong and why. That might mean hiring an accident reconstructionist to figure out speeds of the vehicles. It may mean finding video camera evidence from places that are nearby that captured it. It may be digging deep into the corporate records to figure out the different shell games that the company’s playing and how they’re cheating and not following the legal requirements of what they’re supposed to do to make sure their drivers and their vehicles are safe to be on the road.
In some cases, in really complex cases, there can be more than one party responsible. You can have a trucking company. You can have a loading company if the vehicle was overloaded or loaded improperly. You can have multiple things that led to something terrible happening. And it’s our job when somebody hires us to make sure that we get the full story of what went wrong, why it went wrong, and bring the truth to light. Call us, email us, text us. We’ll respond and hold the people who did it accountable and make sure that your family’s taken care of.
