Everett Truck Accident Lawyer

Trucks that carry goods for a business follow a stricter set of safety rules than private cars. National rules put a cap on the hours a truck driver may spend at the wheel, set standards for who may drive, require regular truck inspections and call for drug and alcohol testing. If a company or its driver ignored any of these rules before a crash, that failure weighs heavily against them. These rules exist because a heavy truck can do far more harm than a car.

Trucks that never leave the state are covered too. State law applies nearly the same safety standards to local haulers, so a truck making short trips between yards and stores cannot avoid the rules simply because it stays close to home. Local delivery firms, dump trucks and tow trucks are often held to these standards as well, even though many of them never travel far.

Truck companies are responsible for how their drivers behave on the job. When the driver was on duty during the collision, the company must answer for those mistakes, even if nobody at the office did anything wrong that day. That matters because a company and its policy can usually cover far more than a single driver could.

Some blame belongs to the company for its own decisions. Hiring a driver with a poor record, skipping training, ignoring complaints, keeping a driver who failed checks or sending out a truck with known problems are all company failures. Each of those decisions is a separate reason to hold the company liable, apart from the driver’s conduct.

Owner-drivers often haul for bigger carriers under a lease. The company whose name and permit the truck runs under is generally still responsible for that truck and its driver while it is working for them. A contract between two businesses never leaves an injured person with nobody to pay.

The law requires trucks to carry more insurance than private cars. Minimum coverage is higher for trucks, and higher still for trucks that haul fuel or other dangerous loads. Many larger companies buy extra policies on top of that, and one truck may be backed by two or three layers of coverage. Tracking down all of that coverage is vital when an injury will need years of care.

Blame often spreads beyond the carrier. A trailer owner, a loading crew, a repair shop or the company that arranged the shipment may each be partly at fault. The claim can name all of them, and each usually brings a separate insurance policy.

The jury may also weigh your own actions, though that seldom defeats a truck claim. Your claim survives whenever the companies being sued hold an equal or greater share of the blame, with your award trimmed by your own percentage. Jurors also know trucks need more room to stop and turn, which usually puts the heavier duty on the truck driver.

The car insurance in your own household normally handles the first hospital and clinic charges plus some of your lost income, regardless of blame, up to its limit. Truck crash injuries often exhaust that limit fast. Anything past it, from long-term care to pain and lasting damage, is pursued from the trucking company and every other business that shares the fault.

Carriers must also keep a written list of their serious crashes for several years. That list can show whether the same kind of crash, route or driver has come up before, which helps prove the company had fair warning. It can also show whether the company fixed the problems behind earlier crashes.

Most key evidence is kept by the company itself. The truck’s computer records its speed and braking, logbooks and electronic devices track driving hours, and the company keeps files on inspections, repairs and the driver’s history. A letter sent soon after the crash tells the company it must keep all of it, and ignoring that letter can hurt the company in court.

A lawsuit over the crash must usually be filed before three years pass. Our page on injury case time limits explains the exceptions. Delay is still a risk, since damaged trucks return to service fast and company files can disappear well before that date.

Together, these rules give several ways to hold the right people responsible. We work out which rules were broken, which businesses were involved and which policies apply, and we name each business that played a part from the beginning. None of this is yours to sort out alone.