Because of the size of these enormous vehicles, truck accidents tend to cause much more severe injuries than normal car wrecks, and a lot of property damage. Beyond that, they are also very complex from a legal standpoint. The question is who is liable, and the answer could be multiple parties. A Katy truck accident lawyer can help you get through the red tape and bureaucracy to find out who is responsible and bring a claim to cover your damages and losses after this type of catastrophic accident.
From a Katy Truck Accident Lawyer: Who Is Liable in a Truck Accident?
The Driver
Obviously, one of the first entities to look at is the driver. Even if the driver works for a trucking company, the driver themselves may be responsible. If a truck driver breaks the law and company policy while driving, and if the trucking company was not aware that they did this, and they did not have a history of doing it, then it may be almost entirely the driver’s fault. The driver was not acting within the scope of their job requirements. While the trucking company may be somewhat at fault as well, the driver may be the primary person legally responsible for what happened.
The Trucking Company
The next entity to look at is the trucking company itself, because it is often at least partially liable in these cases. It’s very difficult to prove liability without the help of a Katy truck accident lawyer, but it’s important to do so in many cases. Most of the time, you can expect the trucking company to try to shift all the blame onto the driver or claim that the driver is an independent contractor and thus they are not responsible. Fighting a trucking company that has resources on their side is hard.
Your lawyer can investigate whether a commercial driver has been wrongly misclassified as an independent contractor in order to allow the trucking company to avoid responsibility. Your lawyer can also investigate things like hiring practices, pressure that might have been put on the driver by the trucking company to bend the rules in order to get deliveries done more quickly, or negligence in training and oversight on the part of the trucking company.
The Cargo Loader
Ultimately, a driver is responsible to ensure that their vehicle has been properly loaded. However, when loading is performed by a third party, there may be cargo loaders who are at least partially responsible for the accident, if one of the contributing factors was a shifting load or if the vehicle was overloaded. This very much depends on the circumstances, so you will want to talk to a lawyer.
The Truck Manufacturer
In some cases, large trucks fail because of something that is ultimately the responsibility of the manufacturer. This might be a defective steering wheel column or another mechanical failure, but if your lawyer can show that the truck accident happened because certain parts of the truck were defective, the truck manufacturer may be at least partly responsible for what happened.
Those Responsible for Truck Maintenance
Even the best-made truck can experience issues if it is not properly maintained. If a truck causes an accident because of the failure of a part that should have been replaced or some other type of maintenance neglect, whoever was responsible for maintaining the truck could be liable.
Who this is exactly will depend on the circumstances, because sometimes an individual driver is responsible for this, and sometimes it’s a trucking company that’s responsible to do basic maintenance. In other cases, the driver or the company may have done their due diligence and had maintenance done, but the entity providing the maintenance did a poor job or even committed fraud by claiming to have done maintenance (and charging for it) when they did not.
The Local Government Agencies
Finally, sometimes a local government agency is at fault, at least partially, for an accident. This is usually the case when a roadway has not been maintained the way it should, if there is incorrect signage on the road, or if a traffic light is not working properly and the local government was aware of it and had not either fixed it or warned drivers properly and provided alternative signaling.
A Completely Other Driver
Finally, in some truck accident cases, all the fault, or at least most of it, may lie with another driver entirely. If, for example, you were hit by a truck, but that truck was pushed into you by another vehicle whose driver was breaking the law, such as by running a red light, it’s the driver of that third vehicle who may actually be the one responsible.
What if Multiple Parties Are Responsible?
As you can see, it’s very easy in these situations for there to be more than one responsible party. The truck driver, the trucking company, and a third driver might all be responsible to one degree or another, for example. When this happens, things can get very quickly tangled up. You can expect each party to be attempting to shift as much blame as possible onto everyone else, and the average victim in this situation is going to really struggle to negotiate a fair settlement.
When multiple parties are involved, you may have more than one avenue for seeking recompense for your damages, and that’s great. But you also face a lot more complexity and difficulty, which isn’t so great. It’s especially important to have the help of a car accident attorney in these situations.
Determining Liability
Because these accidents are often so catastrophic, and because the size of these trucks often means multiple vehicles are involved, it can be difficult to determine liability and reconstruct what happened. This is where having a lawyer is especially helpful because your lawyer will have other experts they know that they can call upon to help.
It’s very common to call in an accident reconstruction specialist in these situations, for example. An accident reconstruction specialist looks at all the evidence and uses this to piece together what actually happened. These specialists are also than able to explain what happened, step-by-step, in terms that the court or an insurance company can understand.
Your lawyer will also review the evidence themselves, potentially initiate an investigation independently, talk to witnesses, look over the accident report from the police, and use all of these to help reconstruct what happened and find out who is legally responsible. Then they will put all of this together to prove liability. Proving liability involves showing that an entity owed you a duty of care, that this duty of care was not fulfilled, that this failure in the duty of care directly caused the accident, and that you suffered specific damages as a result of this accident. This chain of elements has to be proven step-by-step, and your lawyer will put together all the evidence into a cohesive story to do just that.
If you’ve been in a truck accident, don’t try to go at it alone against multiple liable parties, big trucking companies, and powerful insurance companies. Contact us at the Law Office of Shane McClelland in Katy, TX or Sugarland, TX for a free consultation so we can help.