What is your recent experience with truck accidents in Texas?

Video transcript: We’ve had a couple recently. Still working on several as well, but one stands out. It was a young man. His family was moving from New York down to Houston. He was riding. It was about 6:00 in the morning. He was asleep in the passenger seat and his mother was in a little Honda Accord. The 18-wheeler driver, not paying attention, he was actually on the phone with his girlfriend, ran into the back of this car and catapulted her, sling shot them off into the ditch. He just kept driving. He didn’t think he’d hit anyone. Finally, another motorist stopped the truck. Turns out his license plate was still in the back of the car so it was pretty hard for him to deny that he actually ran into him. But that kid ended up being a quadriplegic from that wreck and we had tragic video and audio from the troopers at the scene where you could hear him crying to his mother saying he can’t move truck.

Truck wrecks are similar to bus wrecks in that when there’s a serious trucking incident on the highways, the truck companies and the insurance companies have rapid response teams. They will literally have someone on site within an hour to two hours to start their investigation. That’s why it’s very important again you get legal representation so you can have someone there too. There are also deadlines as to how long the companies have to keep certain documents, so if you wait a year, they may not have to retain all their drivers logs, their electronic data.

They’re very technical cases. You’ve got to understand the Federal Motor Carrier regulations. You’ve got to understand trucking. You’ve got to understand the contracts between the shippers and the brokers and not just the guy whose name is on side of the truck, but usually there’s a company behind it that’s also responsible. And again, like boating accidents, like products cases, an 80,000-pound truck, when it crashes into something, it usually causes a lot more damage than a 4,000-pound sedan.