Choosing a Truck Accident Attorney

Answer:

The question often comes up, “How do I select the right truck accident attorney if I get injured in Arizona?” That’s a very important question if you’ve been hit by a semi-trailer or any large truck. In fact, we’ve had situations like that, recently, where people contact us to talk to one of our attorneys and they say, “Yeah, if somebody can do a car accident, it’s just a bigger vehicle, right?” Well, one of our attorneys was talking to a potential client the other day and explained, no, that’s not right. It’s like the difference between minor leagues and major leagues, if you’re a baseball player, and the reason is because it really is that much different in how a truck accident case needs to be handled from a car accident case.

For instance, it’s very common that a lot of car accident attorneys will handle it the same way, and that can cost you, as a client, as the attorney explained, thousands of dollars. How? As it was explained to this potential client, let’s go through some of those possibilities. All these trucks nowadays have onboard computers that record everything. What happens is, after a semi has rear-ended someone, the insurance companies send out all these experts immediately to protect their client, not necessarily secure the evidence. As one of our attorneys explained to the potential client, what we do is we make sure that one of our experts is there to download that information at the same time the trucking company has an expert. Otherwise, what often happens is that the trucking company or their insurance company just goes, “Oops, it’s gone.” Of course, that’s where the evidence would hurt them. If it’s helpful, they don’t have any problem keeping that evidence around. We had a situation where a semi driver rear-ended our clients, several people were killed, and the insurance company tried to blame our vehicle. They said the lights weren’t on. It took a whole year and, finally, we were able to take the deposition of the other driver, the truck driver, and it turned out that just before we took the deposition of the truck driver, we got the medical evidence showing that this truck driver was high on just about everything you can imagine. After we presented that to the attorney for the trucking company, he said, “I imagine now you probably want us to pay the policy limits,” and, by the way, the policy limits are usually bare minimum, $750,000, millions more common, and sometimes multi-million dollars. We got a very good settlement for our clients. If you’re not willing to go that far, the trucking company and their insurance company, and their attorneys, they’ll do the best they can to make it difficult or impossible for you to discover what they did wrong. Another situation is for drivers to be tired from driving too much. The trucking companies nowadays, they’re usually smart enough to not tell drivers to drive as many hours as they want to make more money. They can encourage it and tolerate it, however. In the old days, they used to have log books and they could fudge it, but now that information is stored in the computers. It can show every place that they stopped, if they got the right amount of rest, if they were driving more hours. If the company tolerates that kind of behavior, just because drivers make more money, make more profit, they might end up killing more people as a result. That case can qualify for what’s called punitive damages – that’s another thing the attorney explained to them. Punitive damages open up a huge amount of compensation beyond the medical bills and the pain and suffering. If you’re in a situation where you or a loved one was involved in a trucking accident, call us. We can do a search and find out if this trucking company and their inspections – if they have failed most of their inspections, if their drivers have been taken off the road because of rule violations – we’ll let you know for free about that kind of information, and that can make a huge difference in the value of your case, even with the same injuries. That’s just part of what our attorneys can explain when they look at your individual situation. Remember, any trucking accident, you really need to have a law firm on your side. Call us early. There’s more that we can help you with. There’s more we can do. Call us. The call is free, the information is free, and it can be priceless and make tens of thousands of dollars difference to you or millions, potentially. Call us because we’re here for you.