How Do I Uncover If A Texas Truck Crash Was Caused By Negligence?
Asked in Austin, TX on July 15, 2018 Last answered on August 20, 20262 answers
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Free Consultation If you or a loved one is in an accident with a truck, resulting in injury or fatality, you may consider pursuing a lawsuit against the driver of the truck. To be successful, you must generally prove that the other driver was negligent or made a mistake. It is difficult to do this as an individual, but an experienced lawyer can help you do so.
First, you should know that timing is extremely important. You must retain an experienced lawyer as soon as possible. This is because the trucking company and its insurance company will begin damage control immediately. They know that these types of accidents happen, and are ready for them. They have very good lawyers, who have a plan in place: you need the same advantage.
A board-certified trial lawyer will have the relationships necessary inside the justice system to work as efficiently as possible on your behalf. Furthermore, trucking accident liability is a specific area of the law: a general practitioner will not have the vast experience in these types of accidents that you would want them to have. They will take the steps necessary to prove negligence in your case. It will involve uncovering documents to help your case, including:
- Drivers’ logs: Trucking companies require their drivers to document everything they do. These notes can lead to inferences about the driver’s fatigue or other elements that might help your case.
- Training documents: How the company trains their drivers to behave may illustrate their lack of care regarding safety procedures, which could have contributed to your accident.
- Personnel files: Was the driver known to be careless? Personnel files can offer insight into the driver’s history.
- Data from electrical control module of the vehicle: Electrical control modules are a part of a truck’s electronics system that controls the electrical aspects of the vehicle. If they malfunction, it can cause an accident.
- The truck’s inspection records: Trucking companies have a responsibility to ensure that their trucks are serviced frequently and kept in good condition. Inspection records can show whether the truck should even be on the road.
Your lawyer will know what measures to take to ensure these documents are produced and preserved. If you delay finding representation, the trucking company may destroy or lose these records, negatively affecting your case.
Additionally, an inspection of the vehicles and the scene can be instrumental in proving negligence. Your lawyer will want to create a record of not only the damage done to your vehicle, but also the condition of the truck and whether it appears to be in ill repair, which may have contributed to causing the accident.
The scene also holds a lot of good information that your lawyer may be able to use. The condition of the road surface, location of barriers, the weather and even tire tracks can all impact your case, and they are all pieces of evidence that can quickly be lost if you do not hire a lawyer right away.
Free Consultation A Texas truck crash is two negligence cases, not one: the driver's conduct behind the wheel, and the trucking company's own conduct in hiring, training, and supervising him. Since 2021, Civil Practice & Remedies Code Chapter 72 has controlled whether a jury ever hears the second one.
Start with where the proof lives. Most of it is federal, and most of it is on a clock.
The driver qualification file. Under 49 C.F.R. § 391.51 the carrier has to keep one on every driver — the employment application, the motor vehicle record, the road test certificate, the annual driving-record review, and the medical examiner's certificate. It must be retained for as long as the driver works there and three years after.
Hours of service. Under 49 C.F.R. § 395.8(k)(1) the carrier must retain records of duty status and supporting documents for not less than six months. Six months. Your deadline to file suit is two years from the crash under Civil Practice & Remedies Code § 16.003, so the logs that would show a fatigued driver can be lawfully gone a year and a half before you sue.
Now the part that surprises people, including lawyers who don't do this work. Under § 72.054(a), if the trucking company stipulates that the driver was its employee acting in the scope of employment, its liability for ordinary negligence rests only on respondeat superior — and § 72.054(b) then bars you from putting on negligent hiring or negligent entrustment evidence in the first phase of a bifurcated trial. That stipulation looks like a concession. It functions as a shield. A defendant can move to bifurcate under § 72.052 by the later of 120 days after its original answer or 30 days after you add a claim against it, and phase one then covers liability and compensatory damages while exemplary damages wait for phase two.
So these cases don't get built by dumping the company's compliance file on a jury. Under § 72.053(b), a regulatory violation reaches phase one only if it tends to prove the violation proximately caused the injury and the regulation is specific and governs that defendant or its equipment. You pick the rule that actually caused this wreck. And claims that don't depend on the driver's negligence at all — negligent maintenance, for one — still survive under § 72.054(f).
This is general information about Texas law rather than legal advice, and answering here doesn't make me your lawyer.
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