The Expertise Provided By Truck Accident Lawyers

Although trucking accidents do not take place as often as car accidents, any one of them could cause very severe injuries to at least some of the people involved in that same incident. That fact highlights the reason that drivers ought to understand the benefits enjoyed by someone that has sought help from an expert on the typical truck accident.

Types of trucks involved in the most dangerous car-truck collisions’

• Semis (semi-trucks)
• Delivery and cargo trucks
• Truck-trailers
• Trucks used for transporting specific items
• Big-rigs

All of the above weigh more than 5x the weight of the average automobile. For that reason, pickups and SUVs do not belong on the above list.

What factors increase the chances that a truck’s driver might be held responsible for an on-road incident?

The driver was an independent contractor. Whenever a driver has been working for a trucking company, that same company can be held responsible for any accident that involved one of the company’s large, commercial vehicles.

Unsafe company practices, which can cause an accident:

• Encouraging drivers to extend the number of hours that they spend on the road each day.
• Encouraging unsafe driving, for the purposes of getting an order to a given location within a defined period of time.
• Failing to check the background of a hired driver. That increases the chances that the same driver might have a criminal background.
• No scheduled inspection of vehicles provided to drivers.
• No plans for maintenance work on vehicles that will be given to drivers.

Times when negligence can cause a truck-car collision:

Negligence by someone in government: Could explain poor road conditions; might explain the absence of a road sign. If the government hired a cheap road engineer, that could explain the presence of a sharp curve or a dangerously sleep slope, both serving as invitations for disaster.

Possible negligence by the truck’s driver: Driver was speeding; driver had drifted out of the truck’s selected lane. Driver’s maneuvers were erratic.

Possible negligence by trucking company: Company’s demands on each driver tend to cause driver fatigue. Company does not arrange for a proper level of maintenance, and, so, one truck experiences engine problems.

The weather is not under anyone’s control. Still, an insurance company does not like to point to the weather as the cause for any accident. It usually re-imagines a collision, so that someone’s failure to prepare for the weather seems to be the cause of that same incident.

A good Personal Injury Lawyer in Waterloo can fight an insurance company’s imagined explanation by using an accident reconstructionist. That is normally someone that has received an engineering degree. A reconstructionist should be able to explain why a truck ought to be held responsible for a given collision.