We’ve had a couple recently, I’m still working on several as well, but one stands out. As a young man, his family was moving from New York down to Houston and he was riding, it was about six in the morning and he was asleep in the passenger seat and his mother was in a little Honda Accord. And the 18-wheeler driving not paying attention he was actually on the phone with his girlfriend ran into the back of this car and catapulted or slingshotted them off into the ditch. He just kept driving he didn’t even think he’d hit anyone. Finally, another motorist stopped the truck, it turns his license plate was still on the back of the car so it was pretty hard for him to deny that he actually ran into them. 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 wrecks are similar to bus wrecks in that when there’s a truck, a serious trucking incident on the highways the truck companies and the insurance companies they 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, to get legal; 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 driver’s logs, the electronic data. They’re very technical cases you got to understand the federal motor carrier regulations, you got to understand trucking, you got to understand the contracts between the shippers and the brokers and not just the guy who’s name’s on the 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.