Articles Posted in Trucking Litigation

Yesterday afternoon, I was surprised by a request for permission to publish a paper I presented at a trucking litigation continuing legal education program in San Francisco last July. It  will appear in Trial magazine in February 2010. The topic is “Hard Times in Trucking Litigation: What To Do When the Trucking Company Goes Under.”  It’s…

In order to use Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulation violations to support liability or punitive damages, it is essential to establish that the violation was a proximate cause of the crash. Some judges don’t easily grasp the obvious connection between extreme driver fatigue and driver error. For example, in one Georgia case the court failed…

The framers of the U. S. Constitution recognized in 1787 that no individual state could adequate deal with regulation of interstate commerce, so that was made one of the core functions of the federal government along with national defense and a few others. The Supremacy Clause of the Constitution provides that any state law that…

Safersys.org is a web site maintained by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Through this site, one may obtain extensive basic information about motor carriers within moments after learning of the potential case. A “Carrier Snapshot” search includes the company’s legal name, address, phone number, USDOT number, numbers of power units and drivers, inspection and…

When a significant motor carrier collision happens, the pattern response is for the truck driver to immediately call the dispatcher, who calls the risk manager even at home in the middle of the night, who in turn calls in a “rapid response team” – a defense lawyer in the state where the crash occurred in…

Any lawyer who assumes that a large commercial truck crash is just a bigger car wreck is dangerously naive. Investigation, discovery, technology and law involved in the crashes of large commercial trucks are substantially different from other motor vehicle accident cases. Counsel must be familiar with a national body of trucking law based primarily on…

As a trucking safety attorney in Atlanta, Georgia, I have found it is extremely important to network with other attorneys doing the same kind of work throughout the United States. At the American Association for Justice convention in San Francisco last Saturday, I spoke at the Interstate Trucking Litigation Group seminar on Saturday and had dinner…

Today I’m heading home from the American Association for Justice annual meeting in San Francisco. On Saturday, I was one of the speakers at the Interstate Trucking Litigation Group seminar.  I had a fairly dry topic, though one necessary in these difficult economic times, “Hard Times in Trucking Litigation: What to Do When the Trucking Defendant…

As a trucking trial attorney in Atlanta, Georgia, I occasionally have one of those “Perry Mason moments” when the defendant breaks down and confesses that his whole story was a pack of lies. Not often, but it does happen. According to a report in the Dallas Morning News, this week in a courtroom in Cleburne,…

Not surprisingly, the “safety culture” of a trucking company is a huge factor in determining whether its drivers are involved in catastrophic truck crashes. The Transportation Research Board published a couple of years ago “The Role of Safety Culture in Preventing Commercial Motor Vehicle Crashes.” Some key points from that study are: • Culture and…