Truck & Insurance Company Tactics

When a trucking accident happens, the trucking company and its insurance company will immediately react with an aggressive defense. You can expect the trucking company, its insurance company, and its lawyers to do everything possible to minimize their exposure to compensate the injured parties.

These defensive methods will include obtaining recorded or sworn statements as soon as possible and sometimes even while the injured party is medicated and in the hospital still. A person injured in an 18 wheeler wreck may think he or she is doing the “right thing” by providing a recorded statement, but more often than not, they do more harm than good to their case when they provide a reason for the insurance company or trucking company to deny liability. The trucking company and insurance company may also hire private investigators to secretly videotape the injured party at home to later challenge their claims of injury. They may also contact family and friends as well as download information of social networking sites to gather information to later use against the injured party.

While the private investigator works to attack the credibility of the injured party, the lawyers are working towards building a defense by hiring experts who may visit the scene of the accident and the storage yards where the damaged vehicles are located to obtain data about the accident and vehicles (i.e., photos and measurements favorable to the defense) before the injured party is even out of the hospital. You cannot expect the defense attorney’s experts to take photos or collect data which may help the injured party. Their job and what they get paid to do is to minimize the compensation due to the injured party and his or her family. Because they do this for a living, you can expect that the defense will be built quickly.

The insurance policies for trucking companies typically have policy limits for several hundred thousand dollars for intrastate trucking companies and at least a million dollars for interstate trucking companies, so there is much at stake in defending a claim made by a seriously injured party against an 18 wheeler company. Claims with serious injuries which require surgery or those in which hospitalization is required typically must be litigated in court before they are taken seriously by an insurance company for the trucking company.

If you or a loved one has been injured in an 18 wheeler accident, you may confidentially contact our law firm for a free consultation about your potential case at (877)-892-2797).