In a trucking accident, who can you actually bring a claim against?
Stephen J. Phillips: He explains that the simplest claim is against the driver and the trucking company, and that in some situations a claim can also be brought against the freight broker and the shipper.
Attorney Stephen J. Phillips · Personal Injury · 3-minute 30-second answer
Transcript
Automatically transcribed from the video’s audio and lightly edited.
Trucking cases can become very complex and complicated. There are a couple of different types of claims that you can bring. The most straightforward claim in a trucking case is against the driver and the trucking company. Now the federal government back in the 80s passed a law that even if the trucking company that’s bringing the load, the goods, the product, whatever it is, doesn’t directly employ the trucker and there’s an independent agency relationship, the trucking company is still responsible for that driver. If that driver is driving with that Department of Transportation placard on the side of the truck. So bottom line, trucking company is responsible for the driver. That’s the simplest and most straightforward case. However, you can in certain situations bring a case against the broker who brokered that freight load and also the shipper and that’s the person who wants their goods shipped from point A to point B. In a vast majority of trucking cases in this country or in trucking accidents there is a middleman and the middleman is somebody who has brokered the load and they’re the middleman between the truck driver and the shipper who wants their goods brought somewhere across the country. Sometimes these trucking companies, many times actually, are fly-by-night, they’re under capitalized, they have a bad history, they have a lot of prior accidents and are unsafe. The brokers, that third party who works as a middleman or manages the load, oftentimes doesn’t appropriately vet the trucking company and kind of turns a blind eye to how unsafe they are. You can, in certain situations, bring a case against that middleman company, that brokering company and the United States Supreme Court actually last month wrote a unanimous opinion holding that those claims are valid and can be brought. The trucking industry and insurance industry tried to get those claims thrown out and barred on a federal level last year into this year and the Supreme Court said no, you can in fact bring those claims. So those are the two or three types of claims that you can bring in these types of accidents. If you have any red flag, green flag, yellow flag questions that you want answered or any questions generally about personal injury and catastrophic injury law, put them in the chat below or comment below and I’ll answer them, happy to answer them. And if you or somebody you know needs a trial lawyer, needs somebody who is willing to go to court, willing to take a matter to trial, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We have 78, 79 years our firm’s been in existence. We have a lot of lawyers on the other side of cases, defense attorneys, who at the end of the case will call us up and say I’d like you to represent my family member, my wife, my son, my daughter, my aunt, my uncle because you guys did such a nice job on this case and I think that that speaks volumes. So please don’t hesitate to reach out to us, our phone number 312-346-4262 or shoot us an email. You can also reach out to us on our website.
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