Truck Accident Lawsuits: Who Can Be Sued + Construction Injury vs Workers’ Comp

[0:00] Welcome back to Navigating Negligence. This is the podcast where we break down real stories, real issues, and real legal strategies behind personal injury law. This is our second episode. We got a lot of positive feedback on our first episode, a few things we’re going to change or tweak for this episode, and some new ideas and things that people asked for and wanted to hear more about. My name is Steven J. Phillips. This is my dad, Steven D. Phillips, and today we have Alec Mesrobian. If you recall last time, my brother Michael was with us.

[0:52] We said we’d be having guest speakers or other lawyers from our office on each of our podcast. This week it’s Alec Mesrobian, who’s one of the other attorneys at the office. Hi guys, how are you? Like Steven said, my name is Alec Mesrobian. I’m an attorney here at Phillips Law Offices. I’ve been with the firm for a while, I think eight years. I clerked for six of those and have been an attorney for two. Today we’re going to be talking about two major areas of law. And last time we talked a lot about accidents, car accidents, what to do in a car accident. Today we’re going to talk about trucking accidents, which are unfortunately becoming more and more common. And we’re going to be talking about construction accidents as well.

[1:44] And at the end we’re going to do some more myths or some facts or fiction. We did that last time, people liked it. We’re going to do that again as well. So with that, I’ll turn it over to Steve for our first segment here. And we’re going to talk about why are trucking accidents more complicated than they seem? Why are trucking accidents not just car accidents, but something bigger? So when somebody hears truck accident, they usually think bigger vehicle hitting a smaller vehicle. From a legal standpoint, that’s not entirely correct because when a truck is involved, there’s a whole host of players or companies or entities that become involved.

[2:36] You’re no longer dealing with just a negligent driver. You’re dealing with a trucking company, a maintenance team, a broker, a shipper, a carrier, a safety director, and the list goes on and on. So first things first, let’s talk about the FMS-CR or FMS-CA. And we have a number of significant trucking cases in our office right now, Steve and all of us, but primarily Steve is handling them. So let’s talk about the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Act generally. Thank you for having me again. I enjoyed the last segment. Well, the one thing that jumps out to a trucking accident lawyer is you have to be very different

[3:30] than and much more involved than and much more knowledgeable than the average Joe personal injury lawyer because the average Joe, the billboard lawyer so to speak, the one who advertises on the billboards and or brokers cases out, doesn’t realize that a trucking accident is significantly more complicated for a variety of reasons. You start with realizing that when a truck is loaded an 18-wheeler, it weighs 40 tons. It’s 80,000 pounds. And one, here’s that, and the first thing that they should realize is that truck drivers and trucking companies have got to be properly trained, properly monitored, and properly

[4:27] trained to drive that truck but also to maintain that truck. And truck drivers have to be vetted. You know, it’s easy to say, well, the truck driver caused this accident. Well, it’s more complicated than that. The United States created the Department of Transportation. The Department of Transportation created the FMCSR, Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations. That’s a branch of the Department of Transportation. The FMCSR regulates trucking companies and truck drivers, and they have a lot of regulations

[5:22] and rules designed to make the trucking industry safer and protect the public. There are numerous regulations that apply to trucking companies. There are numerous regulations that apply to trucks. So when there’s a trucking accident, one has to immediately say, what other factors were involved other than the driver? It’s easy. You start with the driver. You didn’t properly monitor the roadway in front of you. You didn’t stop in time. You didn’t see what was ahead of you and anticipate. But there are a lot of factors beyond that that you have to investigate. And as a lawyer, if you don’t know where to investigate and how to investigate, you’re

[6:19] not digging under every rock, so to speak, to find where the negligence lies. The negligence in these trucking cases is usually multifactorial. It starts with the driver as the most immediate person to look at. But when you look at the trucking company, did they properly vet the driver? Was he qualified to drive an 80,000-pound, 40-ton truck? Was he overworked? Was he fatigued? The FMCSR sets limitations and sets rules on how much time a driver can drive and how much time a driver can be on duty and how much time a driver has to be resting in order

[7:16] to keep the public safe. And you’ve got log books that you need to look at. You’ve got the electronic monitoring. All of the trucking companies, virtually every one, particularly the larger ones, electronically monitor every aspect of these drivers. They know where they are. They know how fast they’re going. They know when they last stopped. They know what the RPMs on their truck are. If they’re doing their job, they’re monitoring these people carefully. And there’s all kinds of apps on the truck driver’s phones and at the trucking companies to make sure these people are doing their job. And you know, one of the things that that brings to mind is the log books and trucking

[8:08] log books. Back in the day, it used to be electronic, excuse me, it used to be paper copies. So there were truck drivers, and there’s plenty of stories of this, who kept two sets of log books. So they could drive in excess of their allotted or allowed hours or amount of time. One log book would show they drove for seven hours, and then if they needed to, they pull out another log book showing they drove for four. They do have electronic log books now, most of the trucking companies. But the log books, candidly, can be edited, changed, modified. And sometimes the drivers actually will turn off their electronic devices. And we have had that happen in multiple cases. So even though they’re on duty, even though they’re on the road, they don’t turn on their electronic log book because they don’t want to log hours because they want to keep driving.

[9:02] So that’s something that a lot of people don’t realize. May I just add? Sure. Years ago, I had a case when there were handwritten log books. And when I looked at the handwritten log books, they were all on the up and up. Driver was properly resting. Driver was sleeping. Driver wasn’t on duty. When I asked for the gas receipts, I’m sorry, the diesel fuel receipts, and the toll receipts, guess what? He was driving and getting fuel and getting tolls when his log book said he was resting. And when I dug deeper, I found out he had way overworked. He was very fatigued. And when he rear ended my client and stopped traffic and killed him, it was very obvious

[9:54] that he had completely falsified his log books versus what he was really doing. Now some of the sneaky truck drivers and sneaky trucking companies, they have ways to, uh, fudge their electronic log books. So that’s why at Phillips Law Offices, we always, always request the gas receipts, the tolls, the things like that to compare it to the log books. We don’t accept their word for it. And one of the things, too, related to the FMSCR and also to fudging log books and the idea of maybe not being on the up and up, the legislature in the 1980s, I think, recognized that 30 or 40 years ago that a lot of these trucking companies were fly-by-night trucking

[10:45] companies. You know, we see some of the bigger trucking companies that are multinational and have thousands of trucks on the road. But if you really pay attention when you’re on the interstate next time or on the highway and you look at who the motor carrier is, you know, the Department of Transportation number pinned up on the side of the tractor trailer or the tractor, usually they’re companies that may only have a couple of trucks. And what a lot of these trucking companies do in terms of fudging numbers or fudging the books is they play a shell game now where they only have one or two trucks and they call it Company A. And Company A has one or two trucks. Company B has one or two trucks, and they do that for five or 10 or 15 different companies. So in reality, all of these companies are one and the same. They’re run by the same people.

[11:36] They have the same employees, same phone number, oftentimes the same location, but they play the shell game so that they are under-capitalized and don’t have to do the things they need to do to protect the public. And that’s something that we’ve had to uncover in a number of trucking cases. If you recall the trucking case involving a motorcycle we had last year where originally they told us, this is just one company, it’s Company A, and we had to do a lot of work to uncover and figure out that Company B, C, D, and E were involved. And sure enough right before trial, they recognized that and we were able to get the policy limit settlement in that case, but it happened the night before trial, excuse me, because of

[12:26] all the work we put in. When talking about the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Act or Federal Motor Carrier Regulations and what’s required of a trucking company, Alec, I’m going to ask you, from our perspective as personal injury lawyers who do trucking cases, what is or what are some of the first things that you do in a trucking case? New case comes in, you talk with the client, maybe if they’re deceased you talk with their relative, you kind of get a lay of the land. What’s the first few things you do or what are the first few things that you would do? Yeah, so one of the first things I do is try and find a video of the incident of the collision, try and find witnesses who may have seen something, seen the actual collision.

[13:17] How do you do that, both of those? So the first, in terms of getting video, I go on Google Maps and I look to see if there are any stores or shops or even pods, cameras here in the city of Chicago, any sort of camera I can find and I send a request for those videos, whether it’s a FOIA, Freedom of Information Act, or I just call the stores myself and I say, hi, I represent John Smith, he was involved in a trucking accident, would you please send me the video? I find more often than not, some of these trucks don’t have front forward dash camera. Yeah, it’s not a requirement, which is kind of crazy in today’s day and age if you’re going to have a trucking company that you don’t have to have forward facing dash camera or internal facing dash camera.

[14:11] And then outside of that, finding witnesses. So I’ll ask the client if anyone approached them for me to talk to, if they got any contact information, and this sort of goes back to Steve’s former point of leaving no stone unturned. You got to dig, you have to dig, you have to be persistent, you need to find every avenue and uncover what really happened. Because sometimes the reports that are made, the police reports, the reconstruction reports, don’t tell the full picture. And so having contact information for witnesses that actually saw the collision is really, really important. And that brings to mind, Steve and I had a trucking case a couple of years ago, motorcycle and truck and the police report, you remember, it said that our client admitted that he was

[15:05] speeding recklessly or words to that effect. And also that two other witnesses in the area said that they saw him go by at 100 miles an hour on a motorcycle. And we looked at the report and said, oh, boy, this, this is going to be a problem. Well, we actually went out and talked to in person and called those witnesses. And we told them this is what the police report says. And both of them said, I never said that. I never, ever said that. And in fact, I felt as though the cop was trying to pin it on the motorcycle. And he put those words in the report. You remember that? I sure do. They were upset, actually, that that was in the report and attributed to them. And the whole case turned in part on that, because those were two very damning statements against our client. And they were completely made up in the report.

[15:56] So like Alex said, sometimes the initial traffic crash report is not accurate. And that’s why you really do need a dash cam or try to get some sort of witness statement. You’d be surprised, too. We’ve had it in a case where a bystander, just for their own safety, has had a traffic camera in their own car. And we were able to find that witness and ask them for that video. And it cuts through any defenses and liability for these kinds of cases. So you really, really have to be persistent in finding that kind of stuff. Going back to the FMSCR and the idea that some of these trucking companies run a shell game, and we were talking about that Company A, Company B, Company D, Company C,

[16:47] that reminds me of the case that we settled last year, where you uncovered just that. And the night before trial or the week before trial, all of the trucking companies that supposedly didn’t exist or weren’t intertwined, all decided to pay their policy limits the night before trial. So do you want to tell us about that and share that story with us and what we did? We represented a wonderful elderly man who was on a motorcycle and a truck driver working for one trucking company took a left turn in front of him in an intersection. And he got hurt very, very badly. Well, early on in the case, the trucking company said, all we’ve got is a million dollars in insurance, here it is. And I said, no, this man is hurt much more than that.

[17:41] And there are other companies that are affiliated with this trucking company. Quite honestly, the other companies are owned by the same guy who owns the trucking company, and they got to pay more money. And the lawyers looked at me and laughed and said, good luck. Well, to a Sicilian like me, that’s a double dog dare. Like when we were kids, a double dog dared me to chase him down, is it okay? So what we did was I hired a private investigator. And then I said, you know what, I’m going to do this myself. I drove out there to the location of this trucking company. And I drove out there and I saw that the trucking company had a name. And the trucking company also had the same name on its leasing company and had the same

[18:37] name on its maintenance company and on the same name as its sales company. And lo and behold, they were all in the same location. With the same logo. With the same logo on a poster. And then I also took out my handy dandy Apple iPhone and I took pictures. Because I knew that they would look at me and say, that’s not true. And I said, well, here’s the photographs, guys. So I took pictures of all of it. And then I took pictures of the perimeter of the trucking yard. And the perimeter of the trucking yard had another company on its emblem saying trespassers will be prosecuted by this company, even though it’s unrelated. We don’t know anything about it. It doesn’t actually exist.

[19:29] Yes. And then we asked for the financials and they were making loans to each other. Obviously, not commercial standard transactions. They were making personal private loans to each other back and forth. Then I took the depositions of the accountants. They all worked for the same company. Then I asked the accountants who they talked to. They all talked to the same man who ran all four companies. So the fact that they said they were all unrelated, good luck, Mr. Phillips. I said, well, kind of looks like I didn’t need a lot of luck. I needed to be persistent and I need to not accept what you’re telling me.

[20:19] And we need to dig down deeper, which is what we did. A week before the trial started, there was a big hearing in front of the judge. Halfway through the hearing, as I’m putting on a slide show for the judge and I’m showing all the interconnections between these companies, the judge leans over with her glasses on the tip of her nose and says to the defense attorneys, is anybody really here claiming that these companies aren’t interrelated? Well, that’s when instead of the $1 million, they settled the case for their policy limits for all of the trucking companies for $4 million. The lesson to be learned is don’t accept, be persistent, be dedicated and have some guts.

[21:13] Chase it down. You know, Steve, do you remember the exhibit we used during that hearing? The octopus. The octopus. And I had an octopus because I put the owner of the company as the head of the octopus and all of the other arms on the octopus were all the companies that he controlled. And while the lawyers got a kick out of that, it really sent the message to the judge of what was really going on here. And you know why that becomes important, going back to this idea of a shell game or fly by night trucking companies. The legislature, United States Congress in the 80s, I think it was 1980 when they enacted the Federal Motor Carrier Act 40 years ago.

[22:03] They put into that bill a minimum requirement that trucking companies need to have in terms of insurance. And back in 1980 or 81, sometime around then, they said if you’re going to operate a trucking company in this country, you need $750,000 of insurance coverage to protect other users of the roadway. It is now 40 years later and that number has not changed. And that’s what’s very frustrating. Inflation was not factored into that. A lot of those bills, it requires that amount to pace inflation or pace the consumer price index. That wasn’t written into that bill. So if you do the math on $750,000 in 1980, that’s the equivalent of $3 million today if it had kept pace with inflation. So these trucking companies get away with being under-capitalized, not having enough

[22:57] assets to pay money judgment when they hurt people, and they don’t have to have sufficient insurance coverage. You think of 80,000 pounds on the roadway and the amount of damage that that can do, and $750,000 is rarely enough to cover that. So that’s part of the reason why we have to uncover all of these other shell companies and figure out who’s really involved in these cases. So Alec, I’ll ask you this. What are some of the most common, and we talked about it a little bit, but what are some of the most common causes of a trucking accident? From your perspective, things you’ve seen? Sure. I think the first and foremost biggest one is distraction. Drivers are on the road for a long time.

[23:49] Even though it’s supposed to be regulated, as Steve pointed out earlier, some drivers stay on the road longer than they’re supposed to and become distracted. Outside of that, there are times when drivers with these big 80,000 pound cars, vehicles, trucks, aren’t trained well enough to drive them and can’t stop the vehicles or don’t anticipate how much braking there needs to be to actually stop one of those trucks, which can cause tremendous large scale accidents and injuries to people. When you say distracted, cell phone? Cell phone. iPad. Big one. iPad. What about maintenance?

[24:42] Sometimes the vehicles, these trucks, aren’t maintained properly and there can be issues with the braking pads, the brake fluid. These trucks are really intricate pieces of technology and if the maintenance isn’t up kept on them, that can cause serious, serious collisions. That reminds me of the case we had with the tandem trailer. We had a case with a tandem trailer a few years ago where usually there’s the one trailer on the back of a tractor. Some states allow two, other states actually allow three. You can have two or three trailers in tandem and they have to be coupled properly. If you recall the case we had a few years ago, we had a wonderful guy in his 50s, married, children, was the type of guy he used to on Thanksgiving and Christmas go to the local

[25:39] shelter and pick people up, bring them back to his home and they would cook for him men, women and children and buy presents for the kids and give them a warm place to have Thanksgiving and Christmas. He would routinely do things like that, just a truly superhero, wonderful man. He was a truck driver on his way home in his semi-truck and if you recall it was nighttime and another truck, tandem truck, wasn’t properly coupled. The guy, genius, who coupled the trailer of this other truck, the second trailer, didn’t hook it or couple it properly and the truck separated from the trailers and the second

[26:31] trailer came off, no lights, no flares, no reflectors and came to rest on the edge of the travel lane on an interstate. Our guy was coming from behind about a mile or two back. He would have had no idea, it was nighttime, middle of the night and the pictures are just terrible but this trailer is not illuminated, no flares, nothing hanging out a few feet into the roadway. On a curve? On a curve, in the nighttime and I think it may have even been snowing or really cold as well and our guy was coming up the interstate, never saw it, you can tell he didn’t even try to apply the brakes, never saw it and he ended up dying instantly and left behind a wife and three adult children, all because the person who was responsible for properly

[27:22] coupling the second trailer didn’t do his job. And they still fought us on that case for three years, remember that? They sure did. We had to try the case. We sure did, yes we did. So that’s a good reminder and maybe some, let’s give people some points or things to remember involving trucks and one of the things I would start with is don’t tailgate a truck. If you’re on the road and you’re driving behind a semi-truck, a lot of us think oh well they’re professional drivers, it’s a professional company, I’m sure they did everything right. Trucks can decouple, they can pop a tire, the load can come out of the back of the truck. Don’t tailgate trucks, give them a lot of space on the road and don’t assume that the driver is a professional, competent, well rested driver.

[28:20] Amen. Amen. What else? Well the one thing that comes to mind immediately is don’t make a sudden stop in front of a tractor trailer. They can’t stop like a car and boy oh boy if you have a semi-trailer behind you and you come to any type of sudden stop or even if you don’t and you come to a slower stop, pay attention in your rear view mirror to what’s going on with that tractor trailer behind you. We have a case right now where we’ve got a line of cars stopped in a construction zone and our car is the last car stopped and a semi-trailer comes barreling down the road and rear ends, it strikes the rear of our car at 55 miles an hour, destroyed this family,

[29:15] just horrible. And the truck driver turns out was watching TV on his cell phone. You believe that? Watching TV on his cell phone. 55 miles an hour into the back of a stopped line of cars that you could see for miles. It was a clear summer day. And that’s a really good point too and your folks probably taught you that when you were learning to drive but if you’re going through a red light for example or a yellow light and I remember you yelling at me about this honestly that’s why I said that. I believe that. I think when I was learning to drive we were on a highway and the light changed from yellow to red and I kind of panicked and immediately just slammed on the brakes and you were yelling

[30:06] at me go go go and I said it’s a yellow and you said there’s a truck behind you. Now he was able to stop but thank God but the point remains now every time I go through an intersection I try to make sure if it’s a yellow or red that I’m looking in the rear view if I’m going to stop suddenly to make sure that the guy behind me isn’t in a semi-truck or a box truck or anybody can make that stop if you’re going to make that decision. So that’s a good point and I remember that vividly. I can picture where I was sitting and you yelling at me and you were right. Folks lesson take away from this when you’re teaching your kids how to drive be tough make sure they do it perfectly. You know what your car is a weapon a truck is a weapon.

[30:57] You wouldn’t let me get my license until I was a few months older than 16 most people get their driver’s license at 16 I wasn’t allowed to why because he said I wasn’t ready and of course in the moment that was very upsetting to me and frustrating but looking back on it years later you were right. I got much better in the three to six months after I turned 16 and then I became physically and mentally ready to drive but that’s another thing just because you turn 16 doesn’t automatically mean boom you’re ready to drive. Remember what you said after a few months? No. I’m the best driver of all my friends. I don’t feel safe with a lot of my friends probably true. Well we should hope that the trucking companies were as vigilant about their training of truck

[31:53] drivers as the Phillips boys got from their parents. So things to do after an accident similar to what we talked about on the last podcast get off the road get to a safe spot get medical attention. Get off the road. Sorry. I’m sorry to interrupt. No that’s okay. Get off the road we have a fair number of cases where people decide to stay on the shoulder of the road and another truck or vehicle ends up hitting them in the rear or striking them on the shoulder. Get the heck away from your car. Don’t worry about the insurance company and property damage and don’t assume don’t assume that the trucks or cars aren’t going to drift over.

[32:46] We had a tow truck driver who was hit by a semi. The tow truck driver was changing a tire on the side of the roadway on Interstate 80. A truck driver decided to reach over to his passenger seat for his sunglasses and as he reached over he swerved onto the shoulder and killed our client. It was terrible just terrible. So don’t assume that the truck driver or any other traffic is alert and aware and going to act properly. And these trucking companies some of the big ones have rapid response teams. They send lawyers and they send investigators out to the scene to start gathering and I say that loosely evidence and talking to witnesses.

[33:38] Damage control. Yeah. So they’re going to do what they’re going to do. You get to a safe spot. You get off the road. You get what you need in terms of medical help. You know I get a kick out of that the rapid response team. They call us ambulance chasers. Well because when our clients hire us and hopefully they hire us immediately we need to get out there and gather the evidence. We need to find out where the skid marks are, where the debris is, who the witnesses are and it’s okay for the rapid response team to do it for the trucking company because they want to protect their money. But we’re ambulance chasers. No I don’t buy that. I don’t buy that. And I’ve told them that. So I think that was pretty thorough in terms of trucking.

[34:33] We said we’d talk about construction accidents. Okay. So segment two, our next segment on the podcast today. Construction accidents and construction injuries. Just like trucking cases, oftentimes a construction accident involves a pretty significant injury. It’s not usually bumps and bruises. Oftentimes it’s amputations or death. And construction sites and construction zones can be dangerous places. But OSHA for example, Bureau of the Government or entity of the government has rules and

[35:26] regulations in place. And a lot of times people are anti-rules, anti-regulations, you know, they don’t like the idea that the government is or a judge is telling them what to do or the legislature is telling them what to do. But if you look at the number of workplace accidents after OSHA has been involved and candidly after some of these personal injury cases have been filed, the number of amputations and severe injuries on the job site has gone down significantly over the past few decades. In part because of those rules and regulations. So in many of these cases, there’s a lot of subcontractors working on scene. And that’s one of the things people don’t realize. It’s not just a general contractor who’s overseeing everything. There are three, four, five, six, seven, eight different companies at any given time on one

[36:21] job site. So you can imagine the environment that that creates. You know, in many of these cases, it’s not just a worker’s employer who’s responsible. Oftentimes there’s another company that’s really the at fault party here. So I’ll ask you, your experience with construction cases, obviously you’ve done more than Alec and myself. What’s your experience with construction sites and some of the distractions that workers have to deal with on a construction site and how that may contribute to an injury? Well remember on construction sites, workers are working with large tools or structures that are very heavy and very dangerous. So safety should be a priority on a construction site.

[37:17] One of the ways that when a worker is up on a scaffold, there’s a lot of potential distractions. It can be weather, it could be odors. For example, if a welder is down below or they’re painting or they’re pouring concrete, it can be noise. Noise can be a distraction to workers. And the OSHA regulations take these potential distractions into account. And they say, okay, on a workplace, we want to make sure that distractions that can create safety problems are accounted for. We want guardrails in place. We want holes covered. We want warnings on the holes. We want to make sure that the holes are covered properly.

[38:09] And that if you’re going to cover it, for example, with wood or metal, you secure it so it can’t open up. So the OSHA, as you were saying, and rightfully so, a lot of people are anti-rule, anti-regulation. Well certainly in the construction trades, rules have made construction sites safer. Because now these companies have safety monitors and safety managers on site making sure the rules are being complied with. And all of the workers are carefully monitored on the legitimate job sites to make sure they’re complying with safety. Because if a plumber is not safe, that can certainly injure a carpenter or an electrician.

[39:02] So rules matter and rules keep people safe. There’s a saying that when you go to a construction site, everybody goes home every night with 10 fingers and 10 toes. That’s the goal. And I think OSHA sometimes calls it or I’ve seen it referred to as the big four or something like that. The falls struck by objects, electrocutions, and then crushed or caught in between. And that’s what many of the OSHA regulations are designed to prevent. And like you said, people do get distracted. There are distractions on the job site and that’s exactly why many of those rules and regulations take that into account. People are forgetful. People do get distracted. People don’t remember something that they may have been told a month ago about a job site. They may go to a different job site for three weeks and come back.

[39:54] They’re not going to remember everything from that job site. So that’s something to keep in mind too. Another thing we’ve seen, and Alec, I don’t know if you have seen this on the construction cases that you’ve handled, but the idea of hurry, hurry, rush, rush and how that affects the work done on a job site. Right. You know, you have the general contractor and then you have a bunch of subcontractors, the plumber, the electrician, the carpenter, and a lot of these job sites have deadlines when the plumbing needs to be done, the electricity needs to be done. And so what we see is those deadlines need to be met. And sometimes in order for those deadlines to be met, corners are cut and it’s not safe

[40:44] for the people that are working on that job site. So this idea of rush, rush, rush, rush to meet a deadline, we find often causes injuries to the people that are working on the construction site. Because the general or another sub is pushing the subcontractor to get work done. And safety takes a second, you got it. And we saw that in part on that case with the scissor lift with the wonderful guy, another really good guy, family man, wife, two kids, both children on the job site, that electrician. Remember that case? Oh, I remember that well. Because the general contractor said, well, it’s his fault. It’s their responsibility to take safety into account.

[41:38] And we just show up there in the morning and we look around and we leave. And I said, really, guys, you act like the elves would come in at night when no one’s around and take care of this. That just isn’t true. You guys were around there. I mean, you know, my mama didn’t raise a fool. And if she did, it was one of my brothers. I said, let’s see what you got. I want to see more. And we put together the physical evidence. We looked at the photographs and the photographs. Can I jump in here? Sure. Just for a second. Sure. I think where you’re going with this is sometimes I used to think that Steve was hypercritical or looked too closely at things that I didn’t see the value of. And I remember vividly that case, looking at photographs of the job site, because one

[42:31] of the defenses, the biggest defense was nobody was supposed to be in that area. Do you remember that? I had remembered it well. The general, the other subcontractors, they all said, your guy, your client, we told them a hundred times over not to go in that area. Of course, there was no evidence of that really, but that’s what they said in their depositions. Steve, everybody knew that you weren’t supposed to be in that area of this. It was a big warehouse, many, many thousands of square feet. And our client was working in a corner and they told us he wasn’t supposed to be there. And mind you, also in the photos, remember the photos from after the accident within 15 minutes, so our client fell in a box out. It was a cutout in the concrete or a box out where when concrete is poured, they leave

[43:23] essentially a hole for plumbing or for electric. And it’s the same color as the surrounding concrete. So you could imagine up on a scissor lift, 20 or 30 feet in the air, you can’t really see. You lose your depth perception. There were no barricades in the hole. There were no warnings, nothing, no flags, nothing, no horses, whatever they call them. Horses, barricades, no tape. Can I interrupt? Yes. Only because this really got to me. They took photographs, they came out with the rapid response team, and they were there within a half an hour. And the photographs were timed. They were barricades in the holes in the floor. They were clearly marked. And they said, we clearly mark these.

[44:15] He should have seen them. Well, we dug deeper and we found photographs in the half an hour, an hour before this happened. There were no barricades in the hole. They put the barricades in after this man died while he was lying on the concrete. And the rapid response team took photographs and they tried to pass them off to us that the barricades were there when our client fell in the hole. They would have absolutely gone with that if the metadata, if we didn’t discover that the photos were after the fall by a few minutes. Yes, yes, yes. And they spray painted danger hole. Remember on the plywood? Yeah. 15 minutes afterwards. And that really got under my craw and I let the defense attorneys know that, that this

[45:07] man had just died and they were doing the CYA. So going back to what I was saying about that is their defense was that our client wasn’t supposed to be in the area. Well, we were looking at photos, I think it was one night, I don’t know, nine, 10 o’clock at night on one of our impromptu zooms that he has us do, where we were going through all the photos from after the occurrence and from before the occurrence. And I didn’t appreciate at the time, a few years ago, many years ago, the significance of literally just little things you might pick up on in a photo. This case really taught me the importance of that. Because I don’t know if you remember this, you pointed out and noticed there’s saw cuts in the concrete. And you can’t make a saw cut in the concrete until after it’s cured.

[45:58] And what does that mean? Other people were on that concrete, making cuts in the concrete, not just our guy. And then we also noticed, you noticed, that there were Gatorade bottles and trash. And the bowls. That wasn’t the elves that did that in the middle of the night. That was other workers on that concrete that they said no one was allowed to get on and no one did get on. Right. And they said nobody other than your client went on that concrete. Well, the saw cuts proved that there were other people in that area who had to encounter that dangerous box out. There was trash and garbage in the holes in the box out showing other people in that area. And then there was also concrete rebar sitting on that concrete. And that showed, again, other people in that area had been there.

[46:50] And that really cut against their defense that nobody would ever have gone in that area. It showed a lot of people had been there. And I didn’t appreciate the saw cuts or the Gatorade bottles in the photos until you pointed that out. And that became a big piece of our case. So that really taught me the importance of circumstantial evidence, which is your physical evidence, which you always say doesn’t lie. You can’t manipulate it. It tells a story. So that reminds me of that case. What do you mean by an impromptu Zoom meeting, by the way? I mean, Alec, you know what I’m talking about. Yeah. Do you mean the stream of conscious type Zoom meetings where we hop on at seven and maybe we’re not done until 10 o’clock, impromptu with no warning? No warning. You get a Zoom link in your email.

[47:41] Meet on this case now. Five minutes. Two hours later. Last night we did that from 4.30 till 7. It was very helpful, though. Sure was. Really helpful brainstorming. I went home very excited last night because we discovered new things because we were bouncing around ideas. Going back to the case we were just discussing, I think if memory serves me correctly, part of their defense, too, blaming it on our client, was that he should have seen this box out from his extended forklift, right? You and I and Michael went out to this warehouse that had a bunch of these fork scissor lifts. And we spent about two hours on one of those scissor lifts taking videos from the perspective of our client. We rented this.

[48:32] We rented out a scissor lift. And we put out a plywood cutout of the size of the box out that our client fell in. But that was one of the things that, again, cut against their defense that our client should have seen this box out. We took videos from all different kinds of perspectives for two to three hours. That’s a very good point and good memory. I remember that. We rented a scissor lift. We drove out to the western suburbs, I think. The exact scissor lift that was involved in this occurrence to make sure that the defendants couldn’t say, well, it wasn’t the same scissor lift. We went up there the same height that our guy was. And do you remember we took videos of the lift moving, of its stationary, of it extended

[49:22] down to show that you can’t really see this box out and for them to leave that uncovered with nothing in it, no orange cone, no red, no yellow. He wouldn’t have had a chance to see that cut out. Don’t forget the sound that the scissor lift made because the superintendent was outside the door with the door open saying, I couldn’t hear the scissor lift moving inside. And yet when we taped the scissor lift moving, it sounded like a freight train going by with the beeping. Boy, that was really an eye opener. You know, it’s funny, that reminds me that the lawyers, we were hired late in that case. There was another law firm, lawyers who called themselves personal injury experts or specialists.

[50:18] They didn’t know what to do with the case. They told us to be. They said it was a tough case. They said that it was a really difficult case and that it was all our guy’s fault. And we got the case late and we had to dig in and learn the facts and hire private investigators and do our own work and our own due diligence to prove that case, to find the facts, to find the witnesses. And I was very proud of our team here at Phillips Law Offices when we did that. Because when we called the prior lawyers and say, we just got this family five million dollars on a case that you said couldn’t be won. And you know, it was almost shame on you guys for representing that your personal injury experts are specialists because you weren’t going to do this family any favors.

[51:14] You weren’t going to do what this family needed to seek justice. We were able to do that. And I still talk to the family now. This case has been resolved for about three, four years. I still talk to the family and stay in touch with them. I do remember that they told us we’d be really lucky if we could successfully win the case. One last talking point or something that I thought of from the perspective of somebody who doesn’t do this every day, I think a lot of people think if you get hurt on the job site, it’s a workers comp claim. And that’s your only remedy or the only thing you can do. Can you explain the difference between workers comp generally and a third party case or personal injury case like we handle?

[52:04] If you are injured on the job, you have a workers compensation claim. That claim will go to what’s called the industrial commission, not the court. And in the industrial commission, a workers compensation claim, the employer says, okay, I’m at fault as long as the injured injury happened on the job site and it was related to the work and I will pay all your medical bills and then at the end of the case, I will pay you a smaller amount than what you may recover in a lawsuit because we’ve given up our defenses. We’re just going to admit that we’re responsible and pay your bills. A lawsuit is a case against people other than your employer 99% of the time and it’s against

[53:02] other people who caused or contributed to the injury because of their negligent act or a defective product or defective maintenance or defective supervision, other fault conduct. And that’s the difference typically. An injury case, if it’s viable, if it’s meritorious, is typically worth significantly more than a workers compensation case. So the takeaway from that is if you’re injured on the job site and it’s something other than your employer’s fault, if it was another subcontractor, it was a general contractor, it was a delivery company, you have an alternative remedy outside of just filing a workers compensation case.

[53:53] That’s what’s important to keep it. We had a truck driver who delivered to a factory. He was standing behind the trailer as they were backing up with a forklift and the forklift operator ran him over. He had a cop case against his employer because he was hurt on the job but he also had a lawsuit against the forklift operator and the employer of the forklift operator and that’s one type of scenario where you have both a compensation claim and a third party lawsuit. Our final segment today is factor fiction. Last podcast we talked about some myths or some facts or fictions, got some positive

[54:44] feedback on it. A lot of people liked hearing some of the truths or dispelling some of the myths about this type of law. So we have four facts or fictions and I’ll ask each of you guys and I’ll start with you first, Alec. Actually, I’ll start with you, Steve. So number one, people say or people may think we have a nemesis, arch enemy opposing counsel that we face off with daily like in suits or in the movies. Is that true or false? That’s false. You know, you got a few on both sides, plaintiff and defense, a few outliers who are either not civil or a bit not right and I have found over the years that the people that I don’t get along with are mostly people who most people don’t get along with and there’s enough

[55:40] lawyers now in the city of Chicago that you don’t see the same people over and over again. You do see them from time to time, but obviously not daily. Okay. Number two, Alec, I’ll ask you this, a deposition, which is a sworn under oath statement where a person raises the right hand, the witness raises the right hand, answers questions as if they were in a court in front of a jury. In the movies or on TV, depositions often involve angry rants, long-winded narratives, screaming, lots of back and forth about the merits of the case. Is that a fact or fiction? That’s going to be fiction.

[56:29] Again, it’s not like what you see in the movies where one party drops a large stack of documents, opens the stack of documents and the deposition of the scene ends. That’s not what it’s like. You know, like Steven said, you have an opportunity to ask questions of that witness. The opposing counsel has opportunities to ask questions of that witness. There might be a little back and forth and then you go on with your day. Well, I would say depositions are really important for the investigation and for getting to the bottom of what happened. And we kind of, you know, there’s a bit of tactic to it, but it’s not yelling and screaming like in the movie. Right, right. In terms of your interaction with the opposing counsel, no, there’s not a lot of yelling and screaming, but you do need to prepare in depth about what questions you’re going to ask,

[57:26] who you’re taking at what time and what you’re going to show that witness and ask them about. Well, I got to qualify that bit. Occasionally there is a little bit of short tempers and I don’t know. I got called a bully in a deposition because I was making a witness answer the question. She didn’t want to answer the question. My client’s husband died in an operating room. He died. And he shouldn’t elective procedure. And an elective hernia procedure. And I wanted to know what happened in that operating room. And this one witness, one of the nurses, didn’t want to answer my question. So I called the judge. The judge made her answer the question as asked. The defense attorney looked at Steven and Michael and said, your dad’s a bully.

[58:17] I want you to know your dad’s a big bully. And I just said, I don’t think I’m a bully. I want to find out what happened. Well, at the end of the case, I was friends with that defense attorney. And that defense attorney actually asked me to represent some of the partners in the firm because I was a gentleman, but I did fight hard. And I did continue to fight for my client’s rights. Sometimes it’s about, what do you always say? It’s about who’s on the other way. Who’s ox is being gored? Or as I have a saying that sometimes they call us plaintiffs lawyers or me, the boogeyman. And I say, yeah, maybe. But when you have a problem, when one of your family members has a problem, you like the

[59:09] boogeyman. The boogeyman is your best way to seek justice for your family and to right a wrong. Number three, you have, and I’ll ask you this, Alec, at any given time, you have multiple numerous cases going on both in court and outside of court, small cases and bigger cases. Is that a fact or fiction? That’s a fact. Like Steven said, we have many cases in the office. Each lawyer has their own handful of cases, and then for some of the cases that require more hands on deck, that’s where there’s more of a collaborative, there’s more collaboration

[1:00:00] in the office on those cases. But no, it’s certainly not one case at a time. And that’s something I’ve had a number of people ask me, are you working on one particular file or one particular case for the next few months? And maybe if you’re getting ready for a big trial, you may devote almost all or all of your time to that trial, absolutely. But it is a lot. You are juggling a number of cases. You’re going to court. I may go to court on three cases. I may have three cases up tomorrow morning. Steve may have one. Alec may have two. And all three of us may be over at the Daily Center on five different cases at any given time. Or Alec may come with me on a case. I may go with my dad on a case. So yeah, there’s a lot of balls in the air at any given time. Last question. I’ll ask you, Steve, lawyers you see on a billboard or on TV have a fearsome reputation

[1:00:57] and are really savvy in the courtroom. Is that a fact or a fiction? Generally, generally, hands down, that’s a fiction. Any lawyer on a billboard, it’s been my personal experience, is not worth much in a courtroom and is not going to get maximum recovery. I’m sure there may be a handful of exceptions. But I would strongly advise people to stay away from the billboard lawyers who advertise like crazy or have gimmicky sayings or gimmicky phone numbers. It’s fiction, run, forest, run, as they said in the forest gump. Okay, so that concludes our second episode of Navigating Negligence.

[1:01:51] If you take one thing away from today’s episode, I would say from a trucking perspective, be careful, be cognizant around trucks on the road and truck drivers on the road, a lot of distractions, texting, watching movies, sometimes intoxication, sometimes substance use, fatigue, lack of sleep, improper maintenance. It’s 80,000 pounds, there’s a lot of things that can go wrong. So be cognizant of that on the roadway. And then in terms of construction, you have other remedies if you’re hurt on the job. It’s not just a workers comp situation with your employer. There’s a third party case or a liability case outside of the comp system, which is what we do outside of comp. If you’re injured and it’s another subcontractor, a general contractor, somebody else who’s

[1:02:47] responsible. So don’t just think, oh, I’m hurt on the job. This must be workers comp. There’s alternatives. So those I think would probably be the two big takeaways for today’s episode. With that in mind, we will have, again, rotating speakers. We’ll probably have either Terry or Michael, my brother, on for the next episode. And we’ll cover a different gamut or set of topics next time. So everybody have a happy holiday. Be safe over the holidays. Enjoy your time with your family. Anything else from you guys before we close? I think we’re covered. Call Phillips Law Offices if you need us, if something happens to you, a trucking wreck or a job site or a job site injury or a car accident.

[1:03:40] Call Phillips Law Offices and call us quickly. We’re going to get on it. And that’s true, too, of a relative or friend. Not just you. If you have somebody who you know needs help and you care about and have a relationship with, have them call us. Give them our phone number. We’re happy to help them. And I think the biggest thing I can say about our firm, we have a fair number of defense attorneys who we’ve had cases against who ask us to represent their family members and their friends in personal injury losses.

[1:04:27] Thank you.