Fatal Semi-Truck Accidents

Wrongful Death Attorney Michael Grossman can Help if You’ve Lost a Family Member in a Semi-Truck Wreck

If you haven’t noticed when you’re out on the roads and highways of Texas and Arkansas, 18-wheelers comprise a significant portion of the traffic on the roads. With truck drivers spending long days behind the wheel and semi-trucks being cumbersome, difficult-to-control vehicles, accidents happen involving 18-wheelers on a daily basis. Moreover, when semi-truck collisions occur, the effects are usually severe and often include the deaths of pedestrians and the drivers and passengers of other vehicles.

If you’ve lost a loved one in a fatal semi truck accident, then you may have the right to seek compensation through wrongful death lawsuit. However, the victim’s loved ones only have the right to pursue such a civil lawsuit if someone else was to blame for the wreck. Moreover, litigation involving fatal 18-wheeler accidents is quite complex, so many times even deserving families end up with less than they deserve or even nothing at all because they did not protect their rights with a skilled and seasoned semi-truck accident attorney.

At Grossman Law Offices, our attorneys have been helping aggrieved families recover from the loss of their loved ones in fatal 18-wheeler wrecks for 20 years. We’re sympathetic to the immense pain you’re feeling, and we know how to alleviate that pain by helping you secure the compensation you deserve. You need to hire a knowledgeable lawyer who can alleviate the stress of a legal action, allowing you to concentrate on healing.

First, we want to ease your concern and confusion by providing you with this informative article about the legal process to resolve fatal semi-truck accidents. Read on and learn, and should you want to discuss your case with legal professional, then call us today for a free consultation at 1-855-589-5645 (toll free).

Why Should I File a Wrongful Death Claim After a Fatal Semi-Truck Accident?

The obvious reason to file a wrongful death lawsuit is to recover the financial losses your family has experienced as a result of your loved one’s death and to obtain compensation for the emotional harm you’ve survived as well. However, there are also two more universally important reasons to take civil action after a fatal semi-truck accident. Unless one of the drivers was drunk or under the influence of drugs at the time of the wreck, criminal charges are not likely to be filed after a fatal semi-truck accident. Thus, the only way to bring the negligent party to justice for the death of your loved one is through a civil lawsuit.

Second, if you don’t bring a wrongful death lawsuit against the party or parties who negligently caused your loved one’s death, then the negligent entity may continue his or her negligent and dangerous behavior, injuring more people. Your family carries a responsibility to protect the welfare of the general public.

How Do I Know if I Have the Right to a Wrongful Death Lawsuit?

In order to have the right to seek a wrongful death lawsuit after the death of a family member in a fatal semi-truck accident, you must be able to prove someone else caused the accident with his or her negligence. How do you do this? You must be able to prove the fatal accident contained to three essential conditions: duty, breach, and causation.

Duty

Any time two parties interact they have certain duties to each other to act reasonably not to harm each other. The duty in question is determined both by the situation and the parties involved. When it comes to fatal semi-truck accidents, there are several duties involved. Both the trucker and the other motorist or motorists involved in the wreck have the duty of operating their vehicles within the confines of the rules of the road and with regard to the safety and well-being of others. Moreover, there are several other parties who have essential duties in truck driving accidents, but we will discuss that later on in this article.

Breach

A breach occurs when someone ignores the required legal duty. In fatal semi-truck accidents, a breach can occur when the truck driver ignores a stoplight and plows through an intersection.

Causation

The breach of duty by one of the parties either caused or contributed to the cause of the fatal accident and the death caused both financial and emotional harm to the victim’s family, also known as the plaintiffs. Carrying our analogy a step further, the 18-wheeler that barreled into the intersection after ignoring the stoplight, slammed into a passenger car, t-boning it and killing the driver, who was survived by a wife and two children.

Determining Fault After a Fatal Semi-Truck Accident

While the above discussion may have made it sound extremely simple to assign blame after a fatal semi-truck accident that is usually not the case. In many fatal accidents involving big rigs, there may be several different parties who negligently caused or contributed to the cause of the wreck besides the truck driver, including:

• The trucking company: If the truck driver negligently caused the fatal semi-truck accident that robbed you of your loved one, then the trucking company can also be held liable. Both Texas and Arkansas recognize a legal concept called respondeat superior that holds employers accountable for the negligent actions or inaction of their employees.

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• The Company that Loaded the Truck: You may not realize it, but a truck’s ability to operate properly depends heavily upon its cargo being loaded correctly. When the cargo is not adequately secured, it can move around during transit, what is called a load-shift, and actually topple the trailer, causing a wreck. Often times, independent contractors or the owners of the truck’s cargo will load the semi-truck. If these parties fail in their duty of loading the cargo properly, then they can be held liable.

• Manufacturers: The makers of the truck and its parts have the duty of designing and assembling a truck and trailer that perform as intended. If there is a mechanical malfunction due to a design or assembly fault that results in a fatal semi-truck accident, then the manufacturer is the party from whom to pursue compensation.

• Company that Planned the Route: Plotting a safe course for an 18-wheeler to traverse is often very difficult. Not all roads are zoned for trucking, and some bridges are too low to allow 18-wheelers to pass beneath them. To deal with this trying task, many trucking companies engage with outside contractors who specialize in truck route planning. If this company sends the truck into a dangerous area that led to a fatal accident, then it is liable.

• Other drivers: Just because an 18-wheeler was involved in an accident doesn’t mean the trucker or anyone associated with the semi-truck that caused the accident. It’s also possible that another driver operated his or her car recklessly, causing the 18-wheeler to get into a fatal accident with another car.

With so many different parties who may be held partially or totally liable for a fatal semi-truck accident, you need the help of an experienced 18-wheeler accident attorney just to be able to identify all of the parties responsible for your loved one’s death – let alone actually gather enough evidence to prove the case. It’s distinctly possible that multiple parties contributed to causing the accident, and if this is the case you most certainly need the assistance of a clever 18-wheeler accident attorney to make sure all the negligent parties are brought to justice and made to pay.

Importance of Investigation

With so many different parties who may have caused a fatal semi-truck accident, a successful investigation becomes critical to the success of any case. Therefore, you must act quickly to secure representation. With 18-wheeler accidents, the evidence begins to vanish soon after the accident – the scene will be cleared to allow for continued use of the roadway, witnesses become difficult to find, and video evidence gets erased. In order to find the proof needed to identify the negligent parties and then hold them liable, your attorney must be on the scene as soon as possible. At Grossman Law Offices, we’ve learned the critical importance of a timely and rigorous investigation. We race to the scene as soon as we’re hired and begin examining the physical evidence like the distance between the skid marks and the point of impact. We lockdown all of the vehicles involved and examine them for evidence, as well. If there are witnesses on the scene, we will interview them thoroughly. We also search the surrounding area for any video or photographic surveillance equipment that might shed some light on the case. We leave no stone unturned with our investigation.

What Damages Can be Sought?

When someone has died in your family, a lawsuit is not the first thing you will be worrying about. You’re rightfully consumed with sorrow, and even thinking about money at this time can seem like an affront to your deceased loved one. However, while your emotional suffering will likely continue for years to come, you can do something to alleviate your economic hardships right now. Also, our attorneys have found that families often have more success bouncing back from the mental trauma caused by their loved one’s death if they’ve already recovered from the financial woes caused by that death.

In Texas and Arkansas, your family has the right to pursue a single comprehensive lawsuit against each liable party, seeking both wrongful death damages and survival damages. However, in Arkansas, the family is responsible for naming a personal representative of the estate to handle this comprehensive suit before taking any other legal action.

Through wrongful death damages, the spouse, children, and parents of the deceased have the opportunity to seek compensation for the individual losses they have suffered – both economic and mental – as a result of the fatal semi-truck accident. Wrongful death damages may include restitution for:

• Funeral costs.
• Lost financial support the deceased supplied to the family.
• Pain and suffering.
• Mental and emotional trauma.

Survival damages, on the contrary, are the sole dominion of the victim’s closet living relative. The purpose of survival damages is to give the plaintiff the ability to pursue the damages the victim is owed for his or her individual suffering as a result of the fatal accident. The right to pursue survival damages is first held by the spouse. If no spouse is available, then this right is inherited by the children, then the parents, and finally a sibling. Survival damages may include restitution for:

• Property damage.
• Medical charges billed to the victim before he or she died.
• The victim’s mental and emotional distress caused by dying.
• Any pain and suffering felt by the victim in the accident.

When it comes to some of these damages, like medical or funeral expenses, a child could convince the court of the right to compensation by producing the bills and the receipts. However, other forms of compensation, like pain and suffering and mental anguish are far more debatable and difficult to prove up. Only a wrongful death lawyer who has spent many years dealing with hundreds of other cases has the expertise to accurately put a price tag on such subjective forms of damages.

Challenges to Full Recovery

Only in the rarest of cases does a negligent party agree to willingly pay the plaintiffs what the death of their loved one warrants. In most cases, you’re going to have to fight for what you deserve, whether negotiating a settlement with a insurance company or fighting a defense lawyer in court. Different challenges you will need to surmount include:

• Enormous Insurance Policies: Insurance policies for semi-trucks are like the truck themselves – much larger than passenger cars. An insurance policy on an 18-wheeler can be as much as 50 times as great in value as for a standard motor vehicle. Thus, with much more money to lose, the insurance company will usually try much harder to fight the claim, assigning one of its toughest, most clever, and most experienced adjusters to handle the claim. These are people who have built a reputation based on an ability to deny other people’s claims. They will attempt to suggest the victim was to blame for the accident. If they can prove the victim was more than 50 percent responsible for the accident, then they owe no compensation to the victim’s family. That means they often drag the victim’s good name through the mud. If that fails, they will try to bully sorrow-stricken families into accepting a settlement that is far less than they are owed in exchange for agreeing to waive the liability of the insured. At Grossman Law Offices, we will handle all interactions with the insurance company. We will only accept a settlement offer that is fair and equitable.

• Untrustworthy Truck Drivers: Now, we don’t mean to suggest that all truckers are liars – they’re not. However, we’ve learned a little too much about human nature in the two decades we’ve been handling personal injury and wrongful death lawsuits. When someone is accused of negligently killing another human being and his or her job is at stake, some people are going to lie to protect themselves and their ability to make a living. We will use our strong investigative skills and deposition questioning strategies to reveal any inconsistencies in a truck driver’s testimony and catch them in their lies.

• Self-Insured Companies: Some companies choose to provide their own insurance by setting aside a portion of their assets. These companies have even more incentive to shortchange the victim’s family, because their own assets at stake. Moreover, they’re not encumbered by federally mandated ethical standards that are imposed on insurance companies. Therefore, if you’re negotiating with a self-insured trucking company, you will not get what you deserve without a time-tested fatal semi-truck accident attorney on your side.

Grossman Law Offices Can Help

The good news for you is that you don’t have to be alone. At Grossman Law Offices, we’ve been dealing with wrongful death cases involving semi trucks for 20 years. We know the ins and outs of these cases, and we can handle every aspect from start to finish, allowing you to focus on overcoming your grief.

We’ve won verdicts and negotiated settlements from every major insurance company in the country, so they know our reputation and often offer our clients favorable benefit packages to avoid facing our attorneys in court. If they won’t negotiate, then we always prepare every case with the assumption we’re going to court and will be ready to fight for the damages your loved one’s death merits if forced to do so. If a loved one of yours has been killed in a fatal semi truck accident, call us now for a free consultation at 1-855-589-5645 (toll free). We offer you the opportunity to tell your family member’s tragic tale to a skilled professional who can answer your questions and explain your legal options. Don’t go through this trying process alone when there is someone waiting to help you.