If a vehicle hits you while you’re driving, you might sustain minor damage or injuries. However, you never know when a car accident might cause devastating damage. It could total your vehicle and injure you in a way that requires surgery or physical therapy.
In this second scenario, you might need to contact a lawyer and sue the other vehicle’s driver if you think they acted negligently. That becomes even more true if you’re paying for medical bills out of pocket and missing work for weeks or months.
If a commercial truck hits you rather than a regular-sized vehicle, it’s more likely you’ll have serious injuries or extensive vehicle damage. That’s because of the size and weight of these enormous juggernauts of America’s roadways. America sees over 500,000 commercial truck accidents yearly, and that number usually remains consistent with each passing year.
In this article, we’ll talk about how the legal system views accidents between commercial trucks and noncommercial vehicles. If this happens, you’ll need to pick up the pieces physically, emotionally, and also financially, so getting the right lawyer becomes vital.
What Caused the Accident?
First, we should talk about personal injury law. Let’s say that a commercial truck hits you when you’re driving on the highway. It strikes your car and causes serious damage, and injuries as well.
In that scenario, if you decide to sue, you’re getting into the personal injury legal niche. You should have no problems finding a lawyer who will represent you if that’s the case.
Many lawyers get into this area of the law because they know they’ll have no shortage of clients. Many attorneys also like the idea of getting financial compensation for victims of companies or private citizens who act negligently or recklessly.
If you’re in the scenario we’re describing, you’ll need to look around and find a lawyer who has an excellent industry reputation. You can do that by looking at their online reviews and seeing what former clients have to say about them. Once you’ve located what seems like a solid choice, you can go meet with the lawyer and tell them what happened.
The lawyer with whom you meet will probably want to know what caused the accident. More specifically, they’ll want to figure out whether the truck’s driver acted recklessly or negligently.
You could safely say that the legal niche, for the most part, regards accident victims in commercial truck crashes sympathetically. It’s probably because commercial trucks take up so much space and the drivers need to exercise extra caution because of these vehicles’ massive size.
Many lawyers who hear that a commercial truck driver plowed into your car or ran you off the road will feel like you’re the smaller kid on the playground who a bully manhandled. They should side with you, unless it’s clear you did something egregiously wrong that caused the accident. Assuming your account makes it clear that you’re not at fault, you should have no trouble enlisting a personal injury attorney’s enthusiastic help as you try to get a lawsuit going.
You Might Sue Different Individuals or Entities
Assuming you don’t admit to your prospective lawyer that you drank a fifth of Jim Beam before you got behind the wheel, you can probably start working on the case together before any more time passes. There’s one more thing worth saying regarding the legal niche and commercial truck accident cases. Many times, a lawyer will eagerly take such a case because they may assume that it can become a nice payday for both you, the victim, and them, your legal representative.
They’re often justified in thinking this way. It could be that the truck driver hit you because they ingested alcohol or took illegal drugs before they drove. Maybe they hit your vehicle during a road rage incident.
However, perhaps the truck malfunctioned in some way, and that caused the wreck. If so, maybe you and the lawyer can go after the mechanic who serviced the truck.
It could also turn out that the trucking company that owns the vehicle didn’t have it serviced regularly. In that case, maybe you can sue them instead.
It might even become a case where you and your lawyer can name multiple defendants in the lawsuit you put together. Perhaps you end up with a situation where you can collect money from the driver, mechanic, and trucking company all at the same time.
Make Sure You Have the Right Lawyer for the Potential Court Battle
Commercial trucking accidents, because they can also involve mechanics who service these vehicles and the companies that own them, often get complicated in a hurry. That’s a major way that they differ from more simple cases where you have two private citizens in vehicles who hit each other in an intersection. The commercial vehicle elements often add extra steps to the investigation process.
That’s where you and your lawyer will hopefully figure out who you can hold responsible, assuming it’s not you who caused the accident. In many cases, you will appear sympathetic to a jury in much the same way you will to your lawyer.
It’s only natural that a group of your peers should judge a company harshly if it pushed a truck driver to get their load to its destination and didn’t give them time to get their proper rest. That sort of thing can often cause an accident, and if it happens, you might end up benefitting.
Keep in mind, though, that even if you suspect illegal or immoral action from the trucking company or some other entity or individual who you can sue, you must prove their culpability. That’s not always easy. It’s probably the largest obstacle you must overcome before you can collect the money to balance the scales of justice following one of these wrecks.
With an experienced truck accident lawyer, hopefully, you can force a settlement offer or get a jury’s verdict in your favor.
