Accidents with large commercial trucks occur frequently. Often times, such accidents are a result of a violation of a safety statute on the part of the truck driver. When a truck driver has violated a safety statute, courts will simply presume him to have been negligent, thereby making the ensuing lawsuit much simpler. The theory is simple: safety statutes, such as speed limits and laws requiring headlights at night, are created to prevent accidents caused by negligent behavior, therefore, if a truck driver causes an accident by violating one of these statutes, he was clearly negligent.

The theory is somewhat limited though. The statute must be designed to protect the class of people to which the injured person belongs, and to prevent the type of injury which the injured person suffered. Therefore, if the statute was not created to protect the injured person, or if the injury was not specifically meant to be prevented by the statute, then proving that the truck driver violated the statute will not result in a finding of negligence.

Examples of cases where truck drivers were found to have violated a safety statute but were not found negligent due to the fact the injured party was not a member of the class protected by the statute, or the injury was not one which the statute was intended to prevent are numerous.

It is important, in my opinion, that someone injured by a commercial truck hire an attorney, otherwise they could lose like people in the following examples. In one case, a city ordinance prohibited commercial vehicles from parking on city streets. Because the intent of the law was to provide more parking, when a car ran into truck that was illegally parked, injuring the passengers, the truck driver was not found negligent because the law’s purpose had nothing to do with preventing accidents. Another example was a city ordinance prohibiting people from stopping their vehicle in a crosswalk.

The purpose of the law was for the protection and convenience of pedestrians, therefore, the driver of a dump truck that stopped in a crosswalk then backed up over a child on a bicycle was not presumed negligent because the law did not apply to bicyclists.

Both of these examples show how narrowly safety statutes are construed by courts. Many people who have been in accidents with commercial trucks attempt to represent themselves, unfortunately, they do not always understand all of the subtleties of negligence law. When people do not get an attorney to represent them, often times they lose cases which could have been won, based solely on their lack of understanding of the law. If you’ve been in an accident, do yourself and your loved ones a favor: get an attorney.

In lawsuits concerning accidents with commercial trucks, many victims recover substantial sums of money because of the truck driver or trucking company’s negligence. Sometimes negligence suits are extraordinarily complicated, and other times they can be relatively straight-forward.

Often times, the truck driver can be guilty of negligence per se—this occurs when a judge finds an inference of negligence against the truck driver. If the circumstances of the accident and the actions of the truck driver clearly point to negligence on the truck driver’s part, the case can be very easy.

An inference of negligence will be found where the accident would not normally occur absent negligent behavior. For example, if you’re driving in the right lane of traffic and obeying all traffic laws and suddenly an 18-wheeler semi crosses the center line and collides with you, there will be an inference of negligence against the truck driver. Absent some sort of negligent behavior, trucks don’t usually cross into the wrong lane of traffic and collide with other vehicles.

However, don’t be lulled into a false sense of security and assume that just because an accident was clearly the truck driver’s fault that you don’t need an attorney. Many times truck drivers and trucking companies are able to mount successful defenses to otherwise obvious negligence cases.

One of the easiest inference-of-negligence cases to win is where a truck rear-ends another car. There is almost always a presumption of negligence on the truck driver’s part in such a case. However, there are ways that truck drivers can escape responsibility in such cases. If you’ve been rear-ended by a large commercial truck, don’t assume that you don’t need a lawyer. There are a number of cases where truck drivers have escaped responsibility for rear-ending other cars.

Some examples include where the truck driver argued and proved that: (1) the car in front of him, without looking or signaling, changed lanes in front of him so closely that the truck driver couldn’t avoid a collision; (2) the car that the truck rear-ended was stalled in the middle of a dark road without any lights; and (3) that the car in front of the truck negligently created a hazard that the truck driver could not reasonably avoid. Without an experienced attorney to counter these arguments in court, a person rear-ended by a large truck could lose an otherwise easy case.

No matter how obvious it may seem that an accident was the truck driver’s fault, contact an attorney so that you can recover the money you deserve to pay for damages to your car and to cover your medical expenses.

The best thing to do when injured in an accident with a large commercial truck is to contact an attorney. Accidents involving the commercial trucking industry are incredibly complex. That is why it is very important to find an attorney with experience and can handle this complicated case.

Trucking accident lawsuits are typically based on the theory of negligence. As a legal theory, negligence is extremely complex. In order to prevail in a negligence case a person must prove the five essential elements of negligence: duty, breach, factual causation, proximate causation and actual damages. If any element is missing the lawsuit will fail. Therefore, an injured victim in an accident involving a commercial truck, the plaintiff, has a large burden. It is not enough to simply prove the accident took place (although that maybe be enough to coax a small settlement out of the trucking company just to get a person to go away).

If you want to actually recover a significant amount of money sufficient to pay for your medical bills, to fix and damage to your car or truck, to compensate you for time missed from work and your pain and suffering, and to punish the trucking company for its lack of responsibility you must hire an attorney with the experience necessary to win a negligence case.

The legal sense “duty” refers to a person’s duty to act in such a way and conform to the standard of care necessary to protect other people from an unreasonable risk of harm. This is the first element of a negligence case, establishing that the responsible party had a duty to you. In determining whether a duty existed, you are essentially asking whether the person had an obligation to use some amount of care to avoid or prevent an injury to another person.

The question of duty can be very easy at times, and in other cases can be very complex and subtle. For instance, clearly a truck driver has a duty to drive at a safe speed in order to minimize the risk to other drivers on the road. They would be violating their duty of care to everyone else on the highway if they drove a huge tractor trailer at 90 miles per hour. However, what duty does a truck driver owe to a car that cuts them off or is following too closely? What about the mechanic that worked on the brakes of the trailer months prior to an accident?

How does his duty figure into an accident where a truck driver rear-ends a person that pulls out in front of him, and does the mechanic’s duty interact with truck driver’s duty, not to mention the duty of the other driver not to pull out in front of other traffic? Issues such as duty can be incredibly tricky and complex and for this reason, an attorney can be an extremely valuable resource if you’ve been in any kind of trucking accident.