3 Truck Accident Facts

Say that you’re involved in an accident with a commercial truck, but the reason that commercial truck deviated from his lane is because maybe there was a barrel from a construction site in its way and they were trying to avoid it, or there was a hole in the road as a result of improper maintenance or construction that caused this vehicle to leave its lane or do something that caused the accident. We have to make sure that we have all those angles covered. There may be a multitude of defendants, and you’re not going to get that information unless you get involved early on in the investigation and get people in the know that can tell you who is responsible for maintenance, or who is the person directly responsible for overseeing the work at the construction site where the accident occurred. There are a lot of moving parts, and that’s why you want to get your investigation done early.

How Much Your Case is Worth

With a commercial truck case, determining the value of your injury is a case-by-case basis. We look at the severity of the injury. Did someone lose a limb? Did they, God forbid, lose their eyesight or something really catastrophic? Those cases are actually somewhat easier to value. It’s the other cases where you may have a neck injury or a back injury that are harder to value. Those injuries may prevent you from working or doing your normal and customary activities. When you have those kinds of cases, making sure you get fully compensated is really important. Sometimes we have to hire experts, because you may have this back injury and you may need future back surgeries, so we need to determine how much medical care you’ll need in the future and what that future care would be. With that, what future household services will you need? Say your injury was such that you need to hire someone to plow your driveway, cut your lawn, things like that. There’s a value to that, and we hire experts to make sure that those values are presented to a jury or an insurance company to make sure you’re fully compensated.

Last but not least, you have your pain and suffering damages and of course that’s a case-by-case basis. Someone who has a serious physical injury at age 20, is going to have a case worth more than someone that may be at age 70, just because of life expectancy. This person that’s 20 has another 60 years of pain and suffering they have to live with, so that could increase the value of their claim.

Commercial truck accident claims are a little different than car accident claims in that many times you have a lot of different defendants involved. We talk about the simple car accident case: someone runs a stop sign, for example, and there are two cars involved in an accident. When you have a commercial vehicle involved, there are more moving parts because the owner of the tractor that’s pulling the rig may be different from the rig that’s being pulled, and there may also be a maintenance company involved in maintaining the trucks. We recently had a lawsuit against the company that was involved with maintaining the vehicle. Our claim was really based on what they did in causing our client’s injuries by failing to maintain the vehicle properly. There are a lot of moving parts to these cases. There could be a multitude of defendants. We want to get that case going right away because, when you have a multitude of defendants, we end up having a lot of litigation and that takes a lot of time, especially if there are appeals to higher courts about court rulings. It’s better to get involved in these cases early and get them moving.

Were you or a loved one seriously injured in a wreck and have questions about these 3 truck accident facts? Contact a Hamburg truck accident lawyer at Chiacchia and Fleming today for a free confidential consultation and case evaluation. Let our experience work for you.

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