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If you were injured in a truck accident, you should seek the help of an experienced truck accident attorney. Your road to recovery will be filled with complex legal issues and insurance claims, and it is important to have an experienced attorney in your corner to help make sure that you get compensation that will cover your injuries and help you get your life back – as close as possible – to normal.
If you were injured by a trucker, you could be entitled to substantial financial compensation for your injuries. However, your focus should be on your recovery, not the legal issues before you. Hire a Fort Wayne, IN truck accident lawyer to handle your case for you while you focus on getting better.
If you were hurt in a truck crash, call Wruck Paupore’s Fort Wayne truck accident lawyers today. Call our lawyers at (219) 322-1166 for a free case evaluation.
In most auto accident cases, you sue the driver who hit you for damages. However, trucking cases – or any auto accident case dealing with a commercial driver – will be a bit more complicated than that.
Like most drivers, truckers themselves carry insurance. In fact, their insurance usually covers higher values because commercial driving has a higher risk of accidents and property damage. Still, after a serious injury, the individual driver might not have the money to cover your injuries.
Suing the truck driver directly will certainly be a part of your case, but you may also be able to include the trucking company they work for as a defendant in your case. If the truck driver does not work as an employee at a trucking company, you cannot sue the company. This is common in cases involving owner-operators who work as independent contractors.
When you do sue the driver, their insurance company will typically take over the case on their behalf. This means that any payments will come from the insurance company instead of being out-of-pocket expenses paid by the driver. However, this means the full force of the insurance company’s lawyers will be against you. It is important to have your own Fort Wayne truck accident attorneys in your corner to help with these kinds of cases.
If the truck driver who hit you was an employee of a trucking company, you may be able to include the trucking company as a defendant in the suit. Most employers can be held liable for the mistakes their employees commit on the job. This includes trucking companies, who can be held liable for accidents that their drivers cause behind the wheel.
To include a trucking company in your case, you have to show that the driver caused the accident while on duty and while working within the scope of their duties. Trucking companies often try to deny liability and blame the driver for everything if the driver was off-route or if the driver was doing something against company policy like drinking and driving. Your Fort Wayne truck accident lawyer can help fight these kinds of defenses.
You can also sue a trucking company if they did something wrong in their own right. Trucking companies are held to follow federal trucking regulations set by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA). The FMCSA’s regulations include hours of service rules that limit how long drivers can stay on the road in a given period, vehicle weight restrictions, driver health restrictions, and equipment standards. Any violations of these rules on the part of the trucking company could make them partially at fault for a crash that results from the violation.
Trucking companies can also be held responsible for crashes caused by equipment issues. In many truck accident cases, both the truck driver and the other driver are victims of negligent trucking companies putting unsafe trucks on the road. If the trucking company owned the truck, they could be liable for any malfunctions or maintenance issues that contributed to the crash.
When you sue someone for a truck accident, you have to prove that the crash was actually their fault.
Indiana uses a “comparative negligence” law, so you do not need to prove that they were 100% liable for the crash. Instead, the court looks at all of the potentially liable parties – including you – and assigns each party a percentage of fault. The defendant is ordered to pay their fare share of damages based on that percentage. Even if you were partly at fault yourself, that would not bar you from suing the truck driver. However, you cannot recover damages in a lawsuit if you were more than 50% at fault.
Before the court can order damages at all, there must be proof that the truck driver and/or the trucking company were at fault. This means showing that the truck driver committed “negligence” by violating some legal duty that they owed you, which caused the crash. This often means pointing to specific traffic code violations, such as speeding or changing lanes without signaling.
You can also point to safe-driving violations that were not explicitly traffic code violations, such as changing lanes without looking or distracted driving. FMCSA violations can also help supply proof that the trucker was negligent. Talk to a Fort Wayne trucking accident lawyer about how to prove your case based on the specific circumstances of your accident.
For help with a truck accident case, contact Wruck Paupore today. Our Fort Wayne trucking accident lawyers offer free case evaluations. Call us today at (219) 322-1166.
Don is a founding partner and one of the nation’s top-ranked personal injury litigators. He is a member of the Multi-million Dollar Advocates Forum, which includes less than 1% of the nation’s trial lawyers, and awarded the highest ranking given by Martindale Hubbel and AVVO.
More importantly, Don understands representing personal injury victims is about more than recovering the best settlement: it’s about helping clients get back on their feet and supporting them in every aspect of their recovery.
In nearly all cases, our clients seek compensation from the wrongdoer’s insurance company. Before forming Wruck Paupore, Jason worked for a prominent law firm representing some of the world’s largest insurers. This experience gives Jason a deep understanding of the insurance industry and the strategies it uses to pay injury victims as little as possible.
Jason -- and our entire team -- put this inside knowledge to work to force insurance companies to pay what is actually owed. Often, we use the insurance company’s own tactics against them as we fight for the full compensation our client deserves.
For more than four decades, Keith has been fighting for injury victims. During that time, he’s watched the insurance industry change, with insurers now more interested in protecting their stock price than treating injury victims fairly.
Since the beginning, Keith has put people first. From his childhood in Gary, Indiana during the 1960’s and working his way through law school, Keith has risen to become one of the Midwest’s most respected trial lawyers. He has never forgotten that being a lawyer is about helping people -- and seeing injury victims through struggles in a way that could change their lives forever.
Over the decades, Keith, Don and Jason have fought relentlessly for clients, even when other lawyers have said the case was impossible to win.
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Wruck Paupore P.C.
Injury Lawyers
275 Joliet St. Suite #250
Dyer, IN 46311
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