In every case, jurors have the ability to award compensation for medical bills, lost wages, and "pain and suffering". The mistake that many personal injury attorneys make in handling tractor-trailer accident cases is that they do not work up the case to support a submission of punitive damages. This is additional money that jurors can award, not to compensate the injured victim, but to punish the trucking company or driver for their egregious behavior. The standard varies by state, but generally the jury must find that the defendant's actions showed a
conscious disregard for the safety of the public. This is a higher standard than just proving they were negligent.
Tractor-Trailer accidents lend themselves to punitive damage submissions more than any other type of personal injury case. This is because of several reasons:
- Tractor-trailer accidents are often much more devastating and requires both the companies and drivers to be especially vigilant when it comes to safety.
- Both the truck companies and drivers are required to study, understand, and follow the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations.
- Truck companies are supposed to have a safety department which trains, regulates, and oversees all aspects of how the company and driver operate.
Many lawyers who do not routinely handle semi-truck wrecks wrongly assume that they cannot make a punitive damages case unless the truck driver was driving drunk or under the influence of drugs. Very rarely will you find that this is the case. Thus, many inexperienced truck lawyers do not
aggressively pursue the punitive damages aspect of these cases. Nothing frightens trucking companies and their insurance companies more than the threat of punitive damages. If this aspect of the case is not aggresively worked up, you lose a major piece of leverage, and ultimately it will cost you a ton of money.
How We Capitalize On Punitive Damages
We first start with focusing on the standard to obtain punitive damages - the truck company or truck driver must illustrate a conscious disregard for the safety of the public. Many lawyers believe this is an extremely high standard, but in tractor-trailer accident cases, it is not! This is because Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations give us a wealth of ammunition. These regulations by definition are designed to promote public safety. And when we find that drivers and the truck companies consistently violate these regulations, then we can prove they are illustrating a conscious disregard for the safety of the public!
Here is the part that many lawyers, even those who have been practicing general personal injury for many years, do not fully understand - the companies and their drivers are almost always violating the federal safety regulations. In fact, a recent study released by the American Association for Justice revealed that over 28,000 commercial motor carriers (trucking companies) have violated at least one Federal Safety Motor Carrier Regulation. Further, there are potentially 200,000 trucks that are or have violated a safety regulation. Once we begin establishing that the truck wreck was not just a simple accident, but the culmination of numerous safety violations, we have our argument for punitive damages. And when we can make a good case for punitive damages, we much more leverage to settle the case for more money.
But to find and fully establish these safety violations, the truck accident lawyer has to be intimately familiar with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations. This is where many personal injury lawyers who do not specialize in truck accident cases fall flat. They do not have a thorough understanding of the safety regulations, nor do they understand how to use them to establish a solid punitive damages case. Our Missouri truck accident lawyers spend thousands of dollars every year traveling across the country to attend truck accident seminars to hone our skills specifically in truck accidents and we put them to use every day in our truck accident cases.