Woodland Truck Accident Lawyer

You are traveling on East Street headed to the Yolo County Fairgrounds in Woodland when your SUV is t-boned by a tractor-trailer. Your vehicle is totaled and you suffer catastrophic physical injuries. The police investigation discovered that the truck operator was texting on their cell phone and got distracted causing the collision.

Unfortunately, this scenario and many other truck accident scenarios are common when you consider the fact that nearly four thousand people died in accidents involving large commercial trucks in the year 2015, according to the Insurance Institute. If that was not bad enough, California is the leader in the country in the total percentage of recorded truck accidents, according to Distracted Driving Accidents.

If you or a loved one was involved in an accident with a large commercial truck, you probably have a myriad of questions that need to be answered. Below is some information that may be of assistance:

Take Action and Contact a Truck Accident Lawyer

An attorney can examine your own auto insurance policy to see if there are any medical expense benefits you can access immediately while your truck accident case is pending. If you do not have health insurance and need treatment, there are medical specialists who offer treatment on a lien basis. Basically, this means the medical professional will treat you at no cost up front, but if we obtain a settlement or jury verdict, the doctor will get reimbursed for their services.

What Needs to Be Proven in Your Injury Case

In a truck accident injury case, the plaintiff (i.e. the injured party) bears the burden of establishing that the defendant, or defendants, were liable for their harms and losses. Liability requires a showing of negligence. To establish negligence, your Woodland truck accident lawyer must be able to show that the truck driver and/or other related defendants owed a duty of care to you and other drivers to exercise reasonable care under the circumstances and that the defendant(s) breached that duty, proximately causing your physical, mental, and emotional harm.

Partial Fault is Not a Prohibition on Taking Legal Action

In some truck accidents, fault is not ultimately 100 percent on one side or the other. In other words, in a case where there may be evidence of negligence on both sides, the injured party can still obtain a financial recovery. Juries are tasked with calculating the amount of fault assigned to each party if this issue arises during the course of your case.

Holding Multiple Negligent Parties Responsible 

You may be able to hold multiple parties accountable for their negligent actions. For example, some accidents are actually caused by poor maintenance of the commercial truck and that negligence proximately caused the collision (and thereby your injuries).  There are even state and federal regulations in place that require trucking companies to regularly inspect and maintain their big rigs. Regardless, many trucking companies throw caution to the wind and neglect maintaining their fleet of vehicles until a terrible accident occurs.

You may be asking yourself, “why would a large trucking company make such short-sighted decisions?” Well, the decision to defer routine maintenance for as long as possible is often driven by an effort to maximize profits. Repairing and maintaining large big rigs is expensive. If you can push those costs off into the future, you generate more profit in the immediate future. This is extremely risky since some commercial trucks that have been on the road for weeks or months with little-to-no-maintenance are like time bombs waiting to wreak havoc on the roads.

Evidence that Needs to be Collected 

This is an important question that highlights the reason why you need to take action and contact a Woodland truck accident lawyer sooner rather than later. Since the burden is on the injured party to prove negligence, you need a lawyer who will get to work right away collecting relevant evidence to build your case. This means collecting maintenance records from the trucking company, taking depositions of witnesses and other parties, retrieving data from inside the big rig such as logbooks and black box data, and personnel records concerning the truck operator. This information needs to be collected as soon as possible since many trucking companies will conveniently lose vital records or dispose of those records during the time period between your accident and the time a lawsuit is filed.

The following video explains the types of damages that could be claimed in a trucking accident lawsuit.

Large Settlements and Verdicts Are Attainable 

It is possible to obtain a large settlement or verdict in a truck accident injury case since the economic and non-economic damages are often quite extensive. As mentioned earlier, truck accident cases often involve catastrophic injuries to the occupants of the smaller vehicle. That means potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills and lost wages and potentially life-altering ramifications from the collision. In recent years, there have been multiple commercial trucking accident cases where a settlement or verdict resulted in $20 million or more for the injured party, according to the National Law Review.

But to be clear, no one can guarantee an outcome in your case because every case is different and the outcome is dependent upon the facts specific to your case.

Statute of Limitations with Truck Accident Injury Lawsuits

Unfortunately, injured parties do not have an infinite period of time to hold the negligent truck operator and/or employer accountable. The California legislature enacted a law that limits the amount of time within which an injured victim can file a civil lawsuit. In the state of California, an injured party has two years in which to file a personal injury lawsuit.

Woodland Truck Accident Lawyer

I'm Ed Smith, a Woodland truck accident attorney. Do not take on the trucking company by yourself. Level the proverbial playing field by retaining an experienced Woodland truck accident lawyer.  If you have been hurt or someone you care about has been injured or killed in a trucking accident, call me today for free and friendly advice at (530) 392-9400 or (800) 404-5400.

I have been practicing injury law since 1982. I've been handling ONLY personal injury and wrongful death cases throughout the great state of California for over three decades. 

We are members of the Million Dollar Advocates Forum and the National Association of Distinguished Counsel.

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