Trucking Company Investigation in College Station

Truck wrecks tend to be much more difficult to deal with than crashes involving two passenger cars. Instead of being up against another individual, your opponent is the trucking company. Trucking companies have massive resources to bring to bear to protect their own interests. They’ll dispatch “rapid response” teams to the accident site to collect evidence and start building a case, and they have teams of attorneys, investigators, and insurance adjusters on their side to reduce or deny your claim.

They don’t have the right to push you around. That’s why you deserve a member of our legal team to help with the trucking company investigation process in College Station. For over a decade, Chad Jones Law, P.C. has been fighting for the rights of people injured in truck crashes throughout Texas.

Types of Evidence

Truck drivers are required by federal law to take regular breaks and may only work a certain number of hours in a given period of time. The purpose of these laws is to keep truckers awake and alert. To ensure compliance with hours-of-service laws, truck drivers are required to log their hours – but the trucking company is only required to keep that log for six months unless an attorney intervenes. After you contact us and retain our firm, we can call the trucking company and demand that they don’t destroy the HOS log.

Truckers are held to high legal standards because their vehicles are so difficult to handle. By law, trucking companies are required to conduct thorough background checks. And ideally, they should hire drivers who are safe and responsible operators. If your wreck involved a drunk, drugged or reckless trucker, we can comb through those records to see whether the trucking company failed to conduct that background check – or negligently hired a driver with a known history of drunk or reckless driving.

You’ve probably heard of the “black box” being used in airline accidents. Commercial trucks have a “black box” as well, and the data contained in it includes information such as average speed, highest speed, time driven, and amount of time spent driving over 65 mph. We can use this data to demonstrate that the trucker may have been speeding or point out inconsistencies in the hours-of-service log. However, because the black box data is the trucking company’s property, we need to move quickly to take legal action and secure it.

Trucking companies put a lot of pressure on drivers to make their deliveries on time, and sometimes, those deadlines are unrealistically short. We may find that the truck was behind schedule, which may have been motivation for the trucker to break the speed limit, drive recklessly, or work through mandatory breaks.

If a truck isn’t in good working order, it poses a threat to everyone else on the road. Truckers are required by law to conduct maintenance checks before getting on the road. We can review the records of those maintenance checks along with other work done on the truck. If the trucking company knew of a dangerous maintenance issue, we can work to hold them accountable.

No investigation would be complete without speaking to the people who actually saw the collision. We can look at the truck driver’s own statements for inconsistencies – for instance, if it seems as though the trucker may not remember what happened, he or she may have been asleep at the wheel. Our team can also talk to witnesses, both people who were at the scene of the crash itself and others who may be able to testify that the trucker was fatigued or intoxicated.