Truck Accident Lawyer | Semi Truck Attorneys – Munley Law®

Were You Injured in a Semi or Tractor Trailer Accident?
Learn How Our Truck Accident Attorneys Can Help.

The truck accident lawyers at Munley Law Personal Injury Attorneys are recognized nationwide as leaders in trucking accident law. No firm is more experienced, or more successful in helping truck accident victims achieve the justice they deserve. We have obtained more than $1 billion in settlements and verdicts for our clients. We are committed to getting you and your family the compensation needed to get you back to your life.

Our Truck Accident Lawyers Have Recovered Billions of Dollars for Truck Injury Victims

When you are involved in a car accident with a semi, you need to know your case is in the best possible hands. Commercial truck and tractor trailer accidents can be far more devastating and complicated than a regular car crash. That’s why these cases should only be handled by a trucking lawyer with decades of experience and a record of success in commercial truck injury cases.

Munley Law Personal Injury Attorneys is unique because our semi truck accident lawyers have developed a special focus on these complex, heavily defended cases. For more than 60 years, our nationwide trucking attorneys have gone head-to-head with large trucking companies to get the maximum amount of compensation for those injured by the companies’ negligent actions. Our accident attorneys are dedicated experts in aggressively pursuing justice for our injury clients; each member of our law firm has extensive experience in trucking cases.

Table of Contents

• Why Choose Our Truck Accident Attorneys?
• What Can a Truck Accident Lawyer Do For You?
• What Does a Trucking Attorney Recommend I Do Following an Accident?
• How Much Does it Cost to Hire an Injury Lawyer?
• What Are the Common Causes of Trucking Accidents?
• How is Compensation Calculated Following a Truck Crash?
• Who is Responsible for My Accident?
• How is Negligence Established Following a Crash?
• What is the Black Box and Why is it Important After a Truck Accident?
• Contact a Truck Accident Attorney Today

Why Choose Our Semi Truck Accident Attorneys?

Our truck accident attorneys are recognized nationwide as industry experts. Marion Munley was the first woman Chair of the American Association for Justice Trucking Litigation Group, and Daniel Munley served as chair from 2011-2012. Munley Law Personal Injury Attorneys is the only firm in the country to have two of our lawyers lead the AAJ Trucking Litigation Group. Both Daniel Munley and Marion Munley are among the few attorneys in the nation to be board certified in Truck Accident Law by the National Board of Trial Advocacy, a recognition given only to truck accident attorneys who have demonstrated high standards of competence and integrity. Both have also been recognized as one of the Top 10 Trucking Trial Lawyers by the National Trial Lawyers Association.

In 2019, the American Association for Justice Trucking Litigation Group renamed the “Chairman’s Award” in honor of Robert W. Munley (1930-2019), in recognition of his work as one of the first lawyers to specialize in truck accident cases and treat them differently from other types of auto accidents. The award is presented annually to an attorney who has advanced the goals of the Group: to educate other lawyers on trucking law matters and to improve highway safety through legal work and advocacy. Marion Munley and Daniel Munley were the first lawyers to receive the award after it was renamed the “Robert W. Munley Award” in honor of their father and Munley Law Personal Injury Attorneys founder.

Our injury lawyers have consistently been named Best Lawyers in America (via the legal guide Best Lawyers), Pennsylvania Super Lawyers (Pennsylvania Magazine), Best Law Firms (U.S. News and World Report), and are proud members of the Million Dollar and Multi-Million Dollar Advocates Forums. Our truck accident attorneys are regarded as experts in the industry, and we are regularly asked to speak about the latest changes and trends in trucking law at events all over the country. Let us put our expertise to work for you.

If you are injured and can’t come to us, our lawyers can travel to meet with you wherever you are located. We understand that this is a difficult time in your life and we will do whatever we can to make sure you get the compensation you deserve following a trucking accident.

What Does a Truck Accident Attorney Do?

Truck accident lawyers can handle all aspects of your personal injury claim and make sure you receive the compensation you need. Personal injury cases do require a thorough investigation, the opinions of expert witnesses, and the creative use of discovery procedures after the suit is filed.

Collect Evidence at the Scene

Prompt investigation of the accident scene is crucial. The trucking company will quickly dispatch its own investigators right after it learns of the crash to collect evidence. This evidence can quickly disappear before anyone has a chance to review it. You will need a team on your side who will save it before it fades away.

Our on-staff team of investigators will respond to the scene of an accident as soon as possible. Our team will document skid marks, debris, as well as oil, gas, and radiator fluid stains at the scene. Our investigators will also obtain police reports, motor carrier records, witness statements, photographs, and safety logs. We will secure the “black box,” an electrical recording device that contains vital information about the semi.

Getting evidence for your case on your own is impossible. Demand letters must be sent to get what’s needed to prove your case. You are only able to do this with the best truck accident lawyer. Contact our truck accident lawyer today for a free consultation.

Utilize Expert Witnesses for Truck Accident Cases

Our injury lawyers have long-established relationships with trucking industry experts and investigators. These expert witnesses can review the facts of your case and help us craft a winning trial strategy. Other experts including engineers, medical professionals, economists, and accident reconstructionists will work alongside us to put your strongest case forward.

Not all law firms have access to these types of experts. But since we’ve been helping injury victims for over 60 years, our trucking lawyer has created relationships that stand the test of time.

Negotiate With Multiple Insurance Companies

With the evidence collected from the scene of the accident, our lawyers will be able to determine who is responsible for the accident. Once we have established liability, we will begin to speak with the insurance companies on your behalf. With decades of experience negotiating with insurance companies, our lawyers will make sure you get the maximum amount of compensation available for your claim.

Unfortunately, the negotiation will take some time and in some cases, a settlement cannot be reached. If this occurs, our experienced truck accident law trial lawyers will file a lawsuit, making sure you receive a fair trial. We are one of the few law firms in the country that has faced trucking companies and insurance companies in a court of law and have come up on top.

What to Do Following a Truck Accident

Immediately after the crash, it’s important that you remain calm and that you call 911. The police will need to make a report so it’s important to stay at the accident scene until the police arrive. If the semi driver leaves the scene of the accident, do not chase after them.

While you wait for emergency services, try to gather evidence from the truck wreck. This includes photos and videos of the crash site and contact information of the truck driver and any witnesses. It’s also helpful to get the contact information of the company that the semi driver is working for and whoever owns the semi.

When emergency services arrive, keep your statement brief and do not admit fault. Get the name and badge number of the police officer and follow up with the police in a couple of weeks to get the completed police report.

Go to the hospital to learn about your injuries. If you choose not to go right then, remember to make an appointment with your primary physician.

Do not discuss the crash with anyone except the police, your injury attorney, and your own insurance agent; you are not required to give a statement to the other driver’s insurance company.

As an injury victim, you have the legal right to compensation. However, because trucking accidents often involve multiple responsible parties and insurance companies, obtaining that compensation can be a nightmare. Without a trucking attorney, you’re likely to be bullied out of a fair settlement.

Trucking companies will typically have unlimited resources, including teams of truck accident law defense lawyers to fight against any suit you may file regardless of how injured you are. The best way to protect your rights after a truck crash is to make sure you don’t speak with the insurance company until you first speak with an experienced truck accident lawyer at Munley Law who will defend your rights and ensure that you are fairly compensated.

Nothing is more devastating than getting into a wreck with a truck. Your injuries may be life-threatening, and medical costs can amount to tens of thousands of dollars. Your insurance may not cover all of your expenses, and you may have difficulties just trying to get back to your life. Our injury attorneys are here to help.

Truck Accident Questions and Answers

What Are the Most Common Causes of Truck Accidents?

The causes of accidents with commercial trucks vary. But when a large vehicle collides with a car, another truck, motorcycle, or pedestrian, it almost always results in serious injury or death. When it is out of control, the sheer size and weight of a large truck make it a deadly weapon.

There are many reasons why large trucks cause truck accidents. Often the reason is negligence or recklessness on the part of the truck driver or trucking company, such as:

• Aggressive driving
• Distracted driving (i.e. cell phone use)
• Impaired driving (i.e., alcohol and drug abuse)
• Failure to inspect tires and brakes
• Poor weather conditions
• Unsecured cargo or overloaded trucks

How is Compensation Determined Following a Truck Accident?

When determining compensation for your truck accident case, both your current and your future expenses will be taken into account. For example, if you suffered a brain injury, you could be facing months if not years of medical treatment and long-term care. You may never be able to return to work. You could lose interest in daily activities that you once loved and you may become distant from your partner. A truck accident claim should pay for all these losses.

A truck accident victim can receive two types of damages — economic and non-economic.

Economic damages will cover any financial costs that accrued after the accident. This includes, but is not limited to, current and future medical expenses, lost wages, loss of earning capacity, and funeral costs.

Non-economic damages are meant to compensate you and your family who are struggling after the accident, such as any pain or suffering you’re experiencing, mental anguish, and loss of consortium.

In rare cases, punitive damages may be awarded if the defendant’s actions were fraudulent, reckless, or malicious. These types of damages are meant to punish the defendant to prevent this behavior from happening again.

Insurance rarely covers all of the losses and expenses that result from a trucking case. Trucking, hauling, and leasing companies often seek to minimize payments by disputing victims’ insurance claims. Trucking firms and insurance companies often use tactics that can add to the trauma and expense of being in a commercial motor vehicle crash.

When negotiations fail to achieve adequate funds for victims, the pursuit of a personal injury or wrongful death lawsuit is the proper course of action. Our truck accident attorneys have won millions of dollars in settlements and verdicts, including many multimillion-dollar awards.

How Can a Trucking Accident Lawyer Determine Who is Responsible for a Truck Crash?

Large truck crashes are unique from other vehicle accidents; due to their size, injuries can be catastrophic. They are also more complicated because there are multiple parties who could be liable for your injuries. It’s not just the truck driver who could be at fault. To navigate liability – from large companies to third party brokers and manufacturers – you’ll want our semi truck accident lawyers by your side.

Who Can Be Held Responsible for a Truck Accident?

When deciding who to hold responsible for your truck accident, you and your trucking lawyer will want to look at a variety of different parties and people.

• Truck Driver: This one is obvious, since your truck driver may have most directly been at fault for causing the truck accident.
• Trucking Company: If the driver of the vehicle was employed by a trucking company, they could be held liable. They are responsible for keeping track of drivers’ information, including background checks, limiting scheduling for rest periods, and more.
• Third-party brokers: Many commercial transportation companies hire a third-party broker to connect them to drivers and trucks to transport their cargo. This means, if you have been in a truck wreck with a vehicle hired by one of these brokers, your truck accident attorney will want to know if they did their due diligence in hiring, as well as investigate how much control they had over the driver’s schedule and more.
• Truck Manufacturers: If the truck accident was caused by a mechanical failure or some other issue with a part in the truck, you could also widen liability to the truck manufacturer. Beyond that, if the employer or independent truck driver did not routinely get the truck inspected and repaired, they could be held liable for a faulty part as well.

Trucking accidents can be complicated, and if one or more of the above parties can be held liable, you’ll want to know. Truck drivers, their employers, and even brokers, all carry their own insurance policies. This means you could be owed compensation from more than one source. The best way to ensure your maximizing compensation for your truck accident injury is by hiring a truck crash lawyer at Munley Law Personal Injury Attorneys.

Nationwide Truck Crash Statistics

If you are driving in a passenger vehicle, large truck crashes can be catastrophic. A truck driver’s ability to brake and maintain other safety controls over their truck is limited. The most recent statistics from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration show that fatal accidents involving large trucks have increased by 13 percent over the past year.

According to the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety:

• In 2020, 4,014 people died in large truck crashes; only 15 percent were truck occupants, while the other 68 percent were in passenger vehicles. The remaining 16 percent are pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorcyclists.
• In a truck crash, people in passenger vehicles are more likely to experience fatal injuries than those in the truck. In 2020, 97 percent of vehicle occupants killed in two-vehicle crashes involving a large truck and a passenger vehicle were occupants in the passenger vehicle.
• Ten percent of all motor vehicle crash deaths in 2020 occurred in large truck crashes.
• Where do truck crashes occur? 47 percent on major roads, 36 percent on interstates and freeways, and 15 percent on smaller roads.
• 27 percent of fatal work zone crashes involved a large truck. (FMCSA)

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Contact Munley Commercial Truck Accident Lawyers Today!

Why Are Tractor Trailer Truck Accidents Different From Car Accidents?

Commercial truck accidents can differ from car accidents in various ways. Not only are you dealing with a larger vehicle — on average, an 18 wheeler can weigh 80,000 pounds, 20 times the weight of a passenger car — but truck drivers need to follow certain federal regulations that the typical driver does not have to follow. For example, the Federal Motor Carriers Safety Administration Hours of Services regulations state a truck driver cannot drive more than 11 hours after 10 consecutive hours off duty; however, many truck drivers ignore this rule in order to meet deadlines or obtain a financial incentive from the trucking company.

Other ways truck accidents can differ from car crashes include:

• Multiple parties can be held responsible: In a typical car accident, usually one or both drivers can be held responsible. But in a truck accident, there could be various parties that can be held liable for the accident, such as the truck company, the manufacturer of the vehicle, and the company that loaded the vehicle.
• Insurance policies are larger for tractor trailers: Truck insurance is larger than your average car insurance policy. This means insurance adjusters will do everything in their power to make sure the fault lies on the car driver’s shoulders to prevent a huge payout.
• Injuries are more severe: The larger the vehicle, the more likely the accident injuries will be greater. This leads to extensive medical bills, life-changing injuries, and possible death.

Truck accidents can be devastating. This is why it’s always important to speak to a commercial truck accident lawyer with the experience, knowledge, and track record to protect your claim and stand up for your rights.

How do Truck Accident Attorneys Establish Negligence?

In order to prove negligence in a truck accident case, you will need evidence that shows the truck driver and other parties at fault were responsible for the accident. By using this evidence, our truck accident lawyer will show that the truck driver and other parties had breached the duty of care, leading to the accident and the injuries it caused.

Common examples of breaching the duty of care include:

• Not properly maintaining the logbook that details how many hours are driven
• Not documenting hours of service and rest breaks taken
• Improper truck loading such as overloading the trailer
• Driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol
• Driving for longer than 10 hours without resting

This can be difficult if you don’t have the right attorneys by your side. Only an experienced truck accident lawyer knows what to look for when determining fault in a truck accident.

You Need a Truck Injury Lawyer Who Knows How to Recover and Examine the Truck’s Black Box

What is the semi truck’s black box and what does it track?

The “black box” contains all kinds of information about the truck at the time of the crash, from the truck’s speed to the tire pressure to whether the brakes were applied. This kind of information about the driver’s actions and the condition of the truck at the time of the crash will be crucial to your case. All trucks are different and not all lawyers know how to obtain this data on every truck – our trucking accident attorneys do.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Association (NHTSA) requires that all commercial trucks record and report certain information. A “black box” is a blanket term that encompasses the kinds of devices that record that information, namely Electronic Control Modules (ECM), Event Data Recorders (EDR), and Electronic Logging Devices (ELD). These devices preserve technical vehicle data and occupant information about both a truck and its operator’s behavior. When a trucking accident occurs and a victim suffers damages, black boxes can provide crucial information about how and why the catastrophic collision occurred.

Black boxes can capture the following data:

• The truck’s speed prior to and upon impact
• The vehicle’s precise GPS location
• Whether the truck’s operator was wearing a seat belt
• The steering angle
• Whether, when, and with what force the trucker used the vehicle’s breaks
• The truck’s engine RPM
• How frequently the truck was operating above the speed limit
• Whether the airbag deployed
• Whether the truck operator was using the cruise control setting
• The percent throttle
• The daily and monthly trucking activity
• The tire pressure
• If the trucker contacted or communicated with the truck company

Because black boxes provide objective information about how and why a collision occurred that cannot otherwise be obtained, they are vital tools for victims of trucking accidents. Black boxes can help to illustrate the events leading up to and following a catastrophic truck accident. The recordings often prove crucial to a personal injury plaintiff’s ability to prove that a trucker was exhausted, overworked, or otherwise negligent.

While undoubtedly valuable, black box data can also be difficult to obtain. Trucking companies do not automatically provide accident victims with black box information. In fact, they may seek to destroy it or they may simply do nothing to preserve it, and most devices automatically delete data after thirty days.

Your truck accident lawyer must not only know how to get the black box information, they must also know how to use it to help you win your case. This requires an understanding of very technical data about the truck mechanics and standards, as well as the regulations on the trucking industry. It may also include hiring one or more experts to consult with or testify in court about topics like trucker fatigue, FMCSA compliance, braking systems in tractor trailers, the physics of semi-truck collisions, or the functioning of black boxes themselves.

For decades, our truck accident lawyer has successfully elicited, interpreted, and utilized data from the black box in order to win big for our clients. With this technical knowledge and skill, we recently obtained a $26 million settlement for your personal injury case. If you or a loved one is suffering from a catastrophic collision, we want to help you to do the same. Don’t wait any longer — call Munley Law Personal Injury Attorneys today to schedule your free consultation.

Contact Our Truck Crash Attorney Today

When choosing a truck accident attorney, go with one with the most experience, the most resources, and the most success. If you or a loved one has been injured in an accident involving a semi truck, you may have a right to recover money for your medical costs and other losses. The truck accident lawyers of Munley Law Personal Injury Attorneys represent tractor trailer accident victims throughout the country.

Contact us now, we’ll discuss your legal options for obtaining money for the losses you have suffered in a trucking accident.

Do I Have A Case?

If you think you may have a personal injury case, contact us now for a FREE consultation.

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