Flagstaff Truck Accident Lawyer

A collision between your car and a 40-ton commercial semi truck can have devastating, even fatal, results. When such an accident occurs, having the right Flagstaff truck accident lawyer can make a real difference in recovering the maximum amount of damages for your losses.

At Stone Rose Law, we have helped Arizona residents recover monetary damages for injuries sustained in truck accidents. If a truck accident left you with medical bills or property damage, we will help you.

Call us at (480) 631-3025 to speak with one of our Flagstaff truck accident lawyers in a free consultation. You can also reach us using our online contact form.

Remedies for Flagstaff Truck Accidents

In the personal injury context, what you can receive after an accident with a truck takes the form of money damages from a court award or a settlement payout from an insurance company. 

In most cases, a negotiated settlement is the source of compensation.

How much compensation you receive depends on your ability to prove the harm you have suffered, the nature of that harm, and, to some extent, the ability of the at-fault driver (or more likely the trucking company) to pay through its insurance and its own financial assets.

The starting point is an investigation of the facts of the accident. 

When our Flagstaff truck accident attorneys investigate a truck accident, we consider legal options including personal injury, wrongful death, a survival action, and possible third-party liability, including product liability. 

While there is no cookie-cutter formula for tabulating your potential compensation amount from a personal injury case, our personal injury calculator can give you some context to work with. 

How Much Time Do You Have to Make a Truck Accident Claim?

Arizona law gives you a limited time to make a legal claim for personal injury after a truck accident. 

The general rule is that you have two years from the date of the accident if your injuries occurred on that date. This is the Arizona statute of limitations for personal injury.

If, however, you do not discover your injury until some time passes after the accident, then it is possible that instead of on the accident date, your two-year period to file a lawsuit can begin on the day you discovered the accident-related injury or medical condition. 

If you get injured in an accident with a government-owned truck, you must file your claim much sooner than Arizona’s general personal injury statute of limitations allows. 

You must serve a Notice of Claim within 180 days from the date the action accrues upon the government agency, and file your personal injury claim within one year from the date the action accrued.

What Kinds of Claims Can You Make After a Truck Accident?

Personal injury claims involving truck accidents are largely the same as with car accidents. Here are some of the factors a Flagstaff truck accident law firm will consider when representing you.

Who is Responsible for the Accident?

The starting point in assessing a personal injury claim arising from a collision with a commercial truck is the truck driver, but the chain of liability often does not end there. 

Here are some other potential responsible parties we often see:

• Trucking corporations (for example, negligent hiring and supervision, negligent driver training, and general agency liability)
• Contractors to employers, like companies that maintain their trucks, can contribute to mechanical failure, or cargo loading companies that improperly load cargo onto a truck
• Other drivers or pedestrians who contributed to causing the accident
• Government agencies, in cases where poor road maintenance contributes to the accident
• Truck and/or parts manufacturers and sellers, or their vendors or suppliers, if the truck, and/or its parts, was designed or manufactured in a way that made it unreasonably dangerous to use for its intended purpose (products liability)

Comparative Negligence in Arizona

In a related sense, sometimes the at-fault driver may claim you played a role in causing the crash. 

Arizona applies pure comparative negligence, so your compensation decreases by your percentage of fault, but you can still recover damages even if you were 99.9% at fault.

Who was Harmed in the Accident?

In addition to the harm you suffer after a truck crash, including property damage claims, some cases involve harm to others. 

For example, if a member of your immediate family, like a spouse or a child of yours, dies as a result of the accident, then you may have a legal claim for the harm you experience.

What is the Nature of the Harm?

Money damages are your main source of financial compensation in a motor vehicle accident, including a truck accident. 

The kinds of money damages you may recover in a truck accident case are economic damages, non-economic damages, and, in rare cases, punitive damages.

Economic Damages

Economic damages are damages that you can calculate relatively easily because they are tangible. You can prove them with medical bills, receipts, repair estimates, and other documentation.

Some specific kinds of economic damages for which you can seek to recover are:

• Medical treatment costs, including anticipated future healthcare costs
• Lost wages and lost earning capacity
• Property damage

Non-Economic Damages

Non-economic damages are intangible in nature. They address types of harm you suffer that are not as readily calculable as economic damages, but are still recoverable.

Examples of non-economic damages include:

• Pain and suffering, and mental anguish
• Loss of companionship 

Punitive Damages

Punitive damages in Arizona require clear and convincing evidence that the defendant acted with an “evil mind,” meaning they intended to cause harm or consciously disregarded a substantial risk of significant harm.

As their name suggests, punitive damages are meant to punish the defendant rather than to compensate you for some loss from the accident. 

Punitive damages can also serve to deter others from engaging in the same kind of behavior that led them to be imposed on one or more defendants in your case.

How a Stone Rose Flagstaff Truck Accident Lawyer Can Help You

If you have been in an accident involving a truck, then you find yourself at the beginning of a legal and negotiation process that can be complicated, sometimes frustrating, riddled with possible pitfalls, and time-consuming. 

Here are some of the issues you may face as a truck accident victim:

• Finding out who you may have a claim against. Determine relationships among the people who caused the truck accident. Seek out evidence in their possession, such as commercial drivers’ logbooks, maintenance records, or inspection reports, and pursue any citations for violating federal trucking laws. Obtain that evidence.
  

• Dealing with your insurance company. If you make an insurance claim after a truck accident, or if you are sued in connection with a truck accident, then your insurance company can assign its own attorney to represent you. This attorney is not, however, “your” attorney because that lawyer is being paid by the insurer and answers to the insurer. While your insurance company lawyer is ethically bound not to harm your interests in a truck accident claim, he or she must also listen to the insurance company’s desire to keep any payout in settlement or a court award to a minimum.
  
• Dealing with other insurance companies in negotiations. Unless the truck driver and the driver’s employer are both uninsured, after an accident involving commercial vehicles you will almost certainly find yourself dealing with insurance companies for the driver, the employer, or both. If other third-party defendants are involved, you may need to negotiate with their insurers too. All these insurance companies will have their own claims adjusters and perhaps attorneys too, and their job will be to look for any way to either deny liability or to minimize any insurance settlement payout you receive.
  
• Dealing with court motions and multi-party claims. You should not be surprised to see multiple parties in a truck accident lawsuit. These defendants often file counterclaims against you, alleging contributory negligence. They can also file cross-claims against one another, and motions to dismiss your claims and those of other defendants. Before long, you could be looking at a confusing multitude of lawsuits and parties all arising from the same truck accident.
  
• Dealing with deadlines. Arizona civil court cases can take a long time to settle or to litigate. But you still have multiple mandatory filing dates to meet throughout. Some of these deadlines will be court-ordered in connection to your claim, others can relate to claims that other parties may have against you. But if you inadvertently miss a required filing, or respond with the wrong documents or insufficient documentation, you could harm your own case or even lose it based on a technicality.
  
• Dealing with other personal injury lawyers. Other parties in a truck accident claim can hire their own attorneys even if they are insured. If you do not have a lawyer of your own in a truck accident lawsuit or settlement negotiation, then other lawyers for the driver, the truck’s owner, and their insurers can all communicate with you directly. These attorneys are professionals who know how to ask you questions designed to get you to say things that harm your case. They will use anything you say to them against you if they can.
  
• Gathering, preserving, and presenting evidence. In a settlement negotiation, court case, or arbitration, your say-so is not enough to win in a truck accident claim. You need to back up your injury and damage claims with evidence. Evidence can be testimonial, including expert witness testimony and accident reconstruction experts; documentary; material (including any electronic data collected and stored by the truck itself); and circumstantial. Where do you look for your evidence? How do you gather it? How do you present it? 

These are only some of the considerations that go into making and winning a personal injury lawsuit for a truck crash.

Fortunately, if your accident occurred in Flagstaff, then a highly experienced Stone Rose Law truck accident attorney is near you. 

We are only a phone call or a mouse click away. You don’t have to go it alone. Let our Arizona personal injury law office stand between you and the other side’s lawyers. 

Our Flagstaff truck accident lawyers have decades of combined experience providing legal representation for truck accident victims like you in truck accident cases and insurance settlement negotiations. 

This gives our law firm practical, working knowledge of all the mechanics involved in preparing and, if need be, litigating your claim against all liable parties responsible for your injuries.

When it comes to recovering the full compensation in settlement or money damages award you need after an Arizona commercial trucking accident, call our Flagstaff truck accident attorneys at Stone Rose Law today, (480) 631-3025.

If you have a question or prefer to schedule a no-cost initial appointment online, a Stone Rose personal injury attorney will reply to you as soon as possible.