At Stone Rose Law, our Phoenix personal injury lawyers have extensive experience helping Arizona residents recover monetary damages for injuries sustained in truck accidents. When large trucks collide with passenger vehicles, the results are often catastrophic — and our law firm is here to fight for the maximum compensation you deserve.
Call us at (480) 631-3025 to speak with one of our experienced truck accident attorneys for a free consultation. A Phoenix truck accident attorney can tell you what your options are and provide the legal representation you need for any truck accident claim you may have.
If you have been in a truck accident in Phoenix, then you find yourself at the beginning of a legal process that can be complicated, sometimes frustrating, and time-consuming. Here are some of the issues truck accident victims face when seeking compensation after serious accidents involving large trucks.
If you make an insurance claim after a truck accident, or if you are sued in connection with a truck accident, 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.
How do you determine the relationships among the potentially liable parties who contributed to causing the Phoenix truck accident? How do you find evidence in their possession, like log books for commercial drivers, maintenance records, inspection reports, or any citations issued for violating federal trucking laws? How do you get that evidence?
Unless the truck driver and the driver’s employer are both uninsured for the truck, you will almost certainly find yourself dealing with the trucking company’s insurance provider and insurance adjusters for the driver, the employer, or both.
These insurance companies will have their own Arizona personal injury defense attorneys, and their job will be to look for any way to either deny liability or to minimize any insurance settlement payout.
Especially if the truck involved in the accident was a commercial truck, and sometimes if third parties played a role in causing the truck accident, you should not be surprised to see multiple defendants in a truck accident lawsuit.
Many times, these defendants will 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 parties all arising from the same truck accident.
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, and others can relate to claims that other parties may have against you. But if you inadvertently miss a required filing deadline, or respond with the wrong documents or insufficient documentation, then you could harm your own case or even lose it based on a technicality.
If you do not have a lawyer of your own in a truck accident lawsuit or settlement negotiation, then the claims adjusters and/or lawyers for the driver, the truck’s owner, and their insurers can all communicate with you directly.
These attorneys and claims adjusters are experts 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.
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 bringing and winning a personal injury lawsuit for a truck crash.
Our experienced Phoenix truck accident lawyers have decades of combined experience representing accident victims in truck accident cases and insurance settlement negotiations. Our legal team has practical, working knowledge, and the legal expertise surrounding all the mechanics involved in preparing your claim and, if need be, litigating your Phoenix truck accident claim against everyone responsible for your injuries.
Arizona law allows you only 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 claims and lawsuits.
A personal injury lawsuit is the most common way for accident victims to recover compensation for the harm done to them in a Phoenix truck accident. A truck accident case begins as a civil lawsuit you file in an Arizona court that has jurisdiction over the defendant(s).
In a personal injury lawsuit, you must prove it is more likely than not that each of the following four elements is true:
Sometimes a truck accident is severe enough that not everyone survives it. A death from a truck accident can occur immediately at the scene, or can come days, weeks, or even months afterward.
A wrongful death claim is one that surviving relatives may bring if the negligent, reckless, or intentional act of another person caused the death of their loved one. This common law cause of action, shaped over time through Arizona court decisions, allows recovery for the surviving relatives’ loss of companionship, support, and economic contributions.
Medical expenses incurred between the time of the accident and the relative’s death, emotional distress damages, and possibly punitive damages may also be recoverable.
Arizona’s statutory laws also include a survival action provision, enabling the estate of a deceased person to file a lawsuit to recover damages for harm done directly to the deceased. The key difference: a survival action recovers damages on behalf of the deceased’s estate, while a wrongful death action recovers damages for the surviving relatives.
A wrongful death action and a survival action are both possible in the aftermath of a fatal truck accident in Arizona. If this happens, there may be some overlap in plaintiffs between the two actions, especially if a family member of the deceased is also the representative of the deceased’s estate.
Although the most obvious defendant in a truck accident lawsuit is the driver of the truck, others can also play a part in causing a truck accident, and you can hold them accountable for their share of the resulting harm to you. Below are examples of how liable parties other than the truck driver can share responsibility in a truck accident.
Commercial trucking accidents frequently involve a trucking company as the owner of the vehicle, the driver’s employer, or both. The commercial trucking industry is governed by strict federal regulations, and when commercial truck drivers or their employers violate those rules, it strengthens your truck accident case.
Sometimes, a truck’s manufacturer can build a vehicle in a way that renders its design or construction inherently unsafe. If, for example, a truck’s brake failure is the result not of poor maintenance but rather a faulty design of a key vehicle system like brakes, steering, hydraulics, wheels, tires, and fuel lines, then this opens up the truck manufacturer to a possible product liability claim.
As long as the chain of causation is strong enough, the act of someone other than the truck driver can contribute to a truck collision, including other drivers involved in a car accident nearby.
For example, if on a multi-lane highway, another car driver negligently changes lanes in front of a truck, causing the truck driver to swerve into your lane in an attempt to avoid an accident with the other driver, then it is arguable that the negligence of the other car driver at least partly caused the truck driver’s act that harmed you.
Similarly, if a pedestrian jaywalks in front of your car, forcing you to brake hard suddenly, and a truck collides with you from behind as a result, both you and the truck driver could have claims against the pedestrian based on negligence or contributory negligence.
Unlike owners of commercial trucks, governments — from the United States Federal Government down to municipalities like Phoenix — are generally immune from being sued for actions and decisions taken in the normal course of their activities. This is known as limited sovereign immunity.
But in some situations, a government can act negligently in such a way that the negligence harms you. One example could be if the city where you live negligently allows a dangerous road condition to persist after it learns of it, and that condition causes or contributes to your accident. Another is if you are involved in a collision with a government-owned truck.
No matter what path is required in a truck accident lawsuit — personal injury, wrongful death, or third-party liability — money damages are your source of financial compensation. The three kinds of money damages you could recover in a truck accident case are economic damages, non-economic damages, and possibly, punitive damages.
Economic damages are also known as direct damages. These are damages that you can, compared to other forms of money damages, calculate easily. This is because frequently economic damages take the form of medical bills, receipts, repair estimates, and other documentation.
Some specific kinds of economic damages you can seek to recover are:
Non-economic damages address harm you suffer that is not as neatly calculable as economic damages are, but are still recoverable nonetheless.
Examples of non-economic damages include:
The severe injuries and serious injuries that often result from truck collisions — including traumatic brain injuries, spinal cord injuries, internal injuries, and other catastrophic injuries — frequently cause pain and suffering that far exceeds the economic damages alone.
Sometimes the behavior of one or more of the defendants in a truck accident can be so reckless, purposeful, or otherwise outrageous that a court will allow punitive damages. 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 the purpose of deterring others from engaging in the same kind of acts that led them to be imposed on one or more defendants in your case.
Arizona personal injury law allows for imperfect liability outcomes. Meaning, it is not uncommon in a personal injury or wrongful death lawsuit for the defendant to be less than 100 percent at fault, and for the plaintiff to share at least some of the fault for the accident.
For example, if upon judgment the court or jury finds that the truck driver was 75 percent at fault for the accident but that you were also 25 percent at fault, the court will reduce your damages award by 25 percent.
When it comes to recovering the maximum compensation after a Phoenix truck accident, call our experienced Phoenix truck accident attorneys at Stone Rose Law today at (480) 631-3025 to schedule a free consultation with our legal team.
If you have a question or prefer to schedule a no-cost initial appointment online, a personal injury attorney at our law firm will reply to you as soon as possible.
