The Idaho Truck Accident Guide was created by Hepworth Holzer to help residents obtain maximum compensation for their claim.

Tips for a Successful Truck Accident Claim

Evidence collection is a huge part of a successful case. We know that sometimes people get whisked away in an ambulance, but if you’re able to collect photos, videos, witness contact info, etc., it will help your lawyers build a stronger case for you.

Getting one of the Boise truck accident lawyers to start on your case immediately means you likely have a stronger case because they can collect even more evidence, such as the black box info from the truck, as well as any possible CCTV footage of the accident.

Evidence is important, especially if you end up having to take the case to trial and show a jury how the accident happened.

Medical attention should be your personal, first priority. If you’ve been seriously injured, you absolutely should not wait to seek medical attention. Your health is more important than anything after you’re involved in a truck accident.

There are serious consequences to avoiding medical care. Your health is at stake, for one. You may get worse. You also need to consider what it may do to your case when you try to take legal action. If the insurance company looks at your medical records and sees you waited weeks to go to a doctor — it doesn’t matter what reasons you had for the delay however valid to you they may be— the insurance company will use that against you. They will claim you lied about how badly you were hurt or even where you got your injuries.

Last, we need to warn you against talking to the insurance company. They are financially responsible for compensating you if their insured was physically responsible for harming you. That’s what insurance companies are around for. That doesn’t stop them, however, from trying to save themselves money. They will do everything they can to devalue your claim. That includes getting you to agree to a recorded statement.

Under no circumstances should you give them a recorded statement. They will ask you questions that force you to answer unfavorably. They will use your words against you to throw away or lessen your claim. Let your lawyers handle communication with the insurance company.

How Boise Truck Accident Lawyers Can Help You

As Boise truck accident lawyers, we provide full and comprehensive legal services aimed at fully addressing your legal needs.

Following a car crash, we can:

assist you through your treatment;
help coordinate your insurance benefits;
work to ensure your treatment, ambulance, hospitalization, physical therapy, home care and other expenses are paid; and,
pursue your maximum compensation from all applicable insurance coverage through negotiation, mediation, arbitration and/or litigation.

Insurance coverage for car collisions and truck crashes can be extremely complex. Often, your own medical or auto insurance is required to pay your initial expenses. Later, the other drivers’ and other parties’ insurance coverage may apply. An issue of subrogation or the right to repayment becomes part of your claim. If there are medical liens or government insurance such as Medicare or Medicaid, too, it gets ever more complex. Correctly coordinating these payments, minimizing the amount others get, and maximizing the amount you get is a critical part of your injury claim. Good lawyers take care of these unfortunately complicated legal issues in a way that increases the amount of money you personally receive.

Typical Truck Accident Injuries

We can handle your full claim regardless of your injuries, which may include:

Herniated disks and bulging disks
Back injury requiring surgery
Whiplash and neck injury
Quadriplegia, paraplegia and paralysis caused by spinal cord injuries
Low back pain and injury
Brain injuries, traumatic brain injuries (TBI), open head injuries and closed head injuries
Headaches, vision changes, emotional problems and cognitive issues
Shoulder and neck injuries and pain
Broken bones and leg, arm, hand, feet and knee breaks
Radiating pain
Chronic pain
Numbness, tingling and shooting pain
Soft tissue injuries, and injuries to connective tissue, tendons and muscles
Wrongful death of a loved one

Suing The Truck Company For Drunk Driving

If you’ve been involved in a collision with a semi-truck driver who was drunk, your case is going to be more complex than you can imagine. The driver’s company might have greater liability than just for your direct personal injury damages, and there might be other entities that have liability for those damages, as well, so that your damages are generally enhanced.

One of the things we know about Idaho juries, from our experience as trial lawyers in Idaho court rooms and the verdicts we have gotten for Idaho residents who were injured in these types of collisions, is that juries don’t like this type of behavior. They will want to impose upon those folks who cause this type of damage to you full responsibility for all the losses that they’ve imposed upon you. That may be the company who hired this driver, given what their knowledge of his situation is. We’ve certainly seen cases where a company had great knowledge of a driver’s history of drunken DUIs, time in prison for being a drunk driver, and they still just gave him a truck and sent him out on the road one afternoon, and he ends up killing a person. There is liability on the company’s behalf for this behavior as well as on the driver’s behalf for this behavior.

These cases are complex. They take a lot of work in the litigation process. You want experienced, quality litigation attorneys working on a case involving a semi-truck driver or commercial driver who causes an accident in Idaho after they’ve been drinking. You want the right lawyers involved. Give us a call and talk to us. We’re happy to help you, if we can, in any way.

Wrongful Death From a Truck Accident

Anywhere on Idaho roads where there’s a collision involving a semi-truck or 18-wheeler, there is a high risk that somebody will be killed. These vehicles kill many people on our highways and trying to make our highways safer is one of the rules of injury law. When someone is killed, what happens is a wrongful death claim exists. If you are an heir, under the terms of Idaho’s law, Idaho code 5311, you have the opportunity and the right to pursue that wrongful death claim.

Wrongful death claims are their own unique area of law. You want people representing you who are experienced trial lawyers who have tried wrongful death cases and received verdicts from Idaho juries, particularly with a wrongful death case involving commercial drivers. Professional commercial drivers who cause deaths have a greater responsibility than other drivers, and Idaho juries understand that as long as a quality Idaho trial attorney is providing that information and telling the tale of what happened to the jury.

If you’ve lost a loved one in a collision with an Idaho commercial driver, you should give us a call so we can talk to you about how you can move forward.

Choosing a Truck Accident Lawyer

Choosing an attorney when you have a truck accident injury in Idaho is a process of investigation. You want an attorney who knows their way around trucking cases. Trucking cases are simply different; they’re not just big car cases. You want a trial lawyer who has experience in trying trucking cases, investigating and preparing trucking cases, and who understands the unique things about trucking cases that make them different. Those unique things include the regulatory system that applies to truckers and whether there is liability above and beyond just for the driver himself. If somebody’s driving their car and runs through a stop sign, they’re responsible for the damage they cause. If that trucker runs through a stop sign, there might be reasons why they got placed in this position where not only are they responsible but their company’s responsible because there’s brokers who put loads on trucks, and they might have liability. There might be enhanced liability issues.

Many things come into play in trucking cases that simply do not come into play when you’re dealing with a straightforward car collision case, so what you want to do is look for a lawyer who understands that. Look for lawyers with accolades on their resumes, who have been reviewed and evaluated by their actual clients online, who have received awards, who’ve worked and had leadership roles in professional organizations like the Trial Lawyers Association, and who work in the world of trucking collision cases.

Spend the time to do a little investigation into your Idaho trucking accident attorney and you’ll find that you’ll be far better off in the long run because, in the area of trucking collisions, getting the right attorney may be as important as it is in any other area of personal law to make sure you have somebody who knows what they’re doing. Don’t pick a generalist— somebody who does divorce work and wills and estates and business organizational stuff. These people are important and do important work, but they won’t know their way around or the first step to take in a trucking collision case.

If you have any questions about a trucking accident case, you want to learn about our backgrounds as attorneys to see if we can help you, give us a call. We’re happy to talk to you.

Truck Accident Case Value

Determining the value of a personal injury claim, a truck accident injury claim in particular, can be a complex thing. Truck accident injuries often can be perceived as having greater value for the same amount of damages because all of us who are on the roads have special concerns about heavy trucks, semi-trucks, and the dangers that they pose to us and our families, so you want to go through the process of evaluating all the issues.

There are straightforward issues like economic loss, lost income and those types of things that arise from an injury after a semi-truck accident, or things like replacing your car and the property damage that’s incurred. Then, of course, you have your medical expenses and the issues related to what the value of medical expenses are; all in all, however, those economic losses are more straightforward. Given the scope of your injury, those economic losses may become bigger because we have to figure out what the long-term cost of care is for the damage imposed upon you in this Idaho trucking collision case, that you have to incur those costs in the future, and how do you have enough resources set aside from the damages recovered to pay for those costs in the future.

Then, of course, there’s the more complex arena of damages like what’s been taken from you. What have you experienced? What are your losses? If you’ve been injured in a trucking accident collision in Idaho, your friends aren’t going to call you and say, “How much are your medical bills? What are your future medical expenses going to be?” They’re going to ask you the important questions, “How are you? How are you getting along? How’s your family? What’s going on in your recovery and getting back to your ordinary life?” Those are the important damage questions, and there’s no hard and fast calculation that you can use to figure out that value. Those are the things that experience Idaho trucking accident lawyers can bring to bear, is figuring out those things, figuring out what a fair value is and talking to a jury, if a case needs to go to trial, about what they should authorize in compensation and award of damages based on the injuries that you personally have incurred.

Every Idaho trucking accident case needs to be looked at from the perspective of that injured person because that injured person is the one really experiencing the losses, and everybody’s losses can be different. If you want to talk about these things, if you want us to help review and evaluate your case, we’re at the other end of the phone. Just give us a call and any one of us would be happy to do it.

Differences Between Car And Truck Accident Cases

Commercial truck accident injury claims in Idaho and car accident injury claims in Idaho are very different things. It seems like a commercial truck accident case is just a big car collision case – it’s not. The reason for that is there are statutory standards that these drivers and trucking companies have to meet, and that makes sense because they cause so much damage when they are involved in collisions as opposed to cars. Obviously, cars can cause substantial damage, too, but when you have 105,000 pounds of rolling death on the interstate causing a collision, you want to follow up with all the regulatory evaluation. Why the wreck happened is a big question in any trucking collision case, not just did the driver not pay attention but the reason the driver didn’t pay attention.

Professional truck drivers have lots of standards they have to meet. There’s lots of regulations on the safety and the safety of the vehicles themselves and standards that limit what they can carry and how they carry it. We often find that inside one of these large trucking semi-truck collision cases there are things that have happened that raise the culpability of others above and beyond merely the driver. Sometimes, it’s the driver and the owners are just looking the other way while the driver is doing things that are not legal and not allowed, and they’re not allowed because they’re recognized by law as being unsafe. We want to be able to track those things down so all damages and full and fair compensation for your losses can be identified and obtained. As a driver gets beyond merely negligent to reckless or an extreme deviation of standards of behavior, the measures of damages change under Idaho law.

These complexities can only be evaluated by a competent personal injury trial attorney with substantial knowledge and understanding of the differences between trucking collision cases in Idaho and car collision cases in Idaho. We’re happy to consult with you on this and talk to you about the specifics of your situation, and we encourage you to call us sooner rather than later when you’re dealing with a semi-truck collision case in Idaho.

Truck Accident Settlement Timeline

Figuring out how long a truck accident collision case in Idaho takes from start to finish can involve complex issues. Because trucking collision cases are more complex than straightforward car collision cases, an accident injury case in Idaho involving a truck might be one that takes longer than you would like it to. Often, they take longer than you would like it to, but that’s the only thing you can do to get full and fair compensation for the injuries that you’ve incurred in this wreck in Idaho with this semi-truck, a commercial vehicle.

You have to go through the process of evaluating not just the damages that have been incurred and what the liability of the driver is, but, as a trial attorney who understands these cases, you want to look at issues underlying like why the collision happened and not merely that the collision did happen, not just the truck driver causing the wreck but why he caused the wreck. Was he overtired? Was he carrying a load he shouldn’t carry? Was he sent to a place he shouldn’t have been sent? Many things need to be looked at, so that can make these cases take longer, when dealing with trucking cases in Idaho, than other ordinary cases.

What you want is somebody who will diligently pursue your case and get a result for you for full and fair compensation for your losses as quickly as reasonably possible. We’re happy to talk to you about these types of things, just give us a call.

Truck Accident Insurance Investigation

One thing you’ll learn if you’ve been involved in a collision with a semi-truck or any other type of commercial vehicle in an Idaho collision is that insurance company is going to reach out to you, and you want to be careful of that. You want to be careful of that first offer they might make you to try to put the case away. The chances of that offer providing you full, fair, and complete compensation for all your losses is about zero. There will be things that they do not acknowledge, and they will be trying to get out of the case as cheap as they possibly can— that’s their goal. Their goal is not to take care of you and your family, it’s not to really provide compensation for you and the losses you’ve incurred, but it’s to put an end to the potential for a lawsuit and a claim against the driver and the company and put that case to bed from their perspective.

You, on the other hand, have to live with the damages imposed on you of this Idaho trucking collision accident. You have to live with those damages for the rest of your life, and you want to be sure that your compensation is complete. When you hear that first offer, the answer is no. Before you go further, give us a call and let’s talk about your Idaho trucking collision case and what the right approach is for you in moving forward and getting that full and fair compensation.

Initial Offer For a Truck Accident

Common Mistakes During a Truck Accident

People who have been injured in a semi-truck collision in Idaho make some basic mistakes that we see that ultimately can impact and reduce their ability to recover full and fair compensation. Among those mistakes are talking to the insurance company for the trucker right away before you’ve talked to an attorney protecting your interests. Why is that? Because they’re looking for ways to minimize the amount of money they pay, ways to blame you, ways to say that your injuries were not caused in this wreck or that your injuries are more minor than they are. A lot of times people, being the decent people that they are, will say things that they don’t understand can be used against them in the course of litigation or in the course of their claim for their Idaho trucking accident case. Don’t talk to an insurance company until you’ve talked to a lawyer. It’s a number one rule in cases like these and one of the number one things people do wrong.

Another thing people do is, when they’re talking to their physicians or their family members or their own insurance company, they’ll minimize the amount of damage or the amount of suffering that they’re going through and try to say, “I’m doing fine,” when in fact there’s a substantial problem going on. Again, this is just language or comments that can be used to reduce the amount of full and fair compensation you ultimately are going to be able to recover.

Before you make one of these mistakes or one of the other many mistakes that we see people make over the course of Idaho injury cases and semi-truck collision cases, you should give us a call, discuss your case so we can review and evaluate it and help provide you some guidance on the proper way for you to proceed forward, to make sure that your compensation is complete at the end of the day.

After a Truck Accident

Following a commercial truck collision in which a semi-truck has caused injury to you, get the medical care you need first— that’s the most important thing. You need to make sure that you’re being taken care. Reach out to your family and your friends to make sure that they understand what’s going on with you.

Before you talk to an insurance company or anyone else, get a hold of an experienced Idaho trucking accident attorney. You’ll want an experienced trucking accident attorney to work with you early in this type of situation because many things are happening, that you probably don’t have an understanding of, that can ultimately impact your long-term outcome and the damages that you will ultimately be able to recover because of the injuries imposed on you in this Idaho trucking collision.

There are many things that need to be preserved and protected when it comes to the records of a trucking accident case that are different than in a car accident case. Once you’ve received your medical care and gotten in touch with your loved ones, get a hold of your attorney before you start trying to do anything else. That’s the most significant thing for you to do following a semi-truck collision that caused you an injury.

These collisions cause substantial and serious injuries. These trucks can be one-hundred and five thousand pounds of rolling death. You want to protect yourself from those who are trying to limit the amount of damages that the people who drive and put these on the road, particularly the dangerous trucks and the dangerous drivers on the road, you want to protect yourself from them limiting the amount of losses that you can recover.

We’re happy to come visit you in your time of need, if you’re in the hospital in the immediate post-collision recovery zone. We’ll come see you because it’s so important to be involved early in one of these cases to make sure that all the evidence is protected and that nothing is done that hurts you, as the injured person, and nothing is done that limits your ability to recover the damages you need. If you need to talk to us, just give us a call and we’ll be there for you.

Call Our Idaho Car Accident Lawyers Today

Were you in a crash in Boise and have questions about suing the truck company for drunk driving? Contact our experienced Boise Truck Accident Lawyers at Hepworth Holzer today for a free consultation and case evaluation.

We are committed to helping individuals and families throughout Idaho navigate the world of personal injury litigation as quickly and efficiently as possible. Let us get results for you and your family.

Like Us on Facebook

Subscribe to us on YouTube

Free Consultation - (208) 328-6998

Free Legal Consultations

(208) 328-6998

Truck Wrecks

Idaho Truck Accident Guide