Were you in a crash in Boise and have questions about truck accident case expectations? Contact our Boise lawyers to get started on your case.
1) Suing The Truck Company For Drunk Driving
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.
2) Wrongful Death Truck Accident
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.
3) Choosing a 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.
4) Case Value
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.
Were you in a crash in Boise and have questions about truck accident case expectations? 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.
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