Who Can Be Held Liable in a Semi-Truck Accident Involving Multiple Parties?

How Does Liability Work in a Multi-Vehicle Semi-Truck Accident?

Any vehicle accident on the road is a serious issue, but a semi-truck accident can be devastating. That’s why knowing how liability works is essential if you’ve been in a semi-truck accident involving multiple vehicles. Sometimes, liability is not as clear-cut as you might think, and figuring out who is at fault and to what degree is the best way to determine your potential compensation.

Because many factors affect liability in Texas, it’s essential to speak with trusted parties who understand the details and intricacies of the law. Finding a trusted and experienced source for legal information, like the team at Ruy Mireles Law Firm, is the best way to know you have the information you need to make the right decisions with your potential compensation case.

What is Comparative Negligence, and How Does it Affect Liability?

Many Texas drivers know that this state is a “fault” state. That means the party at fault for causing the accident is responsible for paying for the victim’s property damage and medical expenses. So anyone in an accident, including a multi-vehicle accident, can seek financial compensation for their losses from the party held responsible (and that party’s insurance company).

However, there is another important factor related to liability, and that is comparative negligence. Negligence is acting without the required amount of reasonable care; in essence, if you should have done something normally that would have prevented an accident, and you didn’t, then you are negligent and, therefore, liable for the accident and the costs that arise from it.

Comparative negligence measures how much responsibility is held by the various parties involved in the accident and how that affects the potential to recover damages. For example, in a three-vehicle accident, one vehicle could hold no responsibility, another was 70% responsible, and the third was 30% responsible. In that case, the first vehicle with no responsibility and the third vehicle with 30% responsibility could potentially still seek damages from the second vehicle, which was most at fault.

The vehicle that caused 70% of the accident cannot seek damages because, according to Texas law, no vehicle more than 50% responsible for an accident can recover damages.

So if you were in the vehicle that held no responsibility, your claim could be fully compensated. However, the vehicle with 30% responsibility could also seek compensation, but their potential compensation would be lowered due to the shared responsibility on their part for the accident.

Are There Other Parties Who Can Be Held Liable?

One element that distinguishes a multi-vehicle accident involving a semi-truck from many other kinds of accidents is the multiple other potential responsible parties that could be involved in compensating a victim, based on the details of the accident.

For instance, the most likely focus of your claim would be the truck driver and the insurance company that covers him. After all, he or she was in control of the vehicle when the accident occurred and therefore holds a large portion of the responsibility. This is particularly true if irresponsible behavior, such as drug or alcohol use or distracted driving, was a factor. However, there can be other factors at play as well that involve additional parties.

If the trucking company itself should have done something and didn’t, leading to the accident, it could also be liable. Factors such as hiring truck drivers with a previous record of negligent driving, not properly training the drivers, or creating an unsafe work environment for those drivers, such as unreasonable schedules that forced them to work while exhausted, can all be held against the company itself.

If the accident was caused by malfunctioning equipment, the truck parts manufacturers who created the malfunctioning equipment could potentially be involved, or even the maintenance people whose job it was to spot these issues with the vehicle and repair them before they caused damage.

Many of these possibilities can exist within the same single accident. A driver distracted by his phone could adjust his driving abruptly, causing a piece of faulty equipment to ultimately break and send the vehicle lurching across traffic. A properly trained driver would know how to steer out of a skid and prevent wrecks, but the company did not properly train this driver to handle that. In this situation, many parties have a potential hand in the responsibility for the accident.

See how quickly the responsibility, fault, and liability issue can become complex, hard to navigate, and even harder for a non-expert to understand and prove?

Do I Need an Attorney for My Semi-Truck Liability Case?

Much like other types of legal issues in the state of Texas and the larger legal system of the United States, individuals bringing an injury case against another party are not required by law to have an attorney work with them in the process. However, just because it isn’t required by law doesn’t mean that working with an attorney isn’t your absolute best option to get the fair and comprehensive compensation you deserve after your accident.

Always remember: insurance companies profit more when they can pay you as little as possible. They are always incentivized to give you the least amount they can, and their tactics are designed to exhaust, confuse, and frustrate people with legitimate cases so that they eventually give up or take a much smaller settlement than they deserve. These companies are often successful because they use methods like delaying answers and using legal language and loopholes to confuse accident victims.

When someone has been hurt, they deserve the ability to get back to living their life as close to how it was before the accident as possible, and that requires financial compensation for many things that insurance companies simply don’t want to pay for and will find excuses to deny. That’s why having a compassionate, experienced, and driven attorney team like the one at Ruy Mireles Law Firm is in your best interest to get a fair result that actually helps make you whole, both physically and financially.

Don’t risk your health, finances, and future dealing with companies that don’t have your best interests at heart. Get a dedicated and knowledgeable team on your side. Call our firm today at 512-817-0223 so we can get started right away, helping you understand your options and get your best result.