Truck Injury Lawyer Blog : Truck Accident Lawyer & Attorney: Morgan Adams : Contingency Fee Truck Accident Lawyer

The Texas legislature, in a fit of sheer stupidity (not a word my kids are allowed to say in my house so you know I feel strongly about the issue!) has raised the speed limits at night for tractor trailers in Texas.  (The Texas state senate passed this May 23, 2011 and it is now on its way to the Governor's desk. You can pray the Governor has the common sense to veto this! (See Transportation Topics, May 30, 2011 p25)) Texas already has one of the highest body counts in the nation for tractor trailer wrecks. According to the DOT, on average over the last 4 years, 410 Texans die each year in heavy truck crashes (stats can be found here).

I have to assume the Texas legislature had this pointed out to them. So what do they do with this knowledge? They raise the speed limit at night. Something that the Texas' own Commercial Driver's License Manual makes clear will kill YOU! Specifically the 2008 Texas CDL manual states (and it said this in the 2004 CDL manual as well, the oldest Texas CDL manual I have): 

Driving too fast is a major cause of fatal crashes. You must adjust your speed depending on driving conditions. These include traction, curves, visibility, traffic, and hills. (2008 Texas CDL Manual Chapter 2.6)  

You should always be able to stop within the distance you can see ahead... At night, you can’t see as far with low beams as you can with high beams. When you must use low beams, slowdown. (2008 Texas CDL Manual Chapter 2.6) 

Whenever you double your speed, it takes about four times as much distance to stop and your vehicle will have four times the destructive power if it crashes. High speeds increase stopping distances greatly. By slowing down a little, you can gain a lot in reduced braking distance.  (2008 Texas CDL Manual Chapter 2.6)

Total Stopping Distance.  At 55 mph it will take about six seconds to stop and your vehicle will travel about the distance of a football field. (60 + 60 + 170 = 290 feet). (2008 Texas CDL Manual Chapter 2.6)

At night your headlights will usually be the main source of light for you to see and for others to see you. You can’t see nearly as much with your headlights as you can see in the daytime. With low beams you can see ahead about 250 feet and with high beams about 350-500 feet. You must adjust your speed to keep your stopping distance within your sight distance. This means going slow enough to be able to stop within the range of your headlights. Otherwise, by the time you see a hazard, you will not have time to stop. (2008 Texas CDL Manual Chapter 2.8)

Knowing this, KNOWING THIS, the Texas legislature goes and RAISES the nightime speed limit to 75MPH for tractor trailers! This means even if the truck driver is attentive and has his high beams on he cant stop in time. 

Now I may not be bright compared to folks in the Texas legislature, but if my own book tells me at 55 MPH it takes a tractor trailer 290 feet to stop, and a tractor trailer driver can only see 250 feet at night with his low beams on, we have a problem. By the time a driver can see Something in the road IT IS TOO LATE TO STOP AT 55 MPH, much less 75 MPH. This problem even has a name, it is called "over driving" your headlights. Safety instructors, trucking companies, and truck drivers have known about this for decades. It is so well known it is even in the 2004 Texas CDL Manual!

If you, your children, or your parents have an engine problem or a flat tire at night, and cant get off the road, you are dead in Texas if a truck is behind you.

I have to think the Texas legislature loves truck companies lots more than us little folks in little cars.

Understand that the truck driver's are the fall guys here. If they are properly trained they will drive slower than the speed limit, within the distance they can see at night with their headlights. Truck companies generally don't train truck drivers that way because the faster the loads get delivered the more money a truck company makes. The victims are really you, me, and the truck drivers. I believe most truck drivers would follow the safety rules if they were properly trained.

The vehicle death rate in Texas from heavy trucks, which has been falling in recent years, is about to explode! Keep in mind that NAFTA is about to put Mexican trucks, which I don't believe are nearly as safe (see my prior blogs) as US licensed drivers and trucks, all over Texas as well! The next time you pass a graveyard in Texas make sure you take a moment to thank your Texas Legislators!

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Every so often drivers ask me how to report a company that forces them to work over hours, or drive unsafe equipment. The government has set up a toll free hotline to take these complaints and start an investigation. The DOT website to report violations can be found here and states:

The Motor Carrier Safety hotline is a line of communication available to commercial vehicle drivers to submit reports of actual or potential violations of the federal motor carrier safety regulations. The line, 1-888-DOT-SAFT (368-7238), is a toll-free number for drivers nationwide to contact the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.

The Safety Violation and the Consumer Household Goods Commercial Complaint Website Hotline http://nccdb.fmcsa.dot.gov  is available to drivers to report safety violations to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration online using a secure system.

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I was happy to learn that a local paper, The Hamilton County Herald  ( www.hamiltoncountyherald.com ), wanted to do an article on my practice, the full article published December 31, 2010 can be found here and is pasted below:

Locally based truck accident lawyer helps nationwide

David Laprad
 

 

Truck wreck lawyer Morgan Adams represents victims of commercial motor vehicle accidents nationwide. He says one of the interesting things about an accident involving a tractor-trailer and a car is that the truck driver can perceive the wreck as a mild bump, while the driver of the car can perceive it as a catastrophic collision. “Both parties are telling the truth,” he says. - Photo provided

If there’s one thing attorney Morgan Adams doesn’t need, it’s more work. As a nationally recognized trucking litigation expert who represents victims of accidents involving large commercial vehicles, he has more than enough cases to keep him busy. So he spends a lot of time trying to prevent accidents from happening.
“People think it’s funny that I give out tips to help them avoid being hit by a tractor trailer, but I don’t need more work. There are enough trucking cases, and there will continue to be plenty of them, even if everyone does everything as close to right as humanly possible,” he says.
Some of the tips Adams doles out might seem unconventional, but make sense, including a tidbit that could save lives in rush hour traffic.
“One of the top causes of truck accidents is fatigued drivers. You might think having your foot on your brakes will tell everyone behind you you’re stopped, but when a truck driver has been on the road too long, a solid light doesn’t register as well as blinking lights, so if you’re going less than the minimum speed on the interstate, turn on your emergency lights until at least five cars behind you have slowed down or stopped. Blinking lights help to alert a fatigued truck driver that there’s a problem up ahead,” he says.
Adams hopes his advice has the same effect on those who hear it.
“I consult on hundreds of cases a year, and none of my clients woke up that morning and said, ‘Hot diggity dang, I’m going to be in a car wreck today!’ They had lives with focus and direction, and a truck wreck decimated their plans,” he says.
Case in point: a young Smith County, Tenn., woman whose life was changed when the van in which she was a passenger collided with a commercial vehicle and she suffered a mild traumatic brain injury. Adams helped her to secure the largest recovery for a living plaintiff to date in the county.
“We had experts from around the country diagnose and explain how she hit her head when the wreck occurred, and that as a result, her future changed dramatically in an instant. So one of the things she’s going to be able to do, since she can’t work full time, is provide medical care for herself for the rest of her life,” he says.
Adams’ work has also impacted how certain laws are interpreted. For example, he argued the first reported case in federal court in Tennessee that found that a violation of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations is negligence per se.
“I’m pretty proud of that legal victory and of the fact that it was deemed important enough to report,” he says.
Adams decided to focus on trucking accidents when he was involved in a case in which a cement mixer rolled over a family in a minivan. A baby suffered brain damage from the wreck and was in intensive care for several days.
“The mixer driver, who was a caring man with children of his own, had never been told by his company that a loaded cement mixer could roll over at 12 mph on a turn. Had the company properly trained the driver, I believe he would have followed his training and the wreck never would have happened,” he says, adding that the company now has a training program for new drivers.
Adams has not always fought on behalf of victims. When he started focusing on truck accident litigation ten years ago, he was on the opposite side of the battle. He says his work for major insurance companies cost him a lot of sleep.
“I’d gotten distressed that a great verdict for my clients meant I’d robbed people who deserved recovery, whether that was because they hadn’t dotted all of their I’s and crossed all of their T’s or some other reason. I knew I’d represented my client well, but I didn’t feel good about what I was doing to individuals,” he says.
The turning point for Adams came when he was asked to formalize a settlement and hand a $5,000 check to a father and the sole supporter of a family. Adams asked the man how he was doing, and the man described symptoms that made it clear he had a bulging disc and would likely need surgery. Since Adams was not the man’s representative, he couldn’t tell the man he was settling for much less than his case was worth.
“I knew he was crazy to settle for $5,000, and the insurance company knew it, but didn’t care. I stopped doing insurance defense work shortly thereafter. And I’d never slept better,” he says.
Adams needed the rest, as he would devote thousands of hours to learning the ins and outs of commercial vehicle accident litigation. His work in the area became his passion, and as he represented more and more victims of catastrophic accidents, he developed a national reputation. Today, he has offices in Nashville and Chattanooga, and is known across the country as “The Truck Accident Lawyer.”
In addition to representing his own clients, Adams helps attorneys across the U.S. understand the liability and damage issues in their trucking cases. His current workload includes cases in California, Nebraska and other states, many of which he handles in person due to their complex nature. Adams also lectures across the country on how to properly handle tractor-trailer cases. Over the next four months, he’s slated to teach CLE courses in New York, Rhode Island, Louisiana and Idaho.
In addition to his lecture work, Adams has written a chapter titled “Trucking Accident Litigation” for the 2010-2011 edition of “Handling Motor Vehicle Accident Cases.” For lawyers who wish to digest similar material in smaller chunks, Adams publishes a blog, accessible at www.truckinjurylawyerblog.com.
While Adams is happy to share his expertise, keeping up with the latest developments in his field requires a significant investment of time.
“It’s an incredibly technical field. To be equipped to handle a trucking case, you have to be constantly involved in the changing safety regulations and dealing with the physics and dynamics and experts involved. It requires a lot of time and effort to stay on top of what’s happening,” he says.
Adams became a lawyer while serving in the U.S. Marine Corps. Following Desert Storm in the early ’90s, he returned to the private sector and took a job with Luther Anderson in Chattanooga. Two years later, he moved over to what was then Hatfield, VanCleave & Akers.
When Akers left to become Hamilton County’s clerk and master, Adams struck out on his own. For a time, he concentrated on family law, and specifically father’s custody. Adams was the first lawyer to convince a Hamilton County judge to allow a father to have his child on Christmas morning.
There’s a touch of irony in Adams’ history with family law, because if there’s one thing he needs more of, it’s time with his wife and three sons. He says he tries to “get home as many nights a year” as he can, but that his work is demanding.
“My wife would not be shy in saying I work too much. But I’m passionate about representing the people who have entrusted this once-in-a-lifetime event to my care,” he says, adding that his wife is “not the better half, but the better nine-tenths,” and that his boys are “smarter than he is, even if they’re not old enough to read [this article] in print.”
When discussing his life and career, Adams seems honest and forthright. But he’s concerned people have the wrong idea about his work: He’s not anti-trucking, he says, but anti-negligence.
“There are a lot of good truck drivers out there, and a lot of good trucking companies. But some trucking companies abuse their drivers, and some truck drivers choose to skirt safety regulations. When they do that, I tend to get involved and try to hold the companies and the drivers accountable.”
That’s bad news for negligent truck drivers and trucking companies, because if there’s one thing they need, besides a willingness to follow the rules, it’s less of Morgan Adams.

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The FMCSA just issued its final rule on Electric On Board Recorders (EOBR's) which replace paper driver logs. Paper logs are often called comic books in the industry because the contents are so funny, because they are so false. A switch to EOBR's will try to eliminate this known problem in the trucking industry. The full text of the rule may be seen here. For known problems with EOBR's click the link to my prior blog here. For past posts regarding EOBR's just past EOBR into the search box and you will have a number of posts on the topic.

The FMCSA has new performance standards for electronic on-board recorders (EOBRs) installed in commercial motor vehicles (CMVs) manufactured on or after June 4, 2012. On-board hours-of-service (HOS) recording devices meeting FMCSA’s current requirements and installed in CMVs manufactured before June 4, 2012 may continue to be used for the remainder of the service life of those CMVs. Motor carriers that have demonstrated serious noncompliance with the HOS rules will be subject to mandatory installation of EOBRs meeting the new performance standards. If FMCSA determines, based on HOS records reviewed during a compliance review, that a motor carrier has a 10 percent or greater violation rate (‘‘threshold rate violation’’) for any HOS regulation listed in the new Appendix C to part 385, FMCSA will issue the carrier an EOBR remedial directive. The motor carrier will then be required to install EOBRs in all of its CMVs regardless of their date of manufacture and use the devices for HOS record keeping for a period of 2 years, unless the carrier (i) already equipped its vehicles with automatic on-board recording devices (AOBRDs) meeting the Agency’s current requirements under 49 CFR 395.15 prior to the finding, and (ii) demonstrates to FMCSA that its drivers understand how to use the devices.

The FMCSA also changes the safety fitness standard to take into account a remedial directive when determining fitness. Additionally, to encourage industry-wide use of EOBRs, FMCSA revises its compliance review procedures to permit examination of a random sample of drivers’ records of duty status after the initial sampling, and provides partial relief from HOS supporting documents requirements, if certain conditions are satisfied, for motor carriers that voluntarily use compliant EOBRs. Finally, because FMCSA recognizes that the potential safety risks associated with some motor carrier categories, such as passenger carriers, hazardous materials transporters, and new motor carriers seeking authority to conduct interstate operations in the United States, are such that mandatory EOBR use for such operations might be appropriate, the Agency will initiate a new rulemaking to consider expanding the scope of mandatory EOBR use beyond the ‘‘1 x 10’’ carriers that would be subject to a remedial directive as a result of today’s rule.

The Agency is still moving forward with new Hours of Service Rules.

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I wanted to thank all the great speakers on the national trucking program I moderated last Saturday in New Orleans, as well as all the speakers at the private, ITLG members only, program on Friday. We had a great turnout and enjoyed hearing different approaches to problems from around the country. My particular thanks as well to the great staff at AAJ, in particular Molly Laurence and Scott Gehring, and fellow trucking attorney, and the head of the ITLG special project committee, Robert Collins. This is the largest annual national program for lawyers representing those injured in a tractor trailer collision.

Consider what you want for your case. You can certainly hire the faculty to represent you, you can hire someone who attended, or you can hire someone who did not even bother to attend the program. I would suggest, for your case, that you should at least make sure whoever you hire attended the program and is keeping up on the law in this complex and unique area.

The seminar agenda for the Association for Justice's Litigating Trucking Collision Cases was as follows, I have included the lawyers website link for you as well if you want to ask the lawyer for a copy of their paper or reach them directly. Our speakers were: 

 Moderator - Morgan Adams

 Documents, Records, and Data—All Kinds of Discovery - Emily Hawk Raley

 Trucking 101: What You Need to Know Before Handling Your First Trucking Case - Michael R. Cowen

 The Records Custodian—The Most Critical Deposition in a Trucking Case - Kenneth L. Shigley

 Interstate Trucking Cases: Equipment, Reconstruction, Evidence Preservation/Spoliation, and Temporary Restraining Orders - Daniel J. Buba

The "Big Ten" COmmercial Transportation "Rules of the Road" - Steven M. Gursten

Comprehensive Safety Analysis 2010: A New Set of Rules for Trucking Companies and Drivers - Lawrence  Simon

 How to Lose a Trucking Case - Allan P. “Chip” Sloan, III  

FMCSR, CDL Manuals, and Negligence Per Se - Matthew A. Cartwright  

The Rogue Trucking Company - Michael J. Leizerman  

Bias and Right Jury Modeling - R. Eddie Davidson

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A recent case will have significant impact on truck accident attorneys and lawyers litigating insurance coverage in trucking cases. In Carolina Casualty v. Yeates, 584 F.3d 868 (10th Cir. 2009) (en banc), the court held that the MCS-90 Endorsement applies as surety coverage when the underlying insurance policy to which it is attached provides no coverage for the loss and the motor carrier’s insurance coverage is not sufficient, IN AGGREGATE, to satisfy the federally prescribed minimum levels of financial responsibility.

As a result of Yeates, Defendant trucking companies and insurers will argue that an insurer’s MCS-90 coverage does not come into play when a plaintiff has already received a payment, from all sources, equal to the minimum statutory insurance coverage amount. See Also: Casper v. American Intl S. Ins. Co., 2009 WL 4984797 (Wis. App.)

 The Truck Accident Lawyers at the Law Offices of Morgan Adams concentrate in protecting the rights of those who were seriously injured or lost a loved one in an accident with a commercial truck or bus. Our lawyers are based in Tennessee, but serve clients throughout the nation. If you or someone you love has been seriously hurt by a careless driver, don’t sign anything the trucking company gives you -- contact us as soon as possible at 866-580-4878 or by email to learn more at a free, confidential consultation.

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Training remains the number one way to prevent truck rollovers according to government and industry officials. A 2007 report by Battelle Memorial Institute for the FMCSA found “75% [of rollovers] are attributed to driver error.” The primary cause was running off the road, caused by driver fatigue or inattentiveness.”

Trucking companies could reduce rollovers by the following: Lowering a trailer 3” would reduce rollovers approximately 12% annually. A wider trailer track, from 96” to 102”, would reduce rollover’s 17%. The study found the average cost of a rollover was $600,000 and that for every dollar spent on stability control devices the company would save $2.20. According to Steve Niswander, vice president of safety and policy regulatory relations for Groendyke Transport, driver training is still the most effective way to present crashes. (See Transportation Topics, December 10, 2007, p11)

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