How Evidence Disappears After a Truck Crash: A Conversation with Clint Crabtree

David Craig: And one of the things in truck wrecks is time matters. You’ve got to move quickly. The more serious the wreck, the more that’s at stake, the more it matters that you hire the right law firm and that they have a Rapid Response Team. If you don’t get out there quickly, you lose that opportunity.

I’m David Craig, a board-certified truck accident attorney who’s dedicated over 40 years to helping the victims of devastating semi-truck, large truck, and other commercial motor vehicle wrecks. When the stakes are high, you need the information to make the right decision. After tragedy strikes, many people don’t know where to begin or what questions to ask. It is my goal to empower you with the knowledge and resources you need to help you understand your rights and to protect you and your family. This is After the Crash.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of After the Crash. Today, we have a special guest, Clint Crabtree. Clint was on a prior episode, but things have changed since then. Clint and I have worked together for 10 years, a little over 10 years now. And Clint, he runs our Rapid Response Team. And so Clint, welcome back to After the Crash.

Clint Crabtree: Glad to be back. And I think it’s 17 years.

David Craig: 17 years.

Clint Crabtree: Yeah.

David Craig: Dan said 20. I said 10.

Clint Crabtree: Well, it’s somewhere in between.

David Craig: Somewhere between. 17 years, my gosh. And one of the things in truck wrecks is time matters. It matters. You’ve got to move quickly. And one of the things I’m really proud of is that we have a Rapid Response Team that Clint runs and he runs the whole thing. And he has a whole team and it has changed since when we did our last episode. I think we’ve gotten better. First of all, most people, most law firms, if you go ask lawyers and you’ve been in a truck wreck and you’re looking to hire somebody, you should ask them, do they have a Rapid Response Team? Because 99% of them are going to tell you they don’t even have one. Not only do we have one, but I’m really proud of it. Clint runs it and it is better than even when we started. Would you agree with that?

Clint Crabtree: Our Rapid Response Team has grown by a couple of people in the last two or three years, and I’m very pleased with the way our team is built out at the moment and the things that we’re able to accomplish and how quickly we can accomplish it. And it’s a team and that’s what makes it work.

David Craig: And let’s talk about some of those team members. So we have somebody who goes out that you send out to the scene right after a wreck. Tell us a little bit about who that is and what they do.

Clint Crabtree: So Patrick Stewart is our investigator for the Rapid Response Team. And when we get a case in, we send him out to the scene. He photographs the scene, looks for yaw marks, things of that nature. But it’s not just the scene. He’s looking for surveillance footage, he’s looking for cameras, he’s looking for obstructions, things of that nature. So not only is he taking pictures, but he’s also putting a GoPro on the dash, driving the scene, showing what it looked like. And the sooner we can get him out there to do that, the more realistic it is for how the accident actually was because if it’s in a construction zone, those change pretty quickly. And so we try to get him out there quickly and he just does a fantastic job of documenting the scene, looking for … He may send an email to us and say, “Hey, we might want to send a preservation letter to this business or this gas station.” And that’s just super helpful to have eyes right there at the scene where the accident happened.

David Craig: And that’s a perfect example of like we talked about, time matters because some of these videos … He has told us before that certain gas stations only preserve them for 14 days or so. And your door cameras, oftentimes they may copy you over, may not store, may not keep it. And in this day and age, you’d be shocked how often a wreck is captured by some type of video, either a dash cam, a door camera from a house, from security cameras, from like a pole barn, from a business, whatever. And if you don’t get out there quickly, you lose that opportunity. So the more serious the wreck, the more that’s at stake, the more it matters that you hire the right law firm and that they have a Rapid Response Team and they have an investigator, like Patrick.

Patrick has found videos and oftentimes they’ll let him watch the video. And so they may not let him have it, but they’ll let him watch it and then we send a preservation letter out and they preserve it for us to get later. But listen, I guess before we move on, let’s talk about some of the videos we’ve seen. We’ve seen a variety of videos from all different types of … I can think of a house that had one on their door that captured a van crossing the center line or a vehicle crossing the center line running us off the road. I can think of security videos that have captured the wreck. I talked to a gentleman today who the audio was on and the lady said, “I pulled out in front of …” It was unfortunately a wrongful death case. But the audio said from a door camera, “I pulled out in front of him.” And that’s stuff that 20, 30 years ago we didn’t have. Tell me some of the stuff you can remember seeing.

Clint Crabtree: We had one where there was a gas station and a client was on a motorcycle and they just put in a new security camera system. The audio was amazing. It was amazing how you could hear the impact, things of that nature. And again, they didn’t know if they could share it, but they let us see it and play it and here’s the person to reach out to and we were able to get copies of that. But there again, if you don’t get there quickly, that stuff is gone.

David Craig: Yeah. And it’s not one of those things that you necessarily can do on your own because first of all, you got to know what you’re looking for, but not all businesses will just talk to Joe Blow off the street. When you’re an investigator and this is what you do day in and day out and you’re investigating a wreck for a law firm, people will tend to be cooperative or at least they’ll tell you whether they have it or they don’t have it.

Clint Crabtree: I had a client yesterday, we represented him I think back in 2010 for a serious accident. He had a small fender bender in a parking lot a couple of months ago. He was backing out, the lady was backing out, they both made impact and now the insurance companies are saying, “Hey, you haven’t proved that we’re at fault.” I said, “What about video?” And he said, “Yeah.” We went and talked to the store about a month later they said they had video, but no longer now because didn’t get it soon enough. I told him, I said, “We go into a case now assuming that there is video of every accident and that’s just what you got to look for.”

David Craig: Yeah. We never know which clients are going to get better and which ones aren’t. Sometimes it’s a wrongful death case so you know that the person is not going to make it or they’re in critical condition, it doesn’t look good. But oftentimes we don’t know what kind of recovery someone’s going to have. We are on the side of let’s go ahead and secure the evidence. Let’s go ahead and look for those videos. Let’s invest the time and effort to find it because if someone doesn’t get better and the higher the stakes, the more likely the defense is to fudge the truth. If there’s no documentation to it, then you’re screwed. If you wait too long, then you don’t have a shot.

I speak at conferences and we teach other lawyers how to handle these cases and it’s always shocking to me because there’s law firms that have no Rapid Response Team, that’s most of them. Then you have some that recognize it’s important to preserve evidence, so they’ll try to use investigators, they’ll hire people to do it. The problem with that is you don’t always have access to them. They may be busy, they may be booked. There may be a day or two or a week before they can get out there. Whereas if you have your own team, I let you know, “Hey, look, we’ve got a new case.” And then you just take charge and make sure, “Hey, what kind of case is it, what needs to be done?” And you send Patrick out and you make the decisions and it’s automatic with us. It’s automatic. And it’s just shocking to me how many firms don’t even have that or don’t even invest in it or they don’t take the time and then they lose that evidence. Same way with dash cam footage. You see on a regular basis dash cam footage and a lot of trucks now have outward facing cameras. Some have inward facing cameras. Police cars have it on their videos. A lot of cars have dash cam on their video, but again, sometimes that’s not preserved and not kept. Whereas if you can find out quickly, you can ask for all that.

Clint Crabtree: Absolutely. Yeah. Teslas have front facing and rear facing cameras. And then even on these bigger crashes, there’s a lot of people that will jump on social media and share, “Hey, I was in this accident today or I drove past this accident and I’ve got dash cam footage.” So that’s stuff that you got to search for quickly as well because that stuff can get lost. And so it takes a team and it’s not a one person deal to be able to secure all this stuff quickly. And that’s why I’m really proud of the team that we have now.

David Craig: Yeah. So that’s Patrick. He’s our investigator and he’s full time and we keep him very busy and he runs everywhere. He goes outside of Indiana, inside Indiana. You name it, he goes there. Who else do you have on your team?

Clint Crabtree: The newest member is Grace Kaminsky and she is the Rapid Response Team paralegal. Patrick and I were just at an inspection today and he said, “Hey, who is responsible for putting Grace on the team?” I said, “Well, I was needing some help and she helped out a little bit and they asked what I thought.” I said, “Man, I think she’s awesome.” And he said, “It’s the best thing that’s happened to us.” He said, “She has been so helpful for me. If I need a preservation letter or something,” he’s like, “I just shoot in an email and she’s on it.” I said, “Yeah, she is. She’s amazing and it’s been a huge help for us.”

David Craig: Yeah. And again, you’re only as good as your team. So a lot of people say, “Okay, well how great of an attorney do I have?” Well, a great attorney with a team that sucks is an average attorney. An average resolved. If you have a great team and a great attorney, then that’s the best of all. But it takes, like you said, a team. And Grace, she’s new. She started off working with you. She really enjoys it and she’s good at getting those … The preservation of evidence letters, folks, so you don’t know what it is. So when there’s a wreck, what you do is the victim, their lawyer sends out a letter saying, “We represent these people and we want you to preserve any and all evidence.” So if it’s a semi-truck, we want them to preserve that semi-truck. We want the tractor, the trailer, everything inside of it, the logs, the paperwork, and the cameras, the videos. We want all that. And we don’t want the defense touching it or altering it until we can get in there and look at it.

You will reach out to the other side pretty quickly and we’ll know, okay, these folks aren’t cooperating, so then we may have to file suit and get a restraining order. But most folks who know us will work with us because they know this is what we do. But those preservation letters, if you don’t get them out quick enough, then they don’t have a duty to maintain … Under Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations, they have a duty to maintain certain records, but only for a limited period of time. But there’s other stuff they don’t have to maintain. And so we’ve got to get those preservation letters out. And I tell the clients all the time when I talk to them … When somebody calls in, I usually am the one that talks to the victims of the serious wrecks and I tell them, “We need to get those preservation letters out immediately because the defense is preserving stuff. They’re already working on the case. As soon as that wreck happens, you need to get the preservation letters out.” Grace is that person who does that.

Clint Crabtree: She does a fantastic job. When a new case comes in, she is on it. I can’t think of a day where… the letters have gone out the next day. She is on it and they get out and we need that and our clients need that and she just does a fantastic job.

David Craig: Yeah. And then tell us a little bit about … Somebody has to be the coordinator. Somebody has to run the show and that’s you. And apparently we’ve been together for 17 years or so. I was just testing you. Explain to the folks what your role is.

Clint Crabtree: Case comes in, we get the preservation letters out, but then we’ve also got to retain experts. So we have a select few experts that we use, so we’d make a decision on who we’re going to use. We have one mechanical expert that we use most frequently, but then it comes to reconstructionists, we have several that we use and they’re in different locations in the state. Some are out of state. And so we make a decision on which ones to use there. And then it’s working with either adjusters, or most times once we get the preservation letters out, tell them we want to do an inspection, they’re pretty quickly getting counsel involved. And frankly, we prefer that. It seems to go smoother that way. Not always, but sometimes. And so then we work to schedule a joint inspection at a mutually agreeable date and time, do the downloads, and then we schedule a post-inspection Zoom to go over what our findings were and get that in the file. Then it moves on to the discovery stage of the case.

David Craig: I think having that person who that’s their job so that you can drop what they’re doing and say, okay, let’s get this case rolling is critical. I think the fact that we dedicate a team to do that is extraordinarily important, and you do a great job of coordinating that and going to the inspection. You literally go to 99% of the inspections. I go to some, and Patrick goes to most of them. But that is so helpful. If you know what you’re looking for and you do this day in and day out, then you know, okay, let’s get inside this tractor and let’s photograph everything that’s in there. Man, we’ve seen all kinds of stuff in there. I’ve seen porn, I’ve seen urine tanks where they’re peeing in jugs, which tells you something. It tells you that they’re not even taking time to break to go to the bathroom. I’ve seen drugs. Some of the stuff is not as bad. You’ll see laptops, stuff mounted, clearly they’re watching and that’s bad.

But then you see bills of lading, paperwork that … In some of these truck cases are the worst truck drivers, they only got $750,000 worth of insurance and they kill people or they devastate people or they have paralyzed people and so that’s not enough insurance. So one of the hard parts about being a truck wreck lawyer is trying to figure out, is there additional coverage? Is there someone else who might be responsible for this wreck? And if you go through normal discovery, that can take months before you find out from the other side who in the heck brokered this load, who was the shipper, whose trailer was it, all those type of things, because there may be insurance with all those. And so the nice thing about when you do the inspection, if you know what you’re doing, you’re in there and you’re photographing the paperwork.

Clint Crabtree: Absolutely. That’s my favorite part of the inspections is the paperwork. The one I was at today, there was titles to other vehicles that was in that vehicle. There was bank receipts. There was all kinds of paperwork and that’s super helpful, especially when you’re trying to find additional insurance and stuff. You just can’t believe the amount of data that you can get just from stuff that’s left in the car.

David Craig: Yeah. And so the bill of ladings and the trying to track that trailer and track that load is extraordinarily important. And again, that’s something that is lost. If the truck was totaled or wrecked or something, they’re going to salvage it. They’re going to get rid of it. If you’re not hired quick enough, they’re going to say, “Look, nobody contacted us” and so they’re going to go in. We’ve seen times when they’ve gone in and cleaned out the vehicles. I’ve seen times where they’ve moved the vehicles before I could get hired. I had one in, it was over by Kansas City and the semi was moved two states away before we got our preservation letters out. And so again, time matters in serious catastrophic truck cases and we want to get in. And again, that’s different because not everybody … So lawyers will go to inspection or they’ll send somebody to an inspection, but there are people who don’t do it day in and day out, and so they miss that opportunity to take photographs.

In our preservation letters, I say that we’re going to inspect the inside and the outside. And I can think of only one time where we had a defense counsel say, “Hey, what are you doing?” By that time we’d already taken photographs of everything anyway, so it didn’t matter. But we could always get a court order and say, “Okay, look, you attorney have to take this stuff, not the trucking company, not the truck driver. You take it and then I’ll get it from you eventually anyway.” And so they usually show it to you.

Clint Crabtree: Yeah. And that’s where getting counsel involved can sometimes be adverse to the trucking company. The trucking company, their main goal, we want to get that truck and trailer back on the road. And so if the opposing counsel is playing games, we’ll just go to the court and get a restraining order and that truck’s going to sit there until we get to do the inspection.

David Craig: Yeah. I’ve had cases where … I can think of one where Don May, who also used to be one of our investigators, Don called me up in the morning and one of our trailers was being … They weren’t supposed to unload it. And so Don went out to check on it and Don calls me first thing in the morning he’s like, “Dave, there’s a whole bunch of people showing up and something’s going on.” The attorney had told us, “No, nothing will happen. We promise. You can have your experts at the same time we have our experts.” In that case, because he told me, I was able to make phone calls and tell the attorney, and the attorney didn’t even know, but the trucking company was going to unload that load. Had they done that, that trucking company only had 750[k] or a million dollars worth of coverage that was a wrongful death case.

Had he not been there and he not told us, then that would have unloaded and then we would have had no other case, other than for the truck driver and trucking company. But because he was there, we were able to stop it. I was able to get our experts there, a video team, myself there, and we were able to watch them unload it. When they did that, we found out there was hidden defects in the way they had loaded it. That gave us a case against the shipper, and that meant we had millions of dollars additional coverage available. Just that timing, had we not been hired immediately … And another lawyer had told his family to call us. Had we not been hired immediately, then that truck would have been unloaded and this family who lost their loved one, their father, the husband, the breadwinner of the family, they would have been limited to the 750[k] or a million, whatever it was. That’s a perfect example of how critical it is for us to have our Rapid Response Team.

Clint Crabtree: It’s a perfect example of rules are not always followed, and so that’s why you got to get the right law firm hired, get the preservation letters out, and then you can’t assume that everybody’s going to play by the rules, so you got to be on top of it.

David Craig: Yeah. We’ve hired people just to watch the trucks before if they’re not in a place where we don’t think they’re secure. In most cases, they haul them places that you know, the same places, and so we know they’re going to be secure and we can get in there. But occasionally, if it’s in a rural area, they may be out in a cornfield or they might be in a farm lot or whatever, and those cases, then when you’re talking millions to 10s of millions, you want to go ahead and spend the money to have somebody out there and secure the vehicle.

Clint Crabtree: Absolutely.

David Craig: But again, you don’t know that if you don’t have a Rapid Response Team, you don’t find out where the vehicles are, and that’s part of what we do is, okay, where is it? I think another part of what you do is the investigation of the trucking company. Talk a little bit about that. Once we get hired and we find out it’s X, Y, Z company, what do we do?

Clint Crabtree: One of the first things we do, we go to the SAFER Assist website that everybody has access to. It shows the trucking companies based on their motor carrier number, what their out of service ratings [are], how many trucks they have, how many drivers they have. You can usually find their insurance information there. How many inspections have they had done on their vehicles? And in there, there’s a lot of data that you can drill down and look for. Has this particular trailer that was involved in the accident, has an inspection been done on it in the past 24 months? So there’s a lot of information there. But beyond that, which is just that’s the easy thing to go to, we’re going to go to the trucking company’s website, we’re going to download their website and that way in deposition, what’s your guys’ policy on this? Well, if they say one thing and their website says another, well, here’s the website two days after the accident and it’s what it said. So we do that. We also do background checks on the drivers, the company itself. We do background checks on our clients. We want to know all the information, good or bad, and get that in our file.

David Craig: Yeah. I think it’s important for people to understand that. A lot of times on a website, a trucking company will talk about how safe they are and they’ll talk about how great they are and they have all these things because they’re trying to get people to hire them for loads. But as soon as a wreck happens, sometimes there’s been times where trucking companies will take down that information because they don’t want it to be used against them and say, “Well, wait a minute, you said on your website that you guys always run blah, blah, blah, you pay by the mile and you pay people to stop in bad weather, pull off. But in fact, in this case, you didn’t. And so what is it?” You’re false advertising, you’re promoting something that you know is the right way to do it, but you’re doing something the opposite.

So you go in and there’s software that you can use that you can just copy the whole website and just preserve it. It may or may not be helpful, but if you don’t do it again fast enough, then the defense is working on the opposite side. The defense is sitting there, they’re working from the day … As soon as that wreck happens, they get a call to dispatch and the driver says, “I’ve just been in a wreck.” Now, sometimes they make that phone call even before they do 911. I’ve had cases like that. Then the trucking company, they have their own Rapid Response Team, and they even have lawyers, some lawyers have a contract that says they have to guarantee that they’ll be at the scene within so many hours. These trucking defense lawyers, trucking claims people, their investigators, their reconstructionists, they immediately start working to try to shift the responsibility away from their driver to either the plaintiff or somebody else. You want to get in and download their information as quick as you can before they change all that. I guess talk about what a download, what is it in these trucks, what do they have and how does that work?

Clint Crabtree: In tractors, they have an engine control module. In cars, it’s an airbag control module. Typically, your data comes from when an airbag is deployed. On a semi-truck, it’s an engine control module. A lot of that is a hard brake, let’s say nine miles within so many seconds or whatever, that’s what triggers a data write on that engine control module. A lot of times you’re able to plug into a port inside the cab of the truck and do the download that way if there’s power to the vehicle and you got a key. Sometimes you have to remove that engine control module and do a direct to module download. It’s basically like a black box from an airplane. It’s amazing the data that you can get from one of those modules.

David Craig: What’s the fastest speed you’ve ever seen that somebody was driving?

Clint Crabtree: 129.

David Craig: That is just crazy. So that’s the thing is that again, if we get hired quick enough, we can get out there and download these black box and we can find out speed. Sometimes we can find out steering, sometimes seat belts and a variety of things that are in there. It’s just amazing to me that sometimes the defendant will say something and they’ll lie about it and then you go get this download and you can make your case or break your case based on that.

Clint Crabtree: Yeah.

David Craig: I’ve had school bus cases before where the company intentionally deactivated. They did not activate the ECM. Why would you do that? Why would you not have an ECM? Why wouldn’t you want to know how your drivers are speeding or they’re not speeding or they’re braking or they’re swerving? Why would you not know that or wanted to know that? But yet we had a pedestrian walking across the street and he gets run over and killed, and we get hired quickly and so we send our preservation letter out and the defense said, “Your client walked right in front of the bus, wasn’t paying attention, probably on their phone and the bus driver did nothing wrong.” I said, “Well, let’s look at the ECM.” We sent our preservation letter out. They get back and say, “Well, sorry, but we didn’t activate it.” We do the inspection anyway and sure enough our expert says, “Yeah, this wasn’t activated. There is no data.”

Well, in that case though, there was at least a camera that was facing backwards and so not outward, which is weird because most of the time when we have cases, most truck drivers like to face outward, most commercial motor vehicle drivers, but this bus driver, this busing company, they had cameras back because they wanted to watch the kids and see if they’re causing trouble, they had videotape of it. So because we got hired quick, we realized, okay, guys, there is at least footage. In that case, we were able to preserve it. We had the footage. It didn’t show us the speed of the vehicle, but our theory was it was speeding. We actually reenacted that wreck a year later on the day of the wreck, and we drove that bus and we were able to match up the shadows. And we could see where the same shadows were happening, and we could time the distance between the shadows. And you could measure those trees, how far apart they were, and we could determine speed.

Again, that’s something that most people would never get. They just would lose that. They wouldn’t have it because they wouldn’t move quick enough. And not only did we preserve it, but then we hired a team, like you said, the experts that we work with to help us then put it together. That guy, he was a father of children, and he was the sole breadwinner, and we were able to get those kids a house and taken care of.

Clint Crabtree: Yeah. Data is king. At the time, we don’t know whether the data that we’re getting is really important or not, but we’re going to get it anyways, get it in the file and then work the case backwards sometimes, forwards, backwards, however, to document what did happen. At the end of the day, that’s what a lot of families are wanting to know anyways, is just what happened.

David Craig: Absolutely. Most people that hire us, they’re worried about the finances and things like that, but most people, the most common question I get asked is, “I want to know what happened. Why did this happen?” And we want to make sure this doesn’t happen again in the future, so that’s another thing. What’s the craziest thing you can think of that you’ve seen over the years? Because you’ve been doing this now for a long time.

Clint Crabtree: Yeah. That’s a good question. Probably the seven or eight bottles of urine in your Mountain Dew bottles or something. There’s no way around other than that person did not want to stop, he just wanted to keep driving.

David Craig: Once we get the case signed up, we preserve the evidence, we send Patrick out, we do all that. You download all the information, you do the background checks, then you turn it over to a paralegal and the file manager then runs with the case. And then occasionally though, you still are … I know there’s cases where we still got investigations that are ongoing. Oftentimes, you’re trying to talk to the police or you’re coordinating outside private investigators to get tape statements from people who did the 911, who called in 911 who may have witnessed it, but didn’t stay at the scene. But it’s not necessarily over for you guys, you’re still working on it.

Clint Crabtree: We get started and the bulk of what the Rapid Response Team does is in that first, let’s say one to six, seven weeks into a case. But then if the case goes through depositions and all that kind of stuff and we get close to mediation or trial, we’ll go back and do background checks again. Just because somebody had a clean background check 12 months ago, not necessarily the case this time. That’s why we go back and check some of that stuff. And it’s interesting to see how things change in people’s lives in a pretty short period of time.

David Craig: Unfortunately, one of the things, if you are preparing your case for trial, you need to know what they’re going to cross-examine your witnesses. And so you may have somebody who’s a really good witness, but they have a fraud conviction or a theft conviction. And if that comes up, you have to wonder, well, what will a jury think? Maybe they’re not going to give that person’s testimony the right weight. And so is there somebody else you can say the same thing who doesn’t have those convictions? So we’re constantly looking at not only at our client, the defendant, the witnesses, and piecing together how do we put this case on and try it? That’s the most compelling way to do it.

Clint Crabtree: Yeah. Whatever the information is, it’s better to know it upfront than to get surprised by it when you’re not expecting it.

David Craig: I think one of the other things that I’m really proud of you guys is your willingness to continue to learn. The last time we did this episode, I bet you knew less than what you know today. Talk a little bit about the fact that you’re willing and have been willing to invest the time and energy to learn how to do this, how to do it right. And we just came back, for example, from a seminar doing that.

Clint Crabtree: Yeah. I very much enjoyed the seminar out in Denver at the ATAA conference. And probably one of the bigger things that stuck out to me besides all the AI talk, which I love all that stuff, but there was a speaker that talked about … It was a motorcycle case. He said that it takes 16 seconds for a tractor to make its left-hand turn. And we happen to have a case that involves a semi making a left-hand turn. You’re listening to people speak about real life, actual nuts and bolts of stuff. And I’m super thankful to work for Craig, Kelley & Faultless. You mentioned us investing the time and stuff, but it takes a lot of investment resources to be able to send us to do that kind of stuff. And I’m super thankful that we get to do that kind of stuff. And it’s just, I love what I do.

David Craig: Yeah. I think, and it shows because you do a great job. But I think if you’re out there and you’re looking and you’re looking and say, okay, I need to hire somebody. Again, the attorneys are only as good as the team. And I would ask, not only do they have a team, what do they invest in their team? Are they sending them to schooling and training? Lawyers go … I speak at conferences. I listen. I always learn something. Every conference I’ve ever been to, I always learn something. I’m always wanting to learn. Things change, technology changes. One of the things we haven’t talked about is some of the systems they have now. They can track these drivers in real time, what’s going on. They can track whether they’re … If they’re dozing off, they get alerts. There’s all this time type of equipment that you’re looking for when you go to inspection. Okay, what kind of equipment does this tractor have? And then we can find the experts to say, okay, what do we need? Do they have video? Would they have given alerts? But that stuff’s changing constantly. And so you go to these seminars to keep up on it.

And the great thing is plaintiff lawyers share information about these systems, how they’re getting the documents, how they’re getting all that. And I really think if you’ve got a case and you’re looking at it, you want to talk to the people that you’re interviewing and say, “Do you have a Rapid Response Team and do you invest them? Do you send their paralegals and their lawyers to training so that they can keep learning?” Because if they’re not, then it’s all about the attorney and that’s not all about you. For me, the better my team is, the better I am and the better services we can provide for our clients.

Clint Crabtree: Yeah. And you have done a fantastic job of building not only the Rapid Response Team, but the entire team at Craig, Kelley & Faultless. And that’s super exciting to be a small part of.

David Craig: Yeah. Thank you. One of the other things is we provide vehicles for Patrick who’s out doing the investigations. He’s out there in some precarious situations. And so you helped us. We outfitted his truck with lights and stuff like that. I think just doing it right, investing the money, investing in the people, investing in the equipment, all those things are extraordinarily important and help us do what we should do, which is make a difference in our clients’ lives.

Clint Crabtree: Absolutely. Yeah.

David Craig: Well, what else you got? Anything else you want to talk about?

Clint Crabtree: What about this podcast room? This is pretty impressive. This has changed a lot since the last one we did. We were just sitting in front of our computer with a little webcam.

David Craig: Yep.

Clint Crabtree: Yeah.

David Craig: So I give big shout out to my nephew, Justin Rock, and Aaron Sherman and Bobby Craig. They did an incredible job on this. I’m so super impressed. It’s fun for me to actually have guests in here.

Clint Crabtree: Yeah, this is amazing.

David Craig: So it’s nice. And so they do a great job of doing that. And I’ve got some more guests coming for future episodes. And so I hope you’re out there watching I hope you’ll join us for our next episode. But Clint, thank you so much.

Clint Crabtree: Thanks for having me. Pleasure.

David Craig: I appreciate it. Thank you.

Thanks for listening to another episode of After the Crash. If you or someone you know has been involved in a semi-truck wreck and you want to talk, go to ckflaw.com or give me a call at 1-800-ASK-DAVID. If you want additional information about semi-truck wrecks or how to pick the right attorney, check out my two books, Semi-Truck Wreck: A Guide for the Victims and Their Families, or It’s Never Been Easier to Hire the Wrong Attorney. Both of them are available on Amazon or you can download them for free on our website, ckflaw.com.