Episode 59: Inside My First Truck Wreck Case

David Craig: I was so young, and I was so scared that I probably was paranoid, and I did everything and anything I could do on that case to protect my case and my client. I learned that you had to preserve the evidence, you had to be aggressive, you had to fight. But I learned not to trust the trucking companies. I learned that they would put bad people behind the wheel in a pinch. I learned that there are bad doctors out there that sometimes qualify people that they shouldn’t. I learned that they would fight you. In this case, they fought me all the way to trial.

I’m attorney David Craig, managing partner and one of the founders of the law firm of Craig, Kelley and Faultless. I’ve represented people who’ve been seriously injured or who have had a family member killed in a semi or other big truck wreck for over 30 years. Following the wreck, their lives are chaos. Often, they don’t even know enough about the process to ask the right questions. It is my goal to empower you by providing you with the information you need to protect yourself and your family. In each and every episode, I will interview top experts and professionals that are involved in truck wreck cases.

In the Ask David episodes of After The Crash, we switch things up. Instead of me asking questions, I answer the questions. Nothing is off limits. They ask me about truck safety, about truck accidents, about semi-truck litigation, about commercial motor vehicle wrecks. You name it, I talk about it. This is After The Crash.

All right, welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to another episode of After the Crash. This is the Ask David version. Today, we have a special guest, a person who this law firm, Craig, Kelley, and Faultless, couldn’t do without. Her name is Ashley Napier. She is in charge of everything to do with litigation. She’s in charge of the file managers, which are the paralegals that work in litigation. She’s in charge of the legal assistants. She’s in charge of the law clerks that work in litigation. She’s in charge of the lawyers that work in litigation. She’s in charge of the record retrieval people that work in litigation. She’s in charge of a lot of different things. And, on top of that, I’ve bugged her to participate and be a guest on After the Crash. So Ashley, welcome and thank you for everything you do for all of our clients.

Ashley Napier: Yes, thank you for having me. Thank you for allowing me to take over for an episode.

David Craig: Yeah, this is always scary to me because After The Crash: Ask David version is a version where the guests get to ask me the questions. She’s already been threatening me with some questions that maybe I don’t know that I want to answer, but we’ll see how we go along.

Ashley Napier: That’s correct. I’ve taken questions from the team and gotten some money, actually, for those questions.

David Craig: So, did my wife ask you any of those? Oh, good, good.

Ashley Napier: Nope. Nope. They remain anonymous.

David Craig: All right. Well, I’m going to turn it over to Ashley. So, Ashley is going to ask the questions today, and I will provide the answers. Take it away, Ashley.

Ashley Napier: Okay. Perfect. So, David, you have been a personal injury attorney for, what, 90 years or so? No, 38 years and counting. What was your first big truck wreck case that you handled?

David Craig: That’s a good question. I’ve been doing this for 38 years. My very first truck case I had was a dump truck. It was a large commercial motor vehicle. It was a dump truck, fully loaded, full of pea gravel, and it was heading down the highway. It went off the highway through a ditch, through a fence, through a parking lot, through parked cars, into a building and hit my client inside the building.

I was a brand-new, young attorney, and back then — this is 30, probably 35 years ago — and back then there wasn’t all these groups…not everybody was doing trucking. There wasn’t groups that were narrowed down to just specific trucking. I had to go out and read everything I could read about how to handle a truck case.

But in this case, the trucking company, the truck driver, denied it was their fault. They claimed that there was a blowout on the tire of that truck and that caused that truck to go through the building. The trucking company, like they normally do, they hired a very aggressive truck defense lawyer. This guy was hurt badly. Again, I was a young lawyer, and it was a challenging case, to say the least, because the trucking defense attorney was extraordinarily aggressive. He made sure I understood that he was wise and old, and that I was young and naive and just learning. But the thing that helped me was that I wasn’t afraid to fight, and he couldn’t outwork me. That was my very first case that I had.

Ashley Napier: What lessons did you learn from handling that case, and what ultimate takeaways did you have?

David Craig: Well, the first thing I realized was that it was different than any other type of personal injury case I’d ever handled. It was bigger, number one. Number two, the lawyer was far more aggressive and experienced, high paid, than what I was used to dealing with with the insurance, like some of the smaller companies and smaller claims.

But then also, the trucking company, they’re used to huge losses, and so they’re very aggressive at defending. What I learned right off the bat was, man, it’s real important to lock in and document evidence. In this case, luckily for us, we were able to secure some video. Back then, a video camera was huge old thing… videotape from the path from the roadway, from the highway, and it showed that there was a smooth tire track, until it hit a fire hydrant. Then, you saw some chopping. There was some evidence that the tire didn’t blow until after it hit this fire hydrant. The truck driver was saying it blew on the highway, and it went off. That video footage, and luckily that was done early on because the building that owned the building where the truck went through, they hired somebody to come out and fix the fence and the landscaping, and so they fixed the grass, and they fixed all that relatively quickly after the wreck. Had we not preserved that evidence with the video, then we would have had a tougher case.

The other thing I learned was that, in that case, it turned out that that truck driver…I mean he had a CDL, he had a medical, so in order to drive a truck, you have to have a medical clearance card, a medical authorization card. You have to go through and get a doctor to say you’re qualified physically to drive a truck. And this man had that. This was the first time I went in, and I took the deposition of the doctor who gave him that. This doctor was running his office — it was like a little shack. This guy was an old doctor. What he was doing was rubber-stamping medical authorization cards so that drivers could get CDLs.

So, this trucking company, what happened was this trucking company was in a pinch, and they had had this driver before, but he developed epilepsy. He had epileptic seizures and lost his ability to drive a truck. They got in a pinch; they needed a truck for a big contract they had. They asked him to come back, and he’s like, “Oh, I can’t. I don’t qualify.”

They said, “Well, we’ll send you to this doctor.” They sent him to a doctor who just rubber-stamped his medical authorization, put him behind the wheel. When I was able to get his medical records — we had a big fight as to whether I could get his medical records. We won that fight. Turned out, we found out that he had epilepsy. I hired an epilepsy expert, and that epilepsy expert said that the guy either fell asleep, was distracted, or he could have had an epileptic seizure. There certainly were signs of an epileptic seizure from some of the witnesses that saw him after the wreck, how he was reacting, how he was interacting with people. I went and had investigators talk to all of the witnesses around the truck.

So I was so young, and I was so scared that I was probably was paranoid, and I did everything and anything I could do on that case to protect my case and my client. I learned that… thank goodness I did that. Thank goodness the books I read, the continuing legal stuff that I could get my hands on, there was some guidance there. I learned that you had to preserve the evidence, you had to be aggressive, you had to fight. But I learned not to trust the trucking companies. I learned that they would put bad people behind the wheel in a pinch. I learned that there are bad doctors out there that sometimes qualify people that they shouldn’t. I learned that they would fight you. In this case, they fought me all the way to trial. I mean, I literally had to go to trial. The lawyer said, and the insurance company said, they’ll never pay X number of dollars. I said, we would never settle for less than X number of dollars.

And so we went to trial. On the first day of trial during jury, I got up to do jury selection, and the defense lawyer asked to approach the bench. We approached the bench, and the lawyer said, “If Mr. Craig’s client will take it, we will give the X number of dollars,” the number that I wanted all along at that point because it went up for the trial. My client took it, and we settled the case.

I realized also how important it was to prepare your case as if you’re going to go try it, and be ready to go try the case. If you do that, then that’s when you get the full value. Otherwise, we would have never gotten the full value.
It was a crazy case for my very first trucking case, but it was a perfect case for me because it had everything you can imagine that we deal with all the time. I learned that, “Okay, this is how we’ve got to handle this case. This is how you got to treat trucking companies. This is how you have to treat their insurance companies. And this is how you protect your clients.” There was a lot, I mean, there was a ton of lessons that I learned from that very first trucking case 35 years ago.

This is David Craig, and you’ve been listening to After The Crash. If you’d more information about me or my law firm, please explore our website. Or if you’d like to talk to me, you can call 1-800-ASK-DAVID. If you would like a guide on what to do after a truck wreck, then pick up my book, Semitruck Wreck: A Guide for Victims and Their Families, which is available on Amazon, or you can download it for free on our website.