An 18-wheeler changed your life in seconds.We make the trucking company answer for it.

Houston's port and refinery corridors and El Paso's border crossings put more commercial trucks on our roads than almost anywhere in the country. When 80,000 pounds hits a passenger car, the injuries are catastrophic — and the trucking company's team is often at the scene before the wreckage is cleared, building the file to pay you as little as possible.

Federal rules give us weapons most people never use. Hours-of-service limits exist because fatigued driving kills; electronic logging devices record whether they were followed. Maintenance and inspection records, driver qualification files, drug-testing history — federal law requires all of it, and all of it is discoverable when you have a lawyer who knows to demand it.

Our first move is locking down the evidence: a preservation letter that puts the carrier on legal notice, followed by demands for the black-box data, logs, and camera footage. Then we identify every liable party and every layer of insurance — because serious truck cases are rarely about one driver and one policy.

These are the highest-stakes cases we handle, and the ones where hiring a lawyer early matters most. The consultation is free, in English or Spanish.

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A second body of law applies

A semi — an 18-wheeler, a big rig, a tractor-trailer — is not a large car. The driver operates under federal motor carrier regulations that govern how long they may drive, how they must be qualified, how the vehicle must be inspected and maintained, and what records the company has to keep. Every one of those rules is a standard the carrier can be measured against — and a violation is evidence you simply do not have in an ordinary collision.

The hours-of-service limits are the ones that matter most often. A property-carrying driver must take 10 consecutive hours off before driving, may drive no more than 11 hours, must stop driving after a 14-hour on-duty window regardless of breaks, and must take a 30-minute break once eight hours of driving time have passed. Weekly caps of 60 hours in 7 days or 70 in 8 sit on top of that.

The evidence is on a clock, and it is shorter than your deadline

This is the single most important thing to understand about a truck case. You have two years to file suit. The carrier is required to keep the driver's records of duty status and their supporting documents for six months.

Six. Electronic logging data, dispatch records, fuel receipts, the payroll settlement sheets that show how the driver was paid — all of it can be lawfully gone long before anyone files anything. Other categories last longer: the driver qualification file runs for the length of employment plus three years, the accident register three years, maintenance records a year plus six months after the vehicle leaves the carrier's control. Onboard camera footage follows no federal schedule at all, and many systems overwrite in days.

A carrier that destroys records on its normal schedule has generally done nothing wrong — unless it was told to preserve them. That letter is the highest-value thing that happens in the first week of a truck case, and it is ours to send.

Usually more than one company is responsible

The name painted on the door is frequently not the company that ends up paying. Tractor and trailer are often separately owned. The driver may be an owner-operator leased to a motor carrier. Behind them sit freight brokers, shippers, and maintenance contractors, and a staffing company may have placed the driver.

Each of those can carry its own coverage, and each can be independently negligent — in hiring, in training, in supervision, in maintenance, in the way the load was secured. That is why identifying every entity early is not bookkeeping. It is where the recovery actually comes from.

The insurance is on a different scale

A for-hire carrier operating in interstate commerce with a vehicle over 10,000 pounds must carry at least $750,000 in liability coverage for ordinary freight, and far more for certain hazardous materials. Most serious carriers carry well above the minimum, and layered excess policies are common.

That changes the posture completely. You are not dealing with an adjuster handling a $30,000 policy. You are dealing with a company that has real exposure, defense counsel on retainer, and an investigator who may have been at the scene within hours of the crash.

The drug test may never have happened

People assume a commercial driver is automatically tested after a crash. The rule is narrower. After a fatality, testing is required regardless of citation. After a crash causing injury treated away from the scene, or requiring a vehicle to be towed, testing is required only if the driver receives a citation. Alcohol testing is to happen within eight hours, controlled substances within thirty-two.

So whether an officer wrote a ticket at the roadside can decide whether that evidence exists at all — which is one more reason the first days matter.