If a company truck hit your car, your first priority is safety and medical attention, but what you do in the hours and days after the crash matters more than it would in an ordinary collision. The trucking company, not just the driver, can be legally responsible for your injuries, and federal regulations covering commercial carriers open up accountability and insurance coverage you would not have against a regular motorist. The catch is that key evidence — electronic driving logs, dispatch records, onboard computer data — can be legally destroyed within weeks if nobody demands it be preserved.
Handle the Scene Like Any Crash First
If you can safely do it, move your car to the shoulder and turn on your hazard lights. Check yourself and your passengers for injuries. Don’t move anyone who seems seriously hurt unless there’s an immediate threat like a fire.
Call 911. You want police on scene to secure the area and generate an official accident report. When you talk to the responding officer, stick to what you know happened. Don’t speculate about causes and don’t accept any blame. Before you leave, ask for the report number so you can get a copy later.
Get checked out by paramedics even if you feel fine. Adrenaline masks pain, and injuries like internal bleeding or soft-tissue damage often don’t produce symptoms for hours or days. Having a medical professional evaluate you at the scene creates a record tying any injuries to this specific crash, which matters if symptoms surface later.
Information to Collect That’s Specific to a Company Truck
A truck crash involves more parties and more documentation than a typical collision, so gather everything you can before leaving. Start with the driver: full name, contact information, and driver’s license number. Then get the name, address, and phone number of the trucking company they work for.
Photograph everything on and around the truck. Capture the license plate, any company logos or markings, and the USDOT number displayed on the vehicle. Federal law requires companies operating commercial vehicles in interstate commerce to register with the FMCSA and display this number, which serves as a unique identifier for tracking the company’s safety information during audits, inspections, and crash investigations.1Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Do I Need a USDOT Number You can plug that number into the FMCSA’s Company Snapshot tool to pull up the carrier’s safety rating, inspection history, and prior crash data.2Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. SAFER Web – Company Snapshot
Ask for the company’s commercial insurance information, not the driver’s personal auto policy. If any bystanders saw the accident, get their names and contact details. Witness accounts from people with no stake in the outcome carry real weight when stories conflict later.
Act Fast to Preserve Evidence
This is where a truck crash claim diverges sharply from a regular car accident. Trucking companies are required to keep driver logs and duty records for only six months.3eCFR. 49 CFR 395.8 – Driver’s Record of Duty Status Vehicle maintenance records must be retained for one year while the truck is in the carrier’s fleet, and only six months after it leaves.4eCFR. 49 CFR 396.3 – Inspection, Repair, and Maintenance Once those windows close, the company can legally destroy the records.
A preservation letter, sometimes called a spoliation letter, is a formal written demand sent to the trucking company requiring it to save all evidence related to your crash. That includes driver logs, GPS and routing data, dispatch communications, maintenance records, drug and alcohol test results, and the driver’s personnel file. If the company destroys evidence after receiving this letter, courts can impose serious consequences, including instructing the jury to assume the missing evidence would have hurt the company’s case. An attorney typically drafts and sends the letter, and time is critical since records start becoming eligible for destruction within weeks.
Most commercial trucks also carry an engine control module that works like a black box, recording vehicle speed, brake application, throttle position, and engine RPMs in the seconds surrounding a crash. That data can prove whether the driver was speeding, braking late, or had the cruise control set when the collision happened. Like paper records, this electronic data can be overwritten or lost if nobody preserves it promptly.
Who Can Be Held Responsible
Liability after a crash with a company truck often extends well beyond the person behind the wheel.
The Employer Under Respondeat Superior
Under a doctrine called respondeat superior, Latin for “let the master answer,” an employer is legally responsible for the wrongful acts of an employee when those acts occur within the scope of employment.5Legal Information Institute. Respondeat Superior If the truck driver was making a delivery, heading to a job site, or doing anything else the company directed, the company shares liability for the driver’s negligence. Two conditions have to be met: the driver has to be an actual employee rather than an independent contractor, and the driver has to have been acting within the scope of their job duties. A driver who had gone significantly off-route for personal reasons may fall outside that scope.
The Company’s Own Negligence
A trucking company can also be independently liable for its own failures, apart from anything the driver did. Negligent hiring is one route: federal regulations require motor carriers to screen prospective drivers’ safety records, motor vehicle records, and qualifications, and a company that skips those checks and puts a dangerous driver on the road can be sued for it.6eCFR. 49 CFR Part 391 – Qualifications of Drivers Negligent maintenance is another: every motor carrier must systematically inspect, repair, and maintain its commercial vehicles and keep records documenting that work.4eCFR. 49 CFR 396.3 – Inspection, Repair, and Maintenance A company that sends a truck out with worn brakes or bald tires is directly negligent regardless of how carefully the driver was operating.
Federal Rules That Can Help Your Claim
Commercial trucking is heavily regulated, and violations of those rules are powerful evidence of negligence.
Hours-of-Service Limits
Driver fatigue drives a disproportionate share of serious truck crashes. A property-carrying commercial truck driver may drive a maximum of 11 hours, but only within a 14-hour window after coming on duty following at least 10 consecutive hours off duty. After 8 hours of driving, the driver must take at least a 30-minute break before driving again. Weekly, drivers are capped at 60 hours on duty over 7 consecutive days, or 70 hours over 8 consecutive days if the carrier runs every day of the week.7eCFR. 49 CFR 395.3 – Maximum Driving Time for Property-Carrying Vehicles Electronic logging devices record these hours automatically. If the driver who hit you was over their legal hours, that violation is strong evidence of negligence and can also open the door to claims against the company for pressuring or allowing the driver to keep going.
Minimum Insurance Coverage
Federal law requires interstate commercial carriers to carry much more insurance than an ordinary driver. For-hire carriers hauling non-hazardous goods in vehicles over 10,001 pounds must carry at least $750,000 in public liability coverage. Carriers transporting oil or hazardous materials must carry at least $1 million, and those hauling the most dangerous materials, such as certain explosives, face a $5 million minimum.8eCFR. 49 CFR 387.9 – Financial Responsibility, Minimum Levels Compared to a crash with an underinsured commuter, there is far more likely to be enough coverage available to pay for serious injuries and vehicle damage.
Handling the Trucking Insurer’s Call
Expect a call from the trucking company’s insurance adjuster quickly. These are not the adjusters who handle minor fender-benders. Trucking insurers deal with high-value claims routinely, and their adjusters are trained to minimize what the company pays.
The adjuster will likely ask for a recorded statement. You are not legally required to give one, and doing so before you fully understand your injuries and the facts of the crash is risky. The questions are often framed to get you to downplay your injuries, speculate about what happened, or make inconsistent statements that can later be used to reduce your claim. A polite “I’m not ready to provide a statement at this time” is a complete answer.
Early settlement offers are the other common tactic. It is normal for a trucking insurer to put a quick offer in front of you before your medical treatment is finished and the full extent of your injuries is known. Those offers almost always undervalue the claim. Once you accept, you sign a release giving up all future claims from the accident, so accepting too soon can leave you covering major expenses out of pocket.
Compensation You Can Recover
Compensation in truck accident claims falls into two broad categories, with a third available in cases of especially bad conduct.
Economic damages cover measurable financial losses: medical treatment from the initial emergency visit through ongoing care, future procedures, lost wages, reduced earning capacity, and the cost of repairing or replacing your vehicle. Every dollar can be documented with bills, pay stubs, and repair estimates.
Non-economic damages cover losses that don’t come with a receipt, including physical pain, emotional distress such as anxiety or post-traumatic stress, and loss of enjoyment of life. These are inherently subjective, which is why documenting your daily experience during recovery helps. A journal noting pain levels, activities you can’t perform, and how the injuries affect your routine gives your claim specificity that generic medical records don’t.
Punitive damages come into play when the trucking company or driver acted with conscious disregard for safety. They aren’t meant to compensate you for a loss; they punish especially dangerous conduct and deter others from repeating it. Scenarios include a company that knowingly pressured drivers to exceed hours-of-service limits, falsified inspection or maintenance records, retained a driver with a known history of dangerous behavior, or dispatched a truck despite out-of-service violations. The legal standard is high — you generally need clear evidence of willful misconduct or reckless indifference, not ordinary carelessness — but where the facts support it, punitive awards can be substantial.
If You Were Partly at Fault
Being partly responsible doesn’t necessarily bar you from recovering damages, but it will affect the amount. Most states follow some form of comparative negligence, where your compensation is reduced by your percentage of fault. If your total damages are $200,000 and you’re found 20% at fault, you’d recover $160,000.
The dividing line that matters is between pure comparative negligence systems, which allow recovery even if you were mostly at fault, and modified systems, which cut off recovery once your fault hits a certain threshold, typically 50% or 51%. A small number of states still follow contributory negligence, where any fault on your part, even 1%, can eliminate your right to compensation. Check your state’s specific rule, because this single issue can determine whether you have a viable claim at all.
Filing Deadlines
Every state imposes a deadline for filing a personal injury lawsuit, known as a statute of limitations. These windows range from as short as one year to as long as five or six years depending on the state, with two to three years being the most common range. Miss the deadline and you lose the right to sue regardless of how strong your claim is. The clock typically starts on the date of the accident, though some states have exceptions for injuries that weren’t immediately discoverable.
For claims involving government-owned trucks or vehicles operated by government employees, the timeline is usually much shorter and may require you to file an administrative notice of claim well before filing suit. If a government vehicle was involved, investigate those shorter deadlines immediately.
When to Bring in an Attorney
You can handle a minor car accident claim on your own. A truck accident claim is a different animal. Multiple potentially liable parties, federal regulatory violations, rapidly disappearing evidence, aggressive insurance defense teams, and complex damage calculations make these cases hard to navigate without experienced help.
Most personal injury attorneys handle truck accident cases on a contingency fee basis, meaning you pay nothing upfront and the attorney’s fee comes out of your recovery, typically between 33% and 40% of the settlement or verdict. If you recover nothing, you owe nothing. That arrangement removes the financial barrier to hiring representation, which matters because the trucking company and its insurer will have legal teams working from day one.
The preservation letter is a good example of why early involvement counts. An attorney can send that letter within days of the crash, before any evidence is destroyed, and can arrange for inspection and download of the truck’s electronic data. Waiting even a few weeks can cost you access to information that would have made or broken your claim.