Any Bowling Green, OH truck accident lawyer can tell you, accidents of this kind are some of the most devastating. When the weight of a pedestrian, a bicycle, or an automobile collides with a truck, the smaller body is clearly going to sustain greater force and subsequent damage.
The protective shell of a commercial vehicle can sustain a much heavier impact and too often, the person in the smaller vehicle can have severe or even fatal injuries as a result.
When this happens to you or your loved one, we hope that you will seek help from our reputable personal injury attorneys, to ensure you get the compensation you deserve.
Truck Accident Injury Results
It is difficult to overstate the severe and far-reaching consequences of a truck accident. The loss of a loved one in a fatal accident is one of the most painful feelings a person can endure.
Furthermore, it leaves a hole in the family dynamic, which is especially felt if others depended on that person for care, income, or other household contributions.
If the injured party survives, it is almost always a long and painful road to recovery, filled with hospital bills, medications, therapy, and home facility adjustments.
Compound these expenses with missed work days for the injured person and caretakers, and a financial burden quickly arises. When someone is living in the aftermath of a devastating accident, the last thing they want to worry about is making ends meet.
Speaking with an experienced and knowledgeable Bowling Green truck accident attorney is the first step in securing the funds needed to get through this difficult time.
Common Truck Accident Injuries
Some truck accident injuries will heal, while others will impact a person throughout their lifetime. Some of the most common truck accident injuries include:
While these injuries are severe, know that they do not have to be faced alone. Bowling Green, OH truck accident attorneys are well versed in local, state, and federal injury law and are here to help.
Justice for Injured Truck Drivers
Of course, truck drivers themselves can be the victims of avoidable truck accidents.
Transportation companies at times can flout regulations, pushing drivers to make high-paying deliveries even when they have worked more than the allotted consecutive hours. Driving for a long period of time may lead to falling asleep at the wheel. The results are often life-altering.
Likewise, a faulty break or another mechanical failure can endanger the driver’s life, forcing their family to seek compensation for serious injuries.
Building a Truck Accident Lawsuit Around “Negligence”
Like most other civil claims filed over personal injuries, truck accident lawsuits and settlement demands in Ohio are virtually always based on the legal theory of “negligence.” In a nutshell, this theory holds that if someone causes another person to sustain a physical injury, they should be financially liable for “damages” the injured person experiences from that injury, regardless of whether they intentionally injured that person or did so entirely by accident.
More specifically, a “defendant” being sued by an injured “plaintiff” is negligent in relation to a truck crash in Bowling Green, OH if all the following conditions are met:
- The defendant owed a specific “duty of care” to the plaintiff, which required them to act responsibly and lawfully under certain circumstances,
- The defendant “breached” their duty through a specific reckless, careless, and/or illegal act,
- The defendant’s breach of duty was the “proximate”—in other words, the main and direct—cause of a collision which likely would not have happened at all without the defendant’s irresponsible act,
- The accident was the proximate cause of at least one physical injury severe enough to require professional medical care, and
- The plaintiff’s injury caused them to suffer “compensable damages” that can be remedied at least somewhat through financial reimbursement.
In this context, all drivers on all public Ohio roads have the exact same “duty of care,” which requires them to obey traffic laws, watch out for vehicles and people near them, and react rationally to unexpected obstacles and hazards they encounter while driving. Therefore, anything from an overtly illegal traffic offense to an ill-timed lapse in concentration behind the wheel can potentially qualify as legally actionable negligence if it directly leads to an otherwise preventable wreck.
As anyone who has ever been involved in a serious traffic collision can tell you, though, sorting out exactly what happened in the moments prior to a crash and whether a specific act should be considered irresponsible under the circumstances can be deceptively tricky. This is a big reason—among many others—why retaining and working closely with a skilled Bowling Green, OH truck accident attorney can be so vital to achieving a favorable result from this sort of litigation.
Understanding the Doctrine of Respondeat Superior
Of course, just because an individual truck driver is the person most directly at fault for causing a crash through their own negligent driving does not mean they are the only person who could possibly hold civil liability for the wreck. In fact, it is often possible to name the company that a negligent truck driver works for as a co-defendant in this type of claim, thanks to something called respondeat superior.
In essence, this legal principle holds that if someone is acting to further the goals of a business that employs them and acts negligently while doing so, that negligent person’s employer can be held “vicariously liable” for any injuries and damages their agent causes another person to sustain through their misconduct. Alternatively, sometimes trucking companies are actually the ones most directly to blame for truck crashes—for instance, if a wreck happens specifically because a driver was overly fatigued after being forced by their employer to stay on the road past the working hour limits set by federal law. A Bowling Green attorney can help someone injured in a truck wreck determine whether respondeat superior applies in their specific circumstance.
Is Ohio a “Fault-Based” State for Auto Accident Claims?
In some states, people who own and operate motor vehicles are required to purchase some type of “no-fault” car insurance coverage that automatically pays them for certain losses caused by a wreck but may also restrict them from being able to hold another negligent person financially liable for the incident. “No-fault” systems like this certainly have some benefits, but they can also make the process of demanding civil compensation for a truck crash a lot more complicated than it necessarily needs to be.
As a Bowling Green commercial vehicle attorney can attest, Ohio is a “fault” state, which means there are no restrictions on your right to sue someone else over negligence leading to a truck wreck. That said, you are still required to purchase “liability insurance” that covers losses sustained by other people in a wreck you were involved in, with mandatory minimum policy limits of $25,000 for a single person’s injuries, $50,000 for all injuries in a single accident, and $25,000 for all property damage in a single accident.
Recovering for Short-Term and Long-Term Damages
In a typical truck accident claim, “compensatory damages”—as the law calls them—can and should include both “economic” and “non-economic” forms of harm. Economic damages in this sort of case can include all medical bills for the treatment of crash-related injuries and lost work income during recovery from those injuries, as well as car repair/replacement costs and other out-of-pocket expenses not already covered by insurance. Non-economic damages, on the other hand, typically center around physical “pain and suffering” but can also incorporate things like emotional anguish, psychological trauma, and lost overall enjoyment of life.
In both respects, it can be vital to account for expected future losses such as the costs of rehabilitative treatment, permanent loss of earning capacity, and long-term mental distress, and you can seek compensation for these kinds of losses years in advance of when they will fully come to pass. That said, you will almost certainly need help from a qualified Bowling Green attorney to identify, assign a fair financial value to, and proactively work future damages like these into your truck accident lawsuit or settlement demand.
Damage Caps for “Non-Economic” Losses
Unfortunately, Ohio is one of many states that imposes “caps,” or artificial limits, on the total amount of money an injured person is allowed to demand for specific types of losses stemming from someone else’s negligence. As per Ohio Revised Code §2315.18, you generally cannot demand more than $250,000 or three times the total value of your economic damages—whichever is greater—for non-economic forms of harm.
Furthermore, no matter the value of your economic damages, you typically cannot demand more than $350,000 in non-economic damages from any one defendant or more than $500,000 for any single accident. However, there is a crucial exception: if you suffered an injury from a truck wreck that left you permanently disabled or disfigured, none of the damage caps mentioned in this subsection apply to you.
Punitive Damages in Truck Accident Claims
There are also caps on the maximum amount of money that a court can make a defendant pay to a plaintiff as “punitive damages” meant specifically to punish them for extremely egregious negligence or intentionally malicious conduct. In the fairly rare scenario where damages of this nature are available through a truck accident claim, O.R.C. §2315.21 prohibits any single individual or small business from being assessed more than $350,000, two times the value of the plaintiff’s total compensatory damages or 10 percent of their net worth—whichever is lesser—in punitive damages.
What Is “Comparative Fault” and How Could It Affect a Civil Claim?
Even if you and your attorney are able to establish that someone else’s negligence was the primary cause of your truck accident in Bowling Green, OH that does not necessarily mean you cannot be found partially at fault for that accident yourself. If you contributed to causing a truck wreck because you too did something reckless, careless, or illegal behind the wheel, your defendant(s) may argue—and more importantly, a court or insurance company may agree—that you should be assigned a percentage of “comparative fault” to account for the role you played in causing your own injuries.
Then, in accordance with O.R.C. §2315.33, the court or insurance company can hold that percentage of fault against you as a proportional reduction from the value of your final damage award or settlement offer. For example, if you are found to hold 25 percent of the total fault for a truck wreck because you were speeding next to a trucker who was driving drunk, you would only be able to recover for 75 percent of the total losses you sustained from that wreck.
Even worse, the abovementioned section of state law expressly prohibits civil recovery by any person found to hold a majority—meaning 51 percent or more—of the total fault for their own personal injury. Minimizing the impact that this “modified comparative fault” system has on your claim is much easier with support from the seasoned truck accident lawyers at Charles E. Boyk Law Offices.
Filing Suit Within the “Statute of Limitations”
Another legal obstacle that sometimes gets in the way of people seeking civil recovery for the effects of truck accidents is the “statute of limitations.” According to O.R.C. §2305.10, virtually everyone injured in any car accident who intends to file suit over the accident must formally start that filing process within two years of when the accident occurred.
Failing to file suit within this strictly enforced deadline will almost always result in a court immediately throwing the case out for being “time-barred,” leaving you permanently without any legal recourse for seeking payment over that particular incident. It is worth noting as well that while there is no specific legal deadline along these same lines for settlement negotiations, insurance companies and other parties will have no reason to continue negotiating a settlement in good faith if they know you are already time-barred from suing them. Contacting a Bowling Green, OH commercial truck accident lawyer as soon as possible after your wreck helps ensure any timelines are met.
Possible Changes to Filing Deadlines
While there are no “exceptions” to the statute of limitations per se, there are a few scenarios where the deadline may be different for specific plaintiffs. For example, if, for some reason, you are unable to conclusively connect a specific injury to a specific accident until some time has passed following that accident, you may be able to argue before a court that the starting point for the standard two-year filing period should be “tolled,” or paused, until the date you actually discovered your injuries. This is sometimes possible under the “discovery rule,” as a Bowling Green truck accident attorney can explain in more detail.
Likewise, the statute of limitations can be tolled in scenarios where the plaintiff who would have standing to file suit is of “unsound mind” at the time the standard filing period begins, as well as situations where the prospective defendant(s) go into hiding or flee the state of Ohio. However, if a truck accident directly results in fatal injuries, the two-year filing period for a “wrongful death” claim built around that incident will virtually always begin on the date of the deceased person’s death regardless of when their accident occurred.
How to Formally File a Truck Accident Lawsuit
Depending on the circumstances, you may not actually need to formally file suit at all in order to get paid fairly for the losses you have sustained in a Bowling Green trucking accident that was primarily not your fault. In fact, the vast majority of claims along these lines end with private settlement agreements reached by the parties directly involved in the crash without a court ever being directly involved, a process which is almost always cheaper, faster, and often more beneficial to plaintiffs than a prolonged court battle would be.
That said, Bowling Green, OH trucking companies and their insurance providers do not always interact with accident victims in good faith, especially ones who try to negotiate a fair settlement without representation from tenacious legal counsel. With that in mind, it is generally best to pursue a settlement at first but also keep the option of filing a lawsuit open, and to collect evidence and build your case with the goal of it holding up in front of a civil court.
If filing suit becomes necessary, most personal injury claims in Ohio are filed and heard in the Court of Common Pleas for the county where the accident occurred or the plaintiff lives. For Bowling Green residents, this would virtually always be the Wood County Court of Common Pleas, located on the second floor of One Courthouse Square, Bowling Green, OH 43402.
Contact a Bowling Green Truck Accident Attorney Today
Depending on the scenario, truck accidents may be the fault of the drivers themselves, the company that employs them, or some other factor.
Regardless, attorneys are willing to investigate the situation, see who is at fault and ensure they are held accountable. It is imperative, however, that you seek help within the statute of limitations — that is, within two years of the accident.
Contact our Bowling Green, OH truck accident lawyers today and we will get you on the road to recovery.
