Truck crash lawyer Las Vegas NV

Truck crashes may begin like any other collision, but the cases behind them are anything but ordinary. In this video, Keith E. Galliher, Jr., founder and principal attorney of The Galliher Law Firm in Las Vegas, explains what sets commercial truck cases apart. 

Galliher describes how federal regulations limit how long a trucker can stay behind the wheel — and how often those limits are violated. He explains why these cases typically require filing suit early to obtain the driver’s logs, which can reveal hours-of-service violations that provide an additional basis for liability. It’s a more demanding approach, and one The Galliher Law Firm is equipped to pursue for people injured by commercial trucks. 

Transcript 

You know, you handle a truck accident, from a client’s standpoint, pretty much the same way. You give your statement to the police, you go see a lawyer, you start getting treatment — that’s fine. But truck accident cases are a little different, because usually they focus on the trucker, the driver of the truck, the driver of the tractor that pulls the trailer. Usually he’s credentialed, he’s got a license. However, what happens with these types of cases is that a lot of times the truckers drive too long. There are federal regulations that control how long a trucker can drive a truck, and they violate them all the time. 

So one of the first things you do as an attorney is you’re going to have to file a lawsuit — those cases rarely resolve without filing a lawsuit. When you do, one of the first things you want are the logs for the trucker, showing how long he was driving the day of the crash. More often than not, you’ll find out that he exceeded the federal requirements, which gives you an additional predicate for liability, apart from whatever negligence he committed that caused the crash. So they’re handled differently: you file litigation earlier, and you get that early discovery of that trucker’s log to find out how long he was behind the wheel.