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In order to handle these cases, these cases are not like car crashes. These cases are not like normal negligence injury cases. So, you can do personal injury and not know how to do a trucking case. To do a trucking case, you have to have the experience, you have to have the knowledge, and you have to have the resources.
I’m attorney Dave Craig, Managing Partner and one of the Founders of the law firm of Craig, Kelley & Faultless. I’ve represented people who have been seriously injured or 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. This is After the Crash.
Welcome to another episode of After the Crash, the podcast. Today is a little bit different. As you know, I’m David Craig and I host this podcast on a regular, ongoing basis and have done so for over two years, but today is different. Today we have a special host, Samantha Stevens, and Samantha will be hosting this episode of After the Crash. Samantha is an attorney with the law firm of Craig, Kelley & Faultless, and more importantly, she also is my daughter, and so today, she’ll be the one asking the questions and I’ll do the answering. Thanks Samantha for helping us out.
Samantha Stevens – Guest Host:
Absolutely. Thank you for letting me be a part of it. So, I guess we’ll turn it around here, and I’ll kind of go through your credentials so everybody here can hear that since they don’t usually get to. David is the managing partner of Craig, Kelley & Faultless. He started this podcast to help those trying to navigate the aftermath of commercial motor vehicle wrecks causing serious injury or wrongful deaths. He’s the author of Semitruck Wreck: A Guide for Victims and Their Families. He’s been selected by peers for inclusion in the 29th Edition of the Best Lawyers in America® in the practice area of Personal Injury litigation for Plaintiffs. He has been selected as one of the Top 50 from Indiana Super Lawyers. He’s been a Super Lawyer Honoree since 2011, and he is a recipient of the Thurgood Marshall Fighting for Justice Award for work in trucking litigation and a member of the Multi-Million Dollar Advocates Forum.
I have an enormous amount of respect for my dad, and I know I’ve been working with him since 2012, and I can say that he is an incredibly knowledgeable and talented attorney, and he’s also just a great person. He’s a great dad and a great grandpa to my two wonderful children, and I have just a lot of respect and I’m honored to get to be a part of this today. So, thanks for letting me be here. What we’re talking about today is we’re going to discuss common questions and concerns that families have during this process and basically what you’ve learned handling these truck and commercial motor vehicle cases throughout the years. I guess we’ll start off by what’s important for people to know after they or a loved one have been involved in one of these wrecks.
What’s Important to Know After You or a Loved One Has Been Involved in a Semi or Large Truck Accident?
David Craig:
Well, these semi wrecks, commercial motor vehicles, regardless of whether it’s a flatbed truck, a semi, a dump truck, a bus, any type of commercial motor vehicle, they’re so big and they weigh so much that when they’re involved in a wreck with a four-wheeler car, they cause devastating results and often cause catastrophic injuries or cause death. So, right after a wreck happens, the families, and their world is turned upside down. I think it’s extraordinarily important for the friends and family members of those people who’ve been involved in one of these serious commercial motor vehicle wrecks to step in because the immediate family have their hands full. They’re either dealing with a death or they’re dealing with somebody in a hospital that’s seriously injured or sometimes, and oftentimes, both. The last thing they’re thinking about is hiring a lawyer or protecting their rights.
So I would definitely, if anybody’s out there listening to this that knows somebody who is going through this situation, I would strongly recommend that you intervene, that you go to the family, and somebody has to be the spokesperson for the family. Someone has to take action and somebody has to do something because time is of the essence. The trucking company doesn’t have the same concerns that the victim’s family has. They look at this purely as a business and this is a loss, and they know that there’s economic consequences to this wreck, and so they look at it and say, how do we preserve our resources? How do we preserve our money? How do we protect our driver, our semi driver, our truck driver? What do we do to protect our company? So, they immediately have these rapid response teams. So, as soon as there’s a wreck, the semi driver typically calls sometimes even before 911, they call the dispatch and they tell the trucking company, “Hey, I’ve been in a wreck. It’s really a bad one,” and that immediately sets in motion. So, within minutes, a team is put together by the trucking industry to go out and start protecting their case. Oftentimes, I’ve had cases where the trucking company, the claims adjuster, the insurance company, and even the defense lawyers are at the scene even before my client’s body has been removed, and they’re there for the specific purpose of protecting the trucking company and the truck drivers. Our families and our clients are still grieving, and so, somebody in the family has to step in and say, “Hey look, I need to look out for this family and I need to get an attorney. I need to hire an attorney.” The defense, the trucking company, the insurance companies, and defense lawyers are already working the case.
Samantha Stevens – Guest Host:
So, once they’ve made that, once somebody’s kind of stepped up and said, “Okay, we need to protect the family,” let’s talk about how does that person decide what attorney to hire. How do they make sure they’re hiring the right attorney because there are lots of attorneys out there who want to take these kind of cases, but they may not have the resources or they may not have the knowledge, so can you explain how is somebody going to know they’re getting the right attorney?
How Do You Know if You’re Getting the Right Attorney for Your Case?
David Craig:
Yeah, that’s extraordinarily important. When one of these catastrophic cases comes around, there’s a lot of lawyers that are advertising. There are lawyers on television, there are lawyers with billboards, there are lawyers with radio, and there are lawyers that are buying pay per clicks, so, they’re putting their ads on top of the Google searches. Luckily, they always say ad on them because just because they’re on television, on billboards or on Google pay per clicks doesn’t necessarily make them good or bad. You certainly don’t want to pick a lawyer just because of one of those things. In order to handle these cases, these cases are not like car crashes. These cases are not like normal negligence injury cases. So, you can do personal injury and not know how to do a trucking case. To do a trucking case, you have to have the experience, you have to have the knowledge, and you have to have the resources.
So you have to have the knowledge, you have to understand what rules apply to a trucking case, a big commercial motor vehicle case. Well, there are the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations. Well, there’s a lot of injury attorneys that have no idea what the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations provide, so you need a lawyer who knows that and knows what’s in those regulations because those regulations apply throughout the country. Then in addition, there’s going to be CDL manuals, commercial driver’s license manuals. Those manuals are pretty much the same with little tweaks here and there state by state. So, your lawyer has to have the knowledge of what’s in there. Your lawyer has to know the knowledge of what are the industry standards, what is normal. If you don’t do this day in and day out, you don’t know that stuff.
So, that’s knowledge, but then you can have a lot of knowledge. You can be really smart and not have the experience, not know how to handle the defense lawyers because the defense company, the trucking companies and the trucking insurance companies are going to hire the best lawyers to go against you. So, you better have a lawyer who has experience, who has been dealing with these type of cases, who has been dealing with these type of issues, who has been dealing with these insurance companies and these lawyers. So, you want to make sure they have experience. Then, the last thing that I say is that you have to have the resources. I tried a case out in Kansas City, it’s a tens of millions of dollars case and we had a quarter of a million dollars in it. Not every law firm has the money to invest in the right experts to try those cases.
These cases can be extraordinarily expensive, and if you hire the wrong law firm that doesn’t have the money, because if you’re the family, you’re not going to have to front the money, the expenses, the lawyer will do that for you. If the lawyer doesn’t have the money either, then that’s a real problem because the lawyer might settle cheap, might settle quickly, might not hire the right people, and might not increase the value of your case by doing the things that need to be done. So, I think that those are key things that you need are the experience, the knowledge and the resources. Now, fortunately, with Google and with the internet, you can look and find a lot of that, but don’t just go by what somebody says, “I’m the best” or “I’ve handled this” or “here’s what I’ve done.”
Look at their credentials. Do they have that experience? Do they have that knowledge? Do they have the resources? The resources are a little bit harder to find, but you might be able to check by the size of the case. One of the things is in trucking area there is board certification process, and the board certification process is kind of a way that someone else can do this work for you. The board certification process is through the National Board of Trial Advocacy, and there’s actually a board certification in truck accident law and the National Board of Trial Advocacy is accredited by the ABA. So, it’s independent, no trial lawyer owns it. You can’t buy your way into it. It’s a group that then looks at your experience and your knowledge, and then they look at that and they say, okay, in order to be board certified you have to have a lot of experience handling these kinds of cases.
You have to have judges who have seen you handle these cases vouch for you. You have to have other lawyers who’ve seen you handle these cases vouch for you. You have to have a certain level of experience like trials or depositions or briefs or whatever, and then, you have to go pass a test, and so you take a test to pass that. So, the last time I checked there were about 60 lawyers throughout the whole country. I mean there’s thousands, tens of thousands of lawyers, but there’s less than 100. There’s like around 60 lawyers that are board certified, and so, that’s something that I would check and say, “Okay, is this lawyer board certified?” I would also look at the Martindale-Hubbell, one of the oldest rating companies in the world, and they have what’s called an AV preeminent lawyer. So I would look and see are they AV preeminent.
Avvo is a company that ranks lawyers. I’d look at the Avvo and these are organizations I’m talking about that you can’t just buy your way in. Best Lawyers by US News and World Report rank lawyers and they do it by peer review by asking other lawyers. I would check and see if these lawyers are listed in Best Lawyers. Then, Super Lawyers is something that every state has that again is peer reviewed. I would look and see, “Okay, is this lawyer a Super Lawyer and how long has this lawyer been a Super Lawyer?” So before I ever would pick a lawyer, I would want to look and see are they board certified and do they have all these organizations that I just talked about, obviously the more they have, the more knowledgeable and experienced they are. Then, the last thing I would do if I were a victim of a truck wreck is I would narrow it down to two or three, and then I personally would encourage people to interview those lawyers because you’re going to spend years with these lawyers and just because somebody’s got the experience and they’re knowledgeable and has the resources doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a good person. They may not be the right fit for you or your family and you’re going to be spending potentially years with them and you want to make sure they’re a good fit for you and your family.
Samantha Stevens – Guest Host:
Absolutely. We do have a lot of clients call in and say they’re talking to multiple attorneys and we’re happy. I assume most attorneys are happy to answer questions and talk to you and give you their time. I’d hope they would be.
David Craig:
Yeah, I just had somebody not too long ago call me and said, I’ve done my research. I know you’re a really good lawyer, and I know you have the experience. I know that you are board certified, I know you have all these things, but I’ve also got two other lawyers who also are just as experienced and just have just as good reputation, and then they go, so why should I pick you? And my response was, “Well interview all three of us, and I think you will find a slight difference between me and them. If you pick my law firm, I will be grateful that you picked my law firm. The other lawyers I bet will make you feel like you should be grateful that you picked them.” It’s a slight difference, but I appreciate the fact that these people pick me.
I am humble enough to realize that I’m very blessed and fortunate to be able to represent these people going through their worst times of their lives, and I try to make a positive difference in their lives. I don’t look at this, I look at every case as an individual case and an individual family. And I think that if you do that interview and that that person ended up hiring me after they did interview all three and they said, “You were absolutely right. They made us feel like, man, this lawyer was bigger and better than us where you made us feel like you were just one of us and part of the team and we would be part of your team.” So, I think that is important.
Samantha Stevens – Guest Host:
I think I’ve seen since I was young, I’ve seen you kind of go above and beyond. I think you genuinely care about your clients and their wellbeing and you had a client when I was 15 who still calls you sometimes for advice. I think I hear about him calling in occasionally. So, you’ve got clients 15 what, 17 years later still calling you, and you take their calls and talk to them, and you see people out and about and talk to them. So, I think you genuinely care about the clients, and I think they feel that and see that. They don’t hesitate to pick up the phone and call you years down the road.
David Craig:
I, personally and by the way I run our law firm, is I’m personally involved in every commercial motor vehicle case. I go out to the inspections. I mean I personally go out and look at the evidence. I go to the scene. I personally do that. I put the team together, and then on my desk right now, if you could see it, I actually have pictures of my clients whose families have been devastated, who have, one right here in my left hand is a father who was killed. I have a picture of his wife and kids. This stuff is personal to me and I care very much about what I do, and I don’t want to ever lose sight of that. It’s not a case. All I have to do is look around my office and I see the families.
Samantha Stevens – Guest Host:
Something else that we hear a lot from clients that they’re very concerned about, some of them but a lot of times we hear, okay, “Well how am I going to pay for this?” That is kind of the last thing they want to worry about, but they are worried about it. They got a lot going on, and a lot of bills coming their way. So, a lot of clients are pretty concerned about how are they going to pay. Do they have to pay as they go? Do they have to pay for time? How do they pay? So can you explain the contingency fee and how we work as a firm?
What Is Craig, Kelley, and Faultless Contingency Fee and How Does the Firm Work?
David Craig:
Yeah, so almost every lawyer that handles semi case, a commercial motor vehicle case, a big rig, a traumatic wreck case, what they do is they work on a contingency fee. A contingency fee just means is that they don’t get paid unless they get you some money. Historically and traditionally, it’s a percentage of whatever you get. It’s not unusual for a fee agreement to say for example, a third. They’ll charge a third of whatever the results are at the end of the case. Sometimes, it’ll go up. If the case doesn’t settle, then the amount of work goes up. So, then the fee goes up. Once you file a lawsuit, it goes up and then if it doesn’t get settled before a trial, then the fee may go up again. Sometimes, it goes up again if you appeal it.
So a contingency fee is if you lose the case for whatever reason, you get nothing, and the lawyer gets nothing. Obviously, the client doesn’t get anything, but the contingency fee is a great way to equalize the battlefield. The playing field, the insurance companies pay their lawyers, the trucking companies pay their lawyers by an hourly rate. So, they pay them, and some of these firms are huge firms and some of these lawyers charge $500, $600, $750 an hour. Well, a lot of the folks we represent, they couldn’t afford to pay me $750 an hour on a monthly basis. So, the contingency fee allows victims of a semi wreck to hire some of the best lawyers out there in the country that are just as good if not better than some of the insurance lawyers and pay them at the end of the case and not have to pay them because they wouldn’t be able to afford to do it on that way.
So, that’s what a contingency fee is. You don’t pay until you get a result and the amount of the fee may go up depending on the amount of work. Now, I would caution people on some law firms advertise that they will flat fee it or they’ll just charge a small percentage no matter what. So, they might charge say 25%. I saw somebody advertising 25%. The problem is they charge 25% no matter what. So, you think about that common sense tells you, well they’re only charging you 25%, and it doesn’t go up based upon the amount of work they do, then what incentive do they have to do the work? So, I look at those law firms and I can’t say all of them, but certainly some of the ones I’ve seen, I know that they’re not really going to do the work.
I know that they’re looking at trying to get a quick, cheap settlement, and so, that’s why they can charge a low fee on the bottom. Now, I’m sure there are exceptions, but I don’t know of any. So when I would look at it, I would look and say what is fair is to pay an increased fee based upon the amount of work that’s done and not pay if they don’t get results, and the incentive is the more money the law firm gets you, the more money they get. So, they have the same incentive that you do, plus they advance all the expenses. Most of the time under most fee agreements in most states, not all, the lawyer is out the expenses and does not get reimbursed expenses. If they lose, the client doesn’t have to reimburse them.
Samantha Stevens – Guest Host:
That’s one thing that’s nice about our firm I think, is that all the attorneys, we’ve all been here for years and we’ve all been told that we work for the client. So, we’re not pressuring the client to do what we want to do. We give our advice and we talk about it. We round table things, we talk about it with all the other attorneys, and we’ve got all the numbers that you would want. We’ll give you our best advice, but ultimately, you’re going to make the call. So, some people don’t want to go that far, some people do. We give you our advice, you make the calls, we’re not going to bully you into something, which is something that I respect and each attorney here has that power. It’s not something just reserved for the partners or things of that nature. So, that’s something that’s not true of every firm, that’s a nice thing about working here.
David Craig:
We empower the client. Everything we do is designed to empower the clients. You empower them by giving them information. That’s why I did the book, and that’s why I do the podcast. When you empower them by letting them make the decision, do you want to settle or do you want to go to trial? We give our recommendation, but I never force somebody to settle and I never force somebody to go to trial. That’s their choice. I work for them, we work for them, and we should respect their opinion once we give advice. My doctor sometimes tells me I should do things differently. I respect his opinion or her opinion. My cardiologist, she tells me I should do things differently, but the reality is I make those decisions, they don’t force me to. That’s the same with my client. My clients respect our opinions, and then they make the decision on what we do.
Samantha Stevens – Guest Host:
We also have, and I think we’ll get to this, but the nice thing too is we’ve got attorneys that are very talented at each process in a lawsuit. We’ve got very talented attorneys that crafting discovery for motor vehicle carriers and everything that goes into that. We’ve got very talented attorneys taking depositions. These are very complicated depositions when you get into these commercial motor vehicle crashes, and we’ve got talented trial attorneys. So, I think it’s nice to have that as an option. Not all firms have somebody that’s really good at everything and we kind of play to our strengths. So, everybody works at what they’re good at and we’ve got multiple people that are really talented at each step of the process. So it makes it a little easier, I think, to make a decision when you’ve got that confidence in your law firm.
David Craig:
Absolutely.
Samantha Stevens – Guest Host:
Alright, let’s talk about once you’ve answered these initial questions. Once they’ve chosen an attorney, what’s going to happen next? What happens after they’ve hired an attorney?
What Happens After You’ve Hired an Attorney?
David Craig:
So, what should happen is that as soon as the family hires an attorney, then a team, internal team should be put together. So that’s a team of people with inside the law firm. So with us, we say, okay, which lawyers are going to work with me on this case? What other people are going to work with me on this case? Are we going to have an investigator in house? Is there property damages or damage to vehicles that we have to deal with? Do we have to secure vehicles? So, I put together a team and so we put that team together, that team will immediately start working. So, I have a guy who does some investigations and does the property damage secured vehicles. He immediately does a background check on the trucking company involved. He immediately contacts the police and starts looking for the police report.
He starts pulling all the news stories. He pulls Facebook pages and everything else you can imagine that has anything to do with the people involved and the event itself. On top of that, I have other people in the office that start working on drafting documents in case we have to get a restraining order or in case we have to draft a Complaint, all those type of things that starts a lawsuit. They start working on that. Then, I also hire an external team, a team outside my office that’s going to work on this case. That depends on what type of case it is, but there’s always going to, almost always, going to be an accident reconstructionist. I use accident reconstructions from all over the country depending on where the wreck is because we handle semi wrecks all over the country. So, we’ll bring in different experts depending on where the wreck is and what type of wreck it is.
The reconstructionist will begin immediately. We want them to be at the scene quickly before the evidence is destroyed or lost. In addition, we’ll want somebody to do a download. So, these big semis and commercial motor vehicles have what’s called an ECM or electronic control modules. There is a computer inside these vehicles that stores data that we want to obtain and get our hands on. The problem is that can be destroyed by someone else. It can be destroyed by the trucking company. If they move the vehicle, they break, fly a hard brake on the vehicle, they try to take the information out, and they might hurt it or destroy it. So, I have to have somebody who’s qualified in taking that type of information out and each, if it’s a Volvo, there’s different types of engines and certain engines have proprietary software that there’s only a couple companies in the whole country that can do the download.
So, I have to know what kind of vehicles are involved. Then, based upon that, that’s how I decide who does the download. Then, a lot of times I’ll have someone cloud point scan the scene. For example, I did a multiple wrongful death case. I represented one person in a multiple death case down in Bowling Green, Kentucky. So, I sent a scanner, somebody to go down and scan that and we scanned a whole roadway. So we scan the road, the path that the truck driver took and the path that our client took. There was a construction zone. We had to preserve that before the signs moved, before all that, and before the road got changed. We cloud point scanned which then creates the roadway in the computer and it’s to scale. It’s perfect and you can recreate the wreck on that computer.
If you don’t go out and preserve that and if you don’t scan it right after the wreck, then you may never be able to do that again. Construction zones are particularly tricky cases because construction zones change daily. We have one right now, a wrongful death case with box truck. We had to get there quickly to look and see what kind of signage was up and what kind of markings were up. You have to do that to see if there’s someone else that might be responsible because the trucking company may blame the construction zone.
So, that outside group of experts may have a reconstructionist, somebody who does download, someone who does scanning, and someone who does a highway or constructions, road design. We’ll send private investigators out to look for security videos and security cameras in the area because more often than not wrecks nowadays are captured by video or they’ll go out and talk to all the witnesses in the houses, in the neighborhoods, the businesses around where the wreck happened to gather information, see whether there were eyewitnesses, and see whether or not that’s a dangerous intersection or dangerous stretch of road.
So, you have a whole team of experts put together and sometimes the other side is cooperative, and so we can schedule the download. Then, there’s other times when they’re not and we have to get a restraining order and tell them they can’t touch the vehicles until we get an opportunity to get our experts. We don’t want their experts touching or altering things. I’ve had cases, I had one out by Denver, Colorado, it was on the Kansas side, and the truck was moved several states before we got hired. They had changed. They had altered the brakes on that. I had another one in over by Wichita, Kansas, in Missouri. It was actually was Kansas City, not Wichita, but Kansas City in Missouri, the Missouri side, and there was an underride guard was an issue. A client ran underneath the back of a truck and that underride guard disappeared.
So, we had another one where the tractor was out in a field, we got an agreement where they wouldn’t change or alter it. Then, we had security watching it, we had people watching it and lo and behold they snuck out there and were trying to download it without us. We had another one where a truck was being unloaded, and we had somebody out there. There’s often times I hire security guards, and I’ll hire my own investigator. I have a guy who goes out, and we watch these vehicles to make sure that the evidence is preserved right after we get hired. So, there’s a lot of work on the front end once we get hired, putting that team together, and then coordinating it. Again, in our firm I work and I’m actually actively involved in all that.
Samantha Stevens – Guest Host:
Yeah, and that definitely goes towards when we were initially talking about hiring an attorney. It really is because time is of the essence because there’s a lot that can be lost in a short amount of time.
David Craig:
To give you an example, we recently handled a case where on I-70 and a semi dropped part of its load. So, the truck driver was blaming the people who loaded the truck in part, they’re blaming other people. The law is once a truck driver takes a load off the property, then it’s the truck driver’s responsibility and it’s not the shipper’s responsibility. So, we got hired quickly in that case. We were able to go out to where the trailer was with all the merchandise, and some of the stuff was still on there. And we put our investigator out there, and he called me when they were getting ready to unload that trailer. My son, Bobby, is a professional videographer. I went there with our investigator, and we were there in time to watch them unload that trailer.
When we watched them unload that trailer, we found out that the certain what’s called dunnage, the boards that were on the flatbed to hold the load, they weren’t fastened down. As a result, that’s why the load shifted and the law says shippers normally not responsible unless the defect that causes the load to fall off is hidden and the driver, the truck didn’t know about it, couldn’t have known about it. Had we not got hired that quickly, if we had not gotten hired in that case, a friend reached out to the family and said, “You need a lawyer. I know your husband died, but you need a lawyer.” Had they not done that, we would not have known why that load fell off and that the shipper was saying it was just strapping. It was just the truck driver’s fault. We were able to prove, and then, we were able to get a settlement for the family from the shipper as well as the truck driver and the trucking company. So with that stuff, you got to get hired quick, and then once you get hired, you got to have a team of people who know what they’re doing and have done this before or that if you waited a extra couple days, that evidence would’ve been lost and millions of dollars would’ve been lost.
Samantha Stevens – Guest Host:
Well, once we’ve been hired, we get our initial preservation letters out, get our internal team and our external team put together here, and start working on preserving evidence. At some point along the way, a lawsuit is more than likely going to get filed. Can you kind of walk people through what’s going to happen there?
What Happens if a Lawsuit is Filed?
David Craig:
So, where you file a lawsuit is important. So when a wreck happens, you can usually file it where it happens. You can also file it from where the trucking company’s located. You can file where the truck driver’s located or lives. Oftentimes with a semi driver or 18 wheel driver, a trucking company, they’re going to be from a different state, sometimes than where the wreck happens. So again, this is where the experience and knowledge comes in. The first question is, “Where do we want to file this lawsuit?” Many lawyers that don’t know this area, they’ll just file it where the wreck happened. I’ve got a case right now that for example, that we can file it in three different locations. We are actually doing focus groups to see where should we file it, what do the people in those three different states think, and then what do they think of the issues of this case.
We try to decide where can we file this that’s going to help the family the most, and then you file a lawsuit. Sometimes, you’re in federal court, and sometimes, you’re in state court. Again, depending on what state you’re in, that could be good or bad for your case or for the value of your case. In certain parts of the country, the verdicts are higher than other parts, and that’s one of the things as a lawyer or plaintiff lawyer, as a lawyer representing the victims, you want to know. Then, you start the process, you start off with written discovery, which you ask them for documents, you ask them to answer questions, they ask us the same thing or ask us questions, give us, ask us for documents. Then, you do depositions. Depositions are where you sit down in a room and all the lawyers are there, and a court reporter is there. You ask them questions, and they answer under oath.
Then, normally you have some motions, maybe some issues, legal issues that have to be addressed. Then usually you try to, in most states, they want you to do a settlement conference or a mediation. That varies from state to state, but they’re all basically the same, which is just, it’s an opportunity to try to get your case resolved without going to trial without spending the extra money and avoiding the risk. Sometimes, you can get things done there. My experience is that often cases do not get settled at mediation because the trucking company or the insurance company tries to low ball the clients to see if they’re desperate. But there are exceptions to that. Sometimes they do get done and then even if the case doesn’t settle at when they settlement conference or mediation, doesn’t mean it won’t settle.
You still have a chance to settle it as you get closer to trial, as people realize there’s more at risk. What I have found is that the closer I get to trial, the more likely the case is to get resolved, if it can be resolved. Some cases just can’t be resolved and they have to go to trial. If you go to trial, then it can be weeks, a trial can last you three or four days, or it can last a week or two depending on the type of case. Obviously, you want to get in and out as quickly as you can, but yet make sure that the jury is aware and informed. Jury trials are what they are. So, a jury of peers from the community in which you filed make the decision. Each state is different. Some states are unanimous, and some states have a majority. Basically, it’s average everyday people trying to make decisions on what’s fair for the victims.
Samantha Stevens – Guest Host:
We have a number of very talented trial attorneys here, you amongst them who you do well at trial and you like to go to trial, which I think is unique nowadays. So, I think that, again, it’s nice to have that option. You don’t want to end up with a firm who doesn’t go to trial and not have that option if the other side isn’t being fair. Hopefully, they work with you earlier on, but if you get to that point, you want to have that option, which is nice to have.
David Craig:
As part of this podcast, I’ve interviewed defense lawyers who used to defend trucking companies or still do defend trucking companies. The one thing they all say is that whether the attorney goes to trial or not, has an impact on how they value a case. Because if you have a lawyer who never goes to trial, the insurance company knows that. The trucking companies know that and they will not pay you fairly because you cannot force them to pay you what’s fair.
So, you have to be willing to go to trial. I enjoy trial, but at the same time I realize that my clients don’t always enjoy it. It’s a stressful thing, but no matter what the insurance companies and trucking companies put my clients through, it’s nothing compared to what they’re already going through. I just talked to some clients the other day whose husband was killed when a semi ran a red light. No matter how horrible this process is, it’s not as bad as the day they lost their husband and their father. So, I recognize that trials, none of my clients want to go through trial, but very few of my clients, they’re all willing to go to trial if they have to.
Samantha Stevens – Guest Host:
I will say too, something that I think says a lot about the clients, but also a lot about you and the firm, is that kind of in that same realm, but we’ve got clients who have decided to that they would like to take less to make changes. They’ve gone through this, and no one should have to go through this. There’s nothing that compares to how awful that is. So for them, no amount of money is going to make this okay. So, there’s been times where they’ve said, “Okay, you know what? We’re going to take less, but we want some changes so this doesn’t happen again.” You all have had that happen numerous times, and I think that’s different than in some firms.
David Craig:
Yeah. At the end of the day, we’re trying to make the world a little better place. At the end of the day, we want to make the world safer. We want to help people, help clients. I have clients who oftentimes will say, “Our family will take less money”, as much as a half a million dollars less I’ve had, “if this trucking company will do a X, Y and Z.” We had a case where we wanted certain sleep deprivation policies put in place. We wanted to make sure that drivers that had sleep apnea had to go through certain training and do certain things and because we had a client who had a family member who was killed because of what we alleged was a truck driver who fell asleep to will and he had sleep apnea. The family was willing to take less money in order to make a change, to make the world safer.
That trucking company was a huge trucking company that travels all over the country, and there’s no doubt in my mind that we all are safer because that client made that choice. We have a lot of cases like that where we’ve made changes or we’ve asked the companies because that’s one thing they understand is money. So, if they can save money at the same time, make things better, then oftentimes they will do that. That’s something that we propose and try to do, and I think that’s fantastic. I think clients sometimes feel better about the process because they know they have made a difference. I think that’s important. That’s why our goal here at Craig, Kelley and Faultless is to make the lives of our clients better, to make the lives of the people in our communities better, and to make the lives of our employees better. I think that really matters.
There’s nothing like that. When you’re negotiating that and you know you’re making things safer, and it’s easy to get up in the morning and go to work when that you’re fighting for the right, you’re fighting for people who need you, you’re fighting, you’re treating people the way you want to be treated. Your clients are not being bossed around. You’re keeping them informed. You’re making them part of the team and you’re taking care of them.
Samantha Stevens – Guest Host:
Absolutely. Anything else important that you want to cover?
David Craig:
No, I think that, again, I think that I’m very proud of our law firm. I don’t think that everybody listening to this is going to hire Craig, Kelley & Faultless, but hopefully they know what questions they need to ask their lawyers or how do they pick a lawyer, what do they do, and hopefully, they can gain some insight. So, I really appreciate the fact that kind of tables are turned. I normally do all the questioning, and today, you did a fantastic job asking the questions and I appreciate you being the host of After the Crash.
Samantha Stevens – Guest Host:
Well, thank you. Thanks for letting me be a part of it. I appreciate it.
David Craig:
This is David Craig, and you’ve been listening to After the Crash. If you’d like more information about me or my law firm, please go to our website, ckflaw.com. 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. This is available on Amazon, or you can download it for free on our website, ckflaw.com.
