Marketing For Victims
Lawyer's commercial to attract truck accident suits draws trucker's ire.
Deborah Whistler
Editor
There's nothing new about lawyers out to get truckers. The deep pockets of the trucking industry keep many an attorney in Gucci.
As a matter of fact, suing truckers has become a target business for many unscrupulous members of the bar.
Why go after truckers? Because the odds of getting a judgment or settlement are so good — whether the opposing party has a legitimate case or not.
One particularly unsettling case involved a CFI truck parked off the highway. A motorist ran off the road and struck the parked rig. Tragically, her passenger was killed. The auto driver admitted she and her companion had been up all night drinking and that she had fallen asleep at the wheel. Regardless, the dead woman's family sued, winning an $1.8 million judgment against CFI.
"When a car is involved in an accident with a truck, even though the truck driver wasn't at fault, they'll look at logbooks, driving records — anything to sway a judge or jury," says Shawn Sullivan, president of Truck Writers Inc., a Minneapolis-based insurance agency. "It's ridiculous. We're seeing 15-mph rear-end accidents where damage to the car is maybe $2,000, but awards can run $750,000 or even $1 million dollars because the plaintiff claims a neck injury."
Huge awards are exactly why lawyers are specifically targeting truckers. We were told by the American Trucking Assns. that lawyer groups have actually sponsored seminars on how to successfully sue trucking companies. Some are even marketing via television to get "victims" to represent.
I got a call recently from a trucker reader who came upon a truck-suing specialist. Rhonda Broussard of Fishers, Ind., said she was appalled by the TV ad the attorney was airing in the Indianapolis area.
The visuals in the ad, Rhonda says, contain image after image of mangled cars. One scene is shot from a car driver's perspective, through the rearview mirror. First, you see a large truck flashing its headlights and bearing down on the car. When the car doesn't move out of the way, the truck speeds up and rams it from behind. Sounds like a scene from a modern-day "Duel," Steven Spielberg's killer truck cult classic.
Even more disturbing, says Rhonda, are the "facts" spewed in the commercial. The voice-over warns motorists that truckers are the most unsafe drivers on the road and responsible for most accidents.
That's a bunch of baloney, and the statistics prove it.
In the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's most recent study of large truck accidents, the 2002 car-truck crash fatality toll of 4,902 — a 3.5% decline over 2001 — marked the trucking industry's best highway safety improvement in nearly a decade.
The NHTSA's data also revealed passenger car drivers share a greater responsibility for car/truck crashes than truck drivers. For example, rear-end fatal collisions where passenger cars strike commercial motor vehicles, are almost four times as likely as trucks rear-ending passenger cars. Head-on collisions with passenger cars in the truck's lane occur more than 10 times as often as the truck encroaching on the passenger car's lane.
In addition, opposite direction sideswipes (car striking the truck in the truck's lane) occur more than 12 times as often as trucks encroaching on the passenger car.
The decline in car-truck fatalities was the only bright spot in the 2002 fatal accident figures. Alcohol-related deaths, motorcycle fatalities and young driver deaths all showed an increase. In fact, all motorist-related fatalities not involving trucks have been on the rise, while truck-related deaths continue to fall. So much for the commercial's contention that trucks are the most dangerous.
Rhonda called me to see what I could do to straighten this guy. out How about we form an organization called Truckers Against Idiot Lawyers - TAIL for short, after the appendage attached to a horse's you-know-what.
In case you want to call the attorney in question, here are his vitals:
Wittry Lance
(317) 353-2020
But be advised, Mr. Lance and his office help might not be very receptive to your calls.
"I called this attorney's office and told them that I was offended," says Rhonda."His secretary told me to get a life."
