Shreveport Truck Accident Lawyers

Shreveport’s 18-wheeler wrecks happen on I-20 and I-49, on the Inner Loop, and at the intersections along Bert Kouns, Mansfield Road, and Youree Drive where dump trucks and other commercial vehicles cross city traffic. The people in them go to Ochsner LSU Health Shreveport on Kings Highway, the Level I trauma center for this corner of the state, or to Willis-Knighton or CHRISTUS Highland. The Shreveport Police Department writes the report inside the city, and the Caddo Parish Sheriff’s Office writes it for the rest of the parish. Caddo Parish suits are filed and tried at the First Judicial District Court, 501 Texas Street. Trey Morris Injury Lawyers is at 509 Milam Street, across the street from that courthouse, and in the first week we pull the crash report, take the carrier name off the trailer, and send the preservation letter before the driver’s logs and the truck’s electronic data are overwritten.

The law that governs the claim is Louisiana law, and it is the same in Caddo Parish as everywhere else in the state. Your claim runs on a two-year clock under La. C.C. Art. 3493.1. What separates a truck case from a fender bender is the paper: when the carrier or the driver broke a federal safety rule, that violation is itself evidence of liability, and the file holding it does not sit still. We send the preservation letter for the hours-of-service records, the cargo weight documents under La. R.S. 32:386, and the crash report required by La. R.S. 32:398 before an I-20 or I-49 insurer reaches for the 51% bar in Art. 2323 to zero out what you collect.

Real commercial vehicle accident results

Results for Louisiana Clients

All case results →

• $17.2 MillionCommercial Vehicle Accident

  Client was struck head-on by a disconnected load of an 18-wheeler that crossed the median causing broken bones and amputation.

• $13 MillionCommercial Vehicle Accident

  On the interstate, an 18-wheeler failed to yield right of way then made an unsafe lane change causing the accident which resulted in major bone breaks, damaged organs, and ultimately a leg amputation.

• $7 MillionCommercial Vehicle Accident

  An 18-wheeler cut across traffic on an illegal left turn and hit our client, who suffered neck and back injuries.

• $4 MillionCommercial Vehicle Accident

  Our client's vehicle was struck by the at-fault vehicle, resulting in neck and back injuries.

• $3.2 MillionCommercial Vehicle Accident

  Commercial vehicle collision. Details not publicly disclosed.

• $3.2 MillionCommercial Vehicle Accident

  While our client was stopped, the at-fault driver rear-ended our client's vehicle and set it on fire, leaving our client seriously hurt.

Past results do not guarantee future outcomes; each case is decided on its own facts.

Common Causes of Truck Accidents

Driver Fatigue and Hours-of-Service Violations

• The driver is too worn out to be behind the wheel, usually because the driving went past the hours federal law allows.

Fatigue turns up as a factor in roughly 13% of large truck crashes in the FMCSA Large Truck Crash Causation Study, which puts it among the higher-risk causes on that list. A carrier builds its own liability when it sets a delivery schedule that only works if a driver skips rest. Doctoring electronic logging device (ELD) records to bury those hours stacks more exposure on the company. On the I-20 and I-49 corridors through Shreveport, where long-haul freight runs straight into local congestion, a tired driver is a standing problem, not a freak event.

Speeding and Traveling Too Fast for Conditions

• The driver runs above the posted limit, or too fast for the road, the weather, or the traffic ahead.

A loaded tractor-trailer is allowed to weigh up to 80,000 pounds under 23 CFR § 658.17. Energy climbs with the square of speed, so the same truck at 70 mph carries four times what it carries at 35.

Speeding is tied to roughly 23% of large truck crashes in FMCSA data. 49 CFR § 392.14 tells a driver to slow down or park when conditions make going on unsafe. The carrier owns a share of the blame when it pays by the mile or sets a delivery window nobody can meet at a legal speed.

Distracted Driving and Inattention

• The driver stops watching the road, whether for a phone, a GPS screen, a sandwich, or simply never checking the mirrors and blind spots.

FMCSA data puts some form of driver error behind the large majority of big-truck crashes. Inattention and inadequate surveillance, meaning nobody checked the mirrors or watched the blind spots, shows up in roughly 14% of the crashes studied.

A commercial truck has blind spots on all four sides, called No Zones in the trade. Cyclists and passenger cars sitting in one of them are in the worst possible place when the truck changes lanes or turns at the I-20/I-49 interchanges.

Cell phone records and in-cab camera footage are what prove distraction. Both get deleted or written over within days of the wreck unless your attorney moves to preserve them.

Brake Failures and Mechanical Defects

• The brakes, tires, steering, or another component gives out because maintenance got deferred, an inspection got skipped, or the part left the factory bad.

Brake problems turn up in roughly 29% of the trucks involved in crashes, per FMCSA data. 49 CFR Part 396 requires a carrier to keep its vehicles in safe operating condition and to run systematic inspections and repairs. Tire failures appear in about 6% of large truck crashes, and Louisiana heat makes that worse, breaking rubber down faster and raising blowout risk on the interstate.

Fault in a mechanical case usually spreads across several parties. The carrier answers for maintenance under 49 CFR § 396.3. The third-party shop that ran the last inspection can be named as a defendant when the records show the defect was sitting there and got missed. If the brake component itself was defective when it left the factory, the manufacturer comes into the case as its own defendant.

Maintenance logs, inspection reports, and repair receipts settle which of them met its obligations and which did not.

Improperly Secured Cargo and Overloading

• The load shifts in transit because it was never restrained properly, or the truck runs over weight, which changes how it handles and how it stops.

An unsecured load is what rolls a truck or jackknifes it. Jackknifing is the trailer swinging outward and folding against the tractor cab. Once it folds, it sweeps across lanes it was never in, and the wreck reaches vehicles that were nowhere near the truck.

Federal cargo securement standards at 49 CFR Part 393 spell out how each type of cargo has to be tied down, blocked, and braced. An overloaded truck also breaks the 80,000-pound gross vehicle weight limit. Liability here runs past the driver and the carrier. The company whose hands packed the trailer and the shipper who directed the loading can each be named as a separate defendant.

Impaired Driving

• The driver is under the influence of alcohol, an illegal drug, or a prescription or over-the-counter medication that slows reaction time.

Drug use, counting legal OTC medication, is a factor in roughly 17% of large truck crashes per FMCSA data. Federal law requires post-accident drug and alcohol testing in many commercial vehicle crashes, and those results become some of the strongest evidence in your file.

A carrier picks up its own exposure when pre-employment and random screening fall short of 49 CFR Part 391. Skipping a required screen, or reading a positive result and putting the driver back on the road anyway, is a failure that belongs to the company and runs a direct line to corporate liability.

Unsafe Lane Changes and Illegal Maneuvers

• The driver moves over without the clearance to do it, cuts off another vehicle, or makes a turn the law does not allow.

These maneuvers cause crashes far out of proportion to how often they happen. In Shreveport the trouble spots are the Stack, where I-20 and I-49 come together, and the narrowed interstate lanes wherever construction is running. One sudden lane change by a loaded truck can start a jackknife or push a smaller vehicle into the guardrail.

The carrier shares the fault when the driver training records show the instruction on safe vehicle operation was thin. The causes of truck accidents page walks through how those liability calls get made.

Following Too Closely

• The truck keeps less distance than its own weight and stopping ability require.

A fully loaded tractor-trailer at highway speed can need 500 feet or more to stop. Close to two football fields. When the truck is tucked in behind you and you brake, the physics do not leave room for the truck to stop, whatever the driver does with the pedal. Rear-end collisions with a commercial truck do severe damage because of the weight sitting behind the bumper.

Inadequate Driver Training and Qualification

• The carrier hires or keeps a driver who does not meet the federal qualification standards, or who was never trained for that vehicle, that route, or that cargo.

49 CFR § 391.11 sets the floor for commercial drivers: medical fitness, driving record, road testing. When a carrier puts an underqualified driver on I-20 or I-49 in the middle of Shreveport traffic, the carrier answers directly for the wreck that follows.

The driver qualification file, which federal law makes the carrier keep, is the evidence that decides it.

How the Cause Connects to Louisiana Fault Rules

Louisiana splits responsibility for a wreck among everyone who contributed, stated as a percentage, under La. C.C. Art. 2323. That is comparative fault. Whatever percentage lands on you comes straight off your award, so the defense in a truck case works to move as much of it onto you as it can.

Act No. 423 of 2024 and Act No. 15 of 2025 changed several rules that reach a truck claim directly. Tort reform is the shorthand for legislation that rewrites how injury suits work, including who collects, how much, and on what conditions. For crashes on or after January 1, 2026, Act No. 15 of 2025 amends La. C.C. Art. 2323 to add a 51% bar: assigned 51% or more of the fault, you collect nothing.

Pinning down the real cause of the wreck, with documented federal violations and preserved electronic data behind it, is how your attorney answers an inflated fault number. The cause of the crash and the legal rule meet at that point.

Louisiana’s prescriptive period for personal injury claims is now two years under La. C.C. Art. 3493.1 (Act No. 423 of 2024, effective July 1, 2024). A prescriptive period is your filing deadline. File suit after it runs and you have lost the right to file at all. Most personal injury claims get those two years, and a products liability claim against a truck-part manufacturer runs on the same two-year clock. Either way, Electronic Control Module data and ELD records can be overwritten in days unless somebody demands they be kept.

This week, write down everything you remember about the truck before the memory thins: the carrier name on the trailer, the USDOT number if you saw it, the color of the cab, the lane it came from, and the time on the clock. Then call the crash report in. Those two things start the cause file.

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Types of Truck Collisions

Truck crashes do not all look alike, and the configuration you were in shapes the whole claim. It sets what has to be investigated, which federal rules the carrier broke, and how fault gets divided among the parties. Each type produces its own injury pattern and its own evidence problems. In 2023, 5,375 large trucks were involved in fatal crashes across the country according to National Safety Council data.

The collision type also drives the fault argument. Under La. C.C. Art. 2323, for crashes on or after January 1, 2026, you collect nothing if you are assigned 51% or more of the fault.

Jackknife

A jackknife is the trailer swinging outward at the articulating joint, the hinge between cab and trailer. Hard braking or a trailer losing traction can pivot it up to 90 degrees and sweep it across several lanes.

Wet or icy pavement and shifting cargo are the usual triggers. Federal vehicle standards at 49 CFR Part 393 and 49 CFR Part 396 set the design and maintenance requirements for articulated commercial trucks.

Underride

An underride is a smaller vehicle sliding beneath the rear or the side of a trailer. The roof of the passenger compartment can shear off on impact, which is why these rank among the deadliest crashes involving commercial trucks. Federal law requires rear impact guards, usually called Mansfield bars, under 49 CFR Part 393. Whether the guard was there, whether it was maintained, and whether it met current strength standards is the central question in most underride cases.

Rollover

A rollover puts the truck on its side or its roof, blocking lanes and setting up a second round of collisions behind it. Tank trucks are especially exposed because of liquid cargo slosh, which is the fluid inside a partly filled tank moving and dragging the center of gravity sideways in a turn.

Flatbeds are exposed when the load was not secured to the federal cargo rules in 49 CFR Part 393.100. Speed on a curve and an overloaded trailer are the two factors that show up most often.

Rear-End Collision

A rear-end truck collision is a loaded commercial vehicle unable to stop before it reaches the vehicle in front. A fully loaded tractor-trailer at highway speed needs about 525 feet to stop, against roughly 316 feet for a passenger car, according to FMCSA data. Brake system problems show up again and again as a contributing factor.

The FMCSA Large Truck Crash Causation Study ranked rear-end events among the most common large truck crash configurations. On I-20 and I-49 around Shreveport, a loaded truck reaching slowed or stopped traffic is how a chain-reaction pileup starts.

Head-On Collision

A head-on with a commercial truck at highway speed produces severe or fatal injuries. Federal law lets a tractor-trailer weigh up to 80,000 pounds on the interstate under 49 CFR Part 658.17. No passenger vehicle is built to absorb what that mass generates.

Fatigue is a leading reason a truck drifts into oncoming traffic. Federal hours-of-service rules at 49 CFR Part 395 cap a commercial driver at 11 hours of driving inside a 14-hour on-duty window. Electronic logging device records show whether the driver stayed inside those limits, which puts them at the center of any fatigue case.

T-Bone (Side-Impact)

A T-bone is the front of one vehicle striking the side of another at an intersection. Dump trucks and other heavy vehicles classed as commercial motor vehicles show up often in Shreveport intersection wrecks, on Bert Kouns, on Mansfield Road, on Texas Street. A commercial motor vehicle, or CMV, is any vehicle used in commerce that meets the weight or passenger-capacity thresholds in 49 CFR Part 390.5.

Running a red light and missing a vehicle in a blind spot are the two usual causes. Side-impact crashes account for a large share of fatal large truck collisions according to FMCSA crash data.

Sideswipe and Wide-Turn Squeeze

A sideswipe is a truck touching a vehicle in the next lane during a lane change. Its cousin, the wide-turn squeeze, happens when a tractor-trailer swings out to make a right turn and the trailer pins a smaller vehicle against the curb or a pole. Both raise the same questions: were the mirrors maintained, was there a camera system, and did the driver follow the turn procedure the carrier was supposed to teach.

What has to be preserved, which federal rules apply, and the settlement value of the claim all follow from how the crash happened. Knowing the specific causes of truck accidents in your wreck also shapes the proof and the questions put to the carrier.

Insurers raise defenses like assumption of risk to move blame off the driver and the carrier. Louisiana’s two-year prescriptive period under La. C.C. Art. 3493.1 covers most truck claims, but the evidence is gone long before that date arrives.

Do this while it is still fresh: sketch the crash on a sheet of paper. Lanes, direction of travel, where the truck was when you first saw it, where each vehicle came to rest. A drawing made this week is worth more than a description given in a deposition next year.

What we handle

Shreveport Practice Areas

• Car AccidentsRear-end, intersection, and highway collisions across Louisiana.
• Truck Accidents18-wheeler and commercial-vehicle wrecks governed by federal trucking rules.
• Catastrophic InjuryBrain, spinal-cord, amputation, and severe-burn injuries that change a life.
• Wrongful DeathClaims brought by families after a fatal accident or act of negligence.
• Premises LiabilitySlip-and-fall and unsafe-property injuries on someone else's premises.
• Product LiabilityInjuries caused by defective or unreasonably dangerous products.
• Oilfield AccidentsDrilling, pipeline, and refinery injuries across the energy sector.
• Industrial AccidentsPlant, warehouse, and heavy-equipment injuries in industrial settings.
• Offshore AccidentsRig, platform, and vessel injuries beyond the shoreline.

Injuries From Truck Wrecks

A fully loaded commercial truck can weigh 80,000 pounds. Your car weighs around 4,000. That ratio is the whole reason truck injuries land in a different category from car wreck injuries. The forces are outside what a body is built to take.

Ochsner LSU Health Shreveport on Kings Highway is Northwest Louisiana’s only Level I Adult Trauma Center and Level II Pediatric Trauma Program, and it takes 2,500 or more trauma patient encounters a year. Willis-Knighton Health System adds hospital capacity across several campuses. If an ambulance took you to either system after a wreck on I-20, I-49, or a surface street, the severity of what happened to you is already written down in your chart.

Truck injuries sort into severity tiers, and where yours falls drives both your future medical needs and what the claim is worth under Louisiana law. The type and the permanence of the injury also set how damages get calculated. Damages is the legal word for the money a court can award: economic damages are your actual financial losses, the medical bills and the missed pay, and non-economic damages are the effect on your daily life, your pain, and your mental health. Fault allocation can cut into that number or wipe it out entirely. Louisiana’s 2024 tort reform changes include the collateral source rule under Act No. 432 of 2024, which now lets a defendant put evidence of payments from your health insurer or another source in front of the jury to reduce your award. Thorough injury documentation carries more weight because of it.

These are the injury categories that come through Shreveport truck cases.

Traumatic Brain Injuries

• What it is: A traumatic brain injury, or TBI, is damage to the brain from a sudden external force. In a truck wreck that means your head hitting the wheel, the window, or the dash. It also means the brain moving hard inside the skull from rapid deceleration. Your head does not have to strike anything. The force of the collision by itself can throw the brain against the inside of the skull.

• Severity range: TBIs are graded mild, moderate, or severe. A mild TBI is a concussion: headaches, dizziness, confusion, and gaps in memory that run for weeks or months. Moderate and severe TBIs bring longer unconsciousness, permanent cognitive impairment, emotional change, and physical disability. A severe TBI can mean a coma or a brain bleed that goes to emergency surgery.

• Long-term reality: Severe TBIs often require care for life: occupational therapy, speech therapy, help in the home. The CDC counted approximately 176 TBI-related deaths per day in the United States in 2020. Putting the full scope of the cognitive loss on paper takes neurologists and neuropsychologists, and that paper is what the damage figure rests on.

Spinal Cord Injuries

• What it is: A spinal cord injury is crash force damaging the bundle of nerves running through your vertebral column. That bundle is the line between your brain and the rest of you. Damage it and the signals stop below the injury, taking sensation and movement with them, partly or completely.

• How truck wrecks cause them: The impact can fracture vertebrae, compress the cord, or sever it. Rollovers and rear-end collisions are the truck crash types that produce spinal cord damage most often. An estimated 62% of spinal cord injuries from truck crashes result in partial or complete disability requiring care for life.

• Ongoing complications: A spinal cord injury does not end at the diagnosis. Pulmonary complications, sepsis (a body-wide infection set off by the injury), and pressure sores from immobility all follow. Even a partial return of function means long-term monitoring and adaptive equipment. Lifetime medical cost can run into the millions, which is why the life care planner gets retained early instead of at the end.

Internal Injuries and Organ Damage

• What it is: Blunt force from a truck collision can damage organs without leaving a mark on the outside. Liver, kidneys, spleen, lungs. Internal bleeding is the danger.

• Why these injuries are dangerous: Internal injuries get called silent injuries for a reason. You can walk away from the scene feeling steady while you are bleeding inside. Symptoms often hold off for hours or days, and by the time they arrive the situation is life-threatening and headed for surgery. That is why the emergency room visit after a truck wreck matters even when nothing hurts yet.

• Legal relevance: An adjuster will point at the gap between the crash and the diagnosis and argue the wreck did not cause it. If you had prior injuries to the same part of the body, count on the defense raising that too. Connecting a delayed-onset internal injury back to the collision takes medical records and expert testimony. Under Act No. 18 of 2025, the Housley presumption is gone in civil tort cases. It used to let a court presume medical causation in certain situations. Now expert medical testimony is what establishes that the truck wreck caused the injury.

Burns

• What it is: Fuel spills, ruptured tanks, and electrical fires in truck wrecks produce burn injuries well past anything a passenger-car collision does. Diesel is less volatile than gasoline, but it burns hotter and longer once it goes.

• Severity classifications: Burns are classed by depth. Third-degree burns destroy the full thickness of skin and leave it white or charred. Fourth-degree burns reach the tissue and bone underneath. Fifth and sixth-degree burns mean complete tissue destruction. The class decides the treatment path: skin grafts, reconstructive surgery, long hospital stays, permanent scarring.

• Healing: Healing from a severe burn takes years. Multiple surgeries, physical therapy to hold range of motion while scar tissue tightens, and psychological treatment alongside it. Permanent disfigurement from a burn carries its own category of non-economic damages under Louisiana law.

Fractures and Orthopedic Injuries

• What it is: Truck crash forces break bones differently than car accidents do. Compound fractures, where the bone comes through the skin. Comminuted fractures, where the bone shatters into pieces. Pelvic fractures. None of these is the clean break that heals in a cast.

• Treatment and healing: Complex fractures usually mean surgery with plates, rods, or screws, then months of physical therapy. Plenty of people never get back to the physical function they had before the wreck. A rib fracture carries the added risk of puncturing a lung.

• Impact on your claim: Louisiana’s prescriptive period for personal injury claims is now two years from the date of the accident under La. C.C. Art. 3493.1 (Act No. 423 of 2024, effective July 1, 2024). Two years sounds like room to work. Orthopedic injuries often take several surgeries across months or years, and your attorney needs the full treatment timeline before settling the case, even when that means using most of the two years.

Amputations

• What it is: A traumatic amputation happens at the scene when the collision takes the limb. A surgical amputation happens at the hospital when a crushed limb cannot be saved. Both are permanent.

• Lifetime costs: Prosthetics, replacement prosthetics, physical therapy, occupational therapy, home modifications, and vocational retraining all go into the economic damage figure. A prosthetic limb needs replacing every three to five years. Multiply that across a lifetime and the number is large.

Paralysis and Permanent Disfigurement

• What it is: Paralysis is the complete loss of muscle function in part of the body. Paraplegia takes the lower body. Quadriplegia takes all four limbs. Permanent disfigurement covers scarring, lost limbs, and other visible change that treatment does not undo.

• Damage calculation: Louisiana law treats both the physical limits and the emotional weight of paralysis and disfigurement as compensable non-economic damages. The experts who testify about how the condition changes your daily activities, your ability to work, and your life expectancy are the ones who put a figure on it.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

• What it is: PTSD is a mental health condition that follows living through or witnessing a traumatic event. It is not weakness of character. It is a documented condition with measurable symptoms: flashbacks, severe anxiety, nightmares, thoughts about the crash you cannot shut off, and avoidance of anything that brings it back.

• Prevalence in truck wrecks: Research indicates that over 20% of truck crash survivors develop PTSD, and the number climbs when the wreck involved a death, a fire, or entrapment. PTSD can keep you from driving, working, sleeping, and holding a relationship together.

• Legal treatment: PTSD is compensable under Louisiana law as a non-economic damage. Some insurers still work to treat a psychological injury as less real than a broken bone. Louisiana’s comparative fault system under La. C.C. Art. 2323 bars all damages if you are assigned 51% or more of the fault, effective January 1, 2026 under Act No. 15 of 2025. That rule is prospective. It applies to crashes on or after that date, not backward. It applies to every category of damages, PTSD included.

Soft Tissue and Whiplash Injuries

• What it is: Whiplash is a neck injury from the head snapping back and forth. In a truck collision the force behind that snap is extreme. Soft tissue injuries cover damage to muscles, tendons, and ligaments anywhere in the body.

• Why they matter: Whiplash and soft tissue injuries get waved off as minor. They are not. Chronic whiplash brings ongoing neck pain, headaches, lost range of motion, and nerve damage that lasts for years. These injuries do not always show on an X-ray or an MRI, so clinical examination and a symptom log carry the proof. The difference between objective and subjective injury evidence is the whole argument in a soft tissue case, and it has to be presented that way.

Ask your treating provider this week for a copy of the complete chart, not the visit summary: imaging reports, operative notes, and the itemized bill. If you are keeping a symptom log, start it today with the date at the top of every entry.

Who Is Liable for a Truck Accident?

A commercial truck crash on I-20, I-49, or any street in Shreveport can involve three, four, or more responsible parties. That is the split from an ordinary car wreck, where you have one other driver and one policy. In a truck case the driver, the carrier, the outfit that loaded the trailer, a parts manufacturer, and a maintenance shop can all carry a piece of the same collision.

Liability is the legal word for who has to answer. A party liable for your injuries owes you compensation under Louisiana law. It matters because each liable party carries its own policy with its own limits. Miss one responsible party and you have missed an entire layer of insurance.

Louisiana’s comparative fault system under La. C.C. Art. 2323 divides fault among everyone responsible, you included. A jury assigns a percentage to each person or company involved. For crashes on or after January 1, 2026, one threshold controls the case: assigned 51% or more of the fault, you collect nothing under Act No. 15 of 2025. The defense will push as much of that percentage onto you as it can. The more defendants properly in the case, the more the fault spreads among them instead of piling on you.

The Truck Driver

The driver is the obvious place to start. Under La. C.C. Art. 2315, a person whose fault causes damage to another is obligated to repair it. Negligence is the framework for measuring that fault: the driver owed you a duty of care, breached it through specific conduct, and caused your injuries by doing so.

Commercial drivers hold a Commercial Driver’s License, or CDL, which federal and state law require to operate a vehicle over 26,001 pounds. A CDL holder passes knowledge and skills tests, keeps a medical certification current, and lives under stricter traffic-violation rules than the rest of us. Because of that training and licensing, courts hold a CDL driver to a higher standard of care.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) writes the hours-of-service rules at 49 CFR Part 395, which cap an interstate driver at 11 hours of driving inside a 14-hour on-duty window. Those limits exist because fatigue is a documented cause of serious crashes. A driver past the limit has handed you negligence per se.

Negligence per se means breaking a safety statute counts as proof of negligence on its own. You do not argue what a reasonable driver would have done differently. The statute was written to prevent the exact harm that happened, and the violation is the proof.

The driver violations that carry liability are the familiar ones: speeding, distraction, driving impaired, and skipping the pre-trip inspection. The causes of truck accidents page covers those patterns.

The FMCSA also disqualifies drivers for serious traffic violations. Two serious violations in three years means a 60-day disqualification from operating a commercial vehicle. Three in three years means 120 days. If the carrier kept a disqualified driver on the road and that driver hit you, the company has its own layer of liability on top of the driver’s.

The Trucking Company

The carrier usually has more insurance and more exposure than the driver does. Two theories put it in the case: vicarious liability and direct negligence.

Vicarious liability holds one party responsible for what another did, even when the first party did nothing wrong itself. In trucking it comes from respondeat superior, Latin for let the master answer. Under La. C.C. Art. 2320, an employer is liable for damages its employee causes acting within the scope of employment. If the driver was running a route, finishing a dispatch, or doing any part of the job when the wreck happened, the carrier answers for that negligence.

Carriers label drivers independent contractors to duck this. Louisiana courts do not stop at the label. They look at how the relationship actually ran: who sets the schedule, who owns the equipment, who picks the routes, who sets the pay. Where the carrier controls how the work gets done, the court treats the driver as an employee whatever the written agreement says.

Direct negligence means the carrier itself did something wrong, separate from the driver. Under 49 CFR Part 391, a carrier has to investigate each applicant’s safety performance history with prior employers before hiring. Skipping that is negligent hiring. The rest of the list runs the same way: thin driver training, failure to maintain vehicles under 49 CFR Part 396, and leaning on drivers to break hours-of-service limits to hold a delivery schedule. Each of those belongs to the company, not to the driver.

Trucking insurers are experienced and well funded. They read Motor Vehicle Records, drug screening results, and inspection reports before they write the policy, so they come into your claim already knowing their insured’s operational history. Knowing how insurance companies work an injury case tells you what you are sitting across from.

Vehicle and Parts Manufacturers

Sometimes the wreck is not about what the driver did. It is about what the truck did. Brakes fail on a grade. A tire lets go at highway speed. A steering column locks. A coupling separates. An underride guard folds on impact. When a defective part causes or worsens a crash, the manufacturer is in the case on its own footing.

The Louisiana Products Liability Act, or LPLA, at La. R.S. 9:2800.51 et seq., is the only route for a product defect claim in this state. It replaces general negligence theories when you sue a manufacturer over a defective product, and it covers four kinds of defect: construction or composition (the product was not built right), design (the design itself is unreasonably dangerous), inadequate warning (the maker knew a risk and did not warn), and breach of express warranty.

Louisiana’s general prescriptive period for personal injury is now two years under La. C.C. Art. 3493.1 (Act No. 423 of 2024). A prescriptive period is this state’s version of a filing deadline. Once it runs, the right to bring the claim is gone no matter how strong the evidence. LPLA claims are delictual actions and follow the same two years for injuries on or after July 1, 2024. A defective part claim still has to move fast, because the physical part goes to a scrapyard long before any deadline arrives.

Cargo Loaders and Third-Party Contractors

The company that loaded the trailer, the broker who arranged the shipment, and the shop that last serviced the truck each answer for their own work. Each gets evaluated separately from the driver and the carrier.

Cargo loading runs on the federal securement standards at 49 CFR Part 393, Subpart I, which require cargo to be secured against shifting and spell out tie-down methods, blocking and bracing, and weight distribution. When a third-party loading company controls how the load is packed and strapped, that company faces its own negligence liability under La. C.C. Art. 2315 if bad loading caused the wreck.

An overloaded trailer creates its own dangers. Federal law at 23 CFR 658.17 sets an 80,000-pound gross vehicle weight limit on the Interstate Highway System, and Louisiana matches it at La. R.S. 32:386. Overloaded trucks take more distance to stop, put more stress on tires, and roll over more easily. A loader that exceeds those limits has handed you a negligence claim separate from anything the driver or carrier did.

A third-party maintenance shop answers directly when bad repair work causes a mechanical failure. 49 CFR § 396.3 requires systematic inspection, repair, and maintenance of commercial vehicles. Brakes have to work at all times under 49 CFR § 393.48. Minimum tread depth is set by 49 CFR § 393.75. A shop that does faulty brake work or turns a truck loose on worn tires can be liable right alongside the carrier. Both can owe you at the same time.

Government entities land in some of these cases too. If a bad road condition on a Shreveport street or a Louisiana highway helped cause the crash, the Louisiana DOTD or the city may share fault. A claim against a government entity carries its own notice provisions and procedural requirements that private claims do not have. Defenses like assumption of risk and arguments about prior injuries come up early in these files, so it pays to know what they are before you file.

Multiple Liable Parties and Insurance Layers

Commercial trucks carry far more insurance than passenger vehicles. The FMCSA requires interstate motor carriers to hold minimum liability coverage under 49 CFR § 387.9. The minimum depends on the load:

• General freight (non-hazardous, over 10,001 lbs): $750,000 minimum liability coverage
• Oil transport: $1,000,000 minimum liability coverage
• Hazardous materials (certain highly dangerous categories): $5,000,000 minimum liability coverage

Those are federal floors. Large carriers and shippers often carry excess or umbrella policies well above them. One crash can reach the driver’s own policy when the driver is an independent contractor, the carrier’s primary policy, the carrier’s excess or umbrella policy, the shipper’s liability coverage, and a maintenance contractor’s general liability policy. Every liable party you identify is another policy available to your claim.

Louisiana has long had a direct action statute at La. R.S. 22:1269. Direct action meant you could sue the at-fault party’s insurer in the same lawsuit without first getting a judgment against the insured. Act No. 460 of 2025 changes that effective January 1, 2026. After that date the insurer cannot be named as a defendant until after trial.

When several defendants share fault, Louisiana’s rules on joint and several liability under La. C.C. Art. 2324 come into it. Joint and several liability means that where certain conditions are met, you can collect the whole judgment from any one defendant regardless of that defendant’s own percentage. That matters when one company has deep coverage and another has nothing to take. Naming every liable party is not about casting a wide net. It is about putting the full picture of fault and available insurance in front of the court.

Your own auto policy can matter here too. Under La. R.S. § 22:1295, every Louisiana auto policy has to include uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage unless you waived it in writing. UM/UIM is the part of your own policy that pays when the at-fault party’s insurance runs out before your losses do. Even a $750,000 carrier policy comes up short in a catastrophic injury case. Your UM/UIM fills that gap. Seeing how different insurance coverages interact is how you find every policy in play.

Pull the declarations page for every auto policy in your household this week and look at the UM/UIM line: accepted or rejected, and at what limits. Bring that page and the photograph of the truck door with the carrier name and USDOT number on it, and the liability map starts building itself.

Louisiana Laws That Affect Your Claim

Louisiana has its own rules that make a truck claim stronger or weaker, and they are not technicalities. The Legislature passed major tort reform in 2024 and 2025 that moved the comparative fault threshold, the prescriptive period, the collateral source rule, and the standard for proving medical causation.

These rules shape strategy from day one. The 51% comparative fault bar effective January 1, 2026 under La. C.C. Art. 2323 and the prescriptive period under La. C.C. Art. 3493.1 both change how a truck claim gets valued and litigated.

Comparative Fault Under La. C.C. Art. 2323

Comparative fault divides responsibility for a wreck among everyone involved. A judge or jury puts a percentage on each party based on what they did before and during the collision, and your award comes down by your percentage. Found 25% at fault on a $400,000 claim, you take $300,000.

Louisiana changed that system in a way that matters. The old rule, pure comparative fault, let you collect something even at 99% fault. It no longer applies to accidents on or after January 1, 2026. Act No. 15 of 2025 amended La. C.C. Art. 2323 to add the 51% bar: assigned 51% or more of the fault, you collect nothing.

Trucking insurers understand that threshold precisely, and their adjusters and hired reconstruction experts work to move fault onto you. They will talk about your speed, your lane position, your reaction time, and whether your phone was in your hand. Every point they add reduces the payment, and past 50% it eliminates the payment altogether.

Preserved evidence is the answer to an inflated fault number. Dashcam footage, traffic camera video, the truck’s ELD data, and eyewitness statements all contradict the version the insurer builds. Lose that evidence and the insurer’s reconstruction expert is the only voice in the courtroom. Fault in a truck case is decided by physical evidence at the scene and electronic data inside the truck, not by argument.

The Two-Year Prescriptive Period

A prescriptive period is what Louisiana calls what most states call a statute of limitations. It is the date by which the suit has to be filed. Miss it and the court dismisses the case regardless of the evidence or how clearly the other side was at fault.

Louisiana extended it under Act No. 423 of 2024, codified at La. C.C. Art. 3493.1. The deadline is now two years from the date of injury, still shorter than the three years many states allow. Products liability claims run on that same two years, so a claim over a defective truck component keeps pace with the rest of the case.

The two years applies to filing suit in court, not to opening an insurance claim. You can open a claim the week after the wreck and negotiate for months. If no suit is filed before the two years expire, the right to sue is gone.

Louisiana recognizes a few narrow exceptions. Contra non valentem suspends the period when you could not reasonably have known about the injury or its cause, which in truck cases means symptoms that do not surface for weeks or months. Courts read it narrowly. Two other exceptions extend the clock: minority, when the injured person was under 18 at the time, which pauses the period until legal age, and interdiction, when a court has declared the person legally incapacitated.

The filing deadline is not the only clock running. The evidence has much shorter ones. A carrier only has to keep ELD data for six months under 49 CFR § 395.8. Driver vehicle inspection reports get kept three months under 49 CFR § 396.11.

Dashcam footage and GPS data go sooner than that unless a formal preservation demand lands first. In a truck case, waiting costs you the evidence the claim runs on.

Federal Trucking Regulations (FMCSA)

A truck case carries a layer of federal regulation that an ordinary car crash never touches. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) writes detailed rules for commercial drivers and the carriers that employ them, covering driving hours, maintenance, drug testing, and qualifications. Break one of those federal rules and the violation becomes evidence in your Louisiana case.

Hours-of-service rules. The HOS rules at 49 CFR Part 395 set how long a commercial driver can run before mandatory rest. A property-carrying driver gets no more than 11 hours of driving inside a 14-hour on-duty window, and that window opens only after 10 consecutive hours off duty. A 30-minute break is required after 8 consecutive hours of driving. Weekly limits cap on-duty time at 60 hours over 7 days or 70 hours over 8 days.

Electronic Logging Device mandate. The ELD mandate puts devices on most commercial trucks that automatically record driving time, engine hours, speed, and location. They replaced paper logbooks, which a driver could rewrite at a truck stop. ELD data resists manipulation, but a carrier can still delete or overwrite it without a formal preservation demand in hand.

A spoliation letter is a written legal demand that the carrier keep every piece of evidence tied to the crash. It goes out within days of the wreck, not weeks. Ignoring one can bring court sanctions, including an instruction to the jury that the destroyed evidence would have helped your case.

Vehicle inspection and maintenance. FMCSA rules under 49 CFR Part 396 require systematic inspection, repair, and maintenance on every commercial vehicle a carrier runs. Drivers complete pre-trip and post-trip inspection reports under 49 CFR § 396.11. A brake failure, a tire blowout, or defective lighting traced to a missed or falsified inspection is how you prove the carrier broke its maintenance duty.

Drug and alcohol testing. 49 CFR Part 382 requires post-accident drug and alcohol testing when a crash involves a fatality, an injury treated away from the scene, or disabling vehicle damage. Alcohol testing has to be done within 8 hours and drug testing within 32 hours (49 CFR § 382.303(c) and (d)).

A positive test triggers negligence per se. Negligence per se applies when a defendant breaks a safety rule written to protect a specific class of people from a specific harm. Instead of arguing what a reasonable person would have done, you point at the broken rule. Louisiana courts apply it when you are in the class the rule protects and the harm is the type the rule was written to prevent.

A driver who blows past the 11-hour limit and wrecks on I-20 in Shreveport has broken a federal rule written to prevent that exact wreck. The causes of truck accidents page covers the other FMCSA violations that turn up in Northwest Louisiana cases.

ELD records, maintenance logs, and reconstruction analysis are what move settlement value in a truck case. The federal regulatory data underneath them disappears fast without a preservation demand.

Write down the date of your wreck and count two years forward on a calendar you look at. Then get a lawyer to send the spoliation letter this week, because the six-month ELD clock started the day of the crash.

Steps to Take After a Truck Accident

What you do in the hours and days after a truck wreck decides whether the case holds up. Every step either keeps evidence or loses it. Every decision either builds your ability to prove what happened or hands the argument to the other side.

Truck cases differ from car cases in one way that matters most: the trucking company and its insurer often have investigators standing at the scene within hours. Those investigators are protecting the carrier. The steps below are how you keep pace.

1. Get to Safety and Call 911

Physical safety comes first. If you can move and your vehicle is sitting in a travel lane, get to the shoulder or off the road. Hazard lights on. Call 911.

A 911 call creates an official record with a timestamp on it, and that timestamp does work later. Louisiana law enforcement responds and writes a crash report documenting the scene, the vehicles, where they came to rest, witness names, and the officer’s first read of what happened. You want that report to exist.

Do not leave the scene. Under Louisiana law, leaving the scene of an accident involving injury is a crime. Stay until an officer releases you.

2. Seek Medical Attention Immediately

Go to a hospital or an urgent care the same day. Do not wait to see whether you feel better tomorrow. Truck collision forces produce injuries with delayed symptoms, and soft tissue damage, internal bleeding, and brain injuries often show nothing at the scene. For the severe end of that list, the Level I trauma center at Ochsner LSU Health Shreveport on Kings Highway is where you want to be.

A medical record dated the day of the wreck ties the crash to your injuries. Wait days or weeks and the trucking company’s insurer will argue something else caused your condition. That gap becomes their main argument.

Louisiana’s tort reform changes reach directly into how you prove injury now. Under Act No. 18 of 2025, the Housley presumption is gone in civil tort cases. Housley let a court assume medical causation when a plaintiff was in good health before an accident and had symptoms after it. That presumption no longer applies in civil tort cases.

Expert medical testimony is what establishes the link between the wreck and your injuries. Same-day records give that expert something solid to stand on.

3. Document Everything at the Scene

If your body will let you, use your phone. Photograph and film all of it: your vehicle, the truck, the road surface, the signals, skid marks, debris, the weather, and any injury you can see. Get the truck’s license plate, the USDOT number on the cab door, and the carrier name on the side of the trailer.

Take down the name and phone number of anyone who saw it happen. Witnesses scatter. A name and number written at the scene is the difference between proof and your word alone.

Memory thins fast, so record a voice memo while the details are sharp. Time, location, direction of travel, what you saw before the impact, what you heard. A recording made 30 minutes after the wreck holds up better than a recollection three months later in a deposition.

4. Get the Driver’s and Carrier’s Information

A commercial truck comes with a stack of parties. The driver may work for one company, the tractor may be owned by another, the trailer may be leased from a third. Collect every identifier you can.

Write down the driver’s name, license number, and insurance information. Write down the trucking company name, the USDOT number, and the MC number, all of which are painted on the cab door and required by Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) regulations. The USDOT number is what lets your attorney pull the carrier’s safety record, inspection history, and prior violations.

If the driver names an employer, a dispatcher, or an insurance carrier, write that down too. Every piece you capture at the scene saves weeks of investigation later.

5. Do Not Give a Recorded Statement to Any Insurance Company

The trucking company’s insurer will call you, possibly the same day, and ask for a recorded statement. They will make it sound like paperwork. It is not paperwork. It is evidence collection.

Whatever you say on that recording can be used against you. Say you feel okay because adrenaline has you upright, and that sentence appears in a motion aimed at your injury claim months later. Guess at what happened, or apologize because that is how you were raised, and those words go in the file.

You have no legal obligation to give the other side’s insurer a recorded statement. Decline politely. Tell them your attorney will be in touch, or that you are talking to one. Get legal advice before you answer any insurer.

6. Preserve Your Own Evidence

Do not repair or dispose of your vehicle until it has been documented. The vehicle is physical evidence. Crush patterns, the point of impact, and mechanical failures tell a story that engineers and reconstruction experts can read.

Keep every piece of paper. Medical bills, prescription receipts, tow invoices, rental car agreements, pay stubs showing the shifts you missed. One folder, physical or digital, everything in it.

Save text messages, emails, and voicemails from the insurance company, the trucking company, or anyone else involved. Screenshot relevant social media posts by the other driver or by witnesses. Digital evidence vanishes when an account is deactivated or a post comes down.

7. Contact a Truck Accident Attorney Before the Prescriptive Period Runs

Louisiana sets a prescriptive period for personal injury claims, which is the deadline for filing suit. Miss it and the right to bring the case is gone regardless of the evidence. Under Act No. 423 of 2024, La. C.C. Art. 3493.1, that period is two years from the date of the accident for injuries on or after July 1, 2024.

Two years sounds like plenty. It is not. A truck case runs on preserved electronic logging device data, driver qualification files, maintenance records, and black box downloads. Under FMCSA regulations, ELD records have to be kept 6 months (49 C.F.R. § 395.8) and driver qualification files for the length of employment plus 3 years (49 C.F.R. § 391.51). Without a spoliation letter going out early, that data is overwritten or destroyed before suit is ever filed. A spoliation letter is a formal notice demanding the trucking company preserve everything related to the wreck, and it creates a legal obligation to keep records that routine operations would otherwise discard.

8. Understand How Comparative Fault Applies to Your Actions

Louisiana assigns responsibility among everyone involved, with a jury putting a percentage on each party. Under La. C.C. Art. 2323, as amended by Act No. 15 of 2025, a plaintiff assigned 51% or more of the fault collects nothing. That bar takes effect for accidents on or after January 1, 2026.

Your conduct after the crash feeds into that number. Leave the scene, skip medical treatment, or make an admission in a recorded statement, and the defense will use it to argue you carry part of the fault or that you failed to hold your own damages down. Every step on this list keeps your own conduct out of the argument.

This week: request the crash report, put every receipt in one folder, and let the adjuster’s call go to voicemail until you have talked to a lawyer.

What Compensation Does Louisiana Law Allow After a Truck Accident?

Truck wrecks produce injuries in a different category from car collisions. A loaded commercial truck can weigh over 80,000 pounds, and the forces involved cause spinal fractures, brain injuries, amputations, and internal organ damage at rates a passenger-vehicle crash does not reach. Louisiana sorts what you can collect into categories, each with its own rules and its own proof. Knowing the categories is how you tell whether a settlement offer covers everything the law allows.

The legal word for that money is damages. Damages are not a windfall. They are a calculation of what you lost financially, what you will keep losing, and the non-financial harm done to your daily life. Louisiana splits them three ways: economic (measurable financial loss), non-economic (harm with no receipt), and exemplary (punishment for extreme misconduct, available only in narrow situations).

Louisiana passed several tort reform laws in 2024 and 2025 that change how compensation is calculated. Tort reform is the label for legislation that rewrites the rules of injury suits. Two of those changes matter most to a truck claim.

Under Act No. 432 of 2024, effective January 1, 2025, collateral source payments are admissible in court to reduce your total award. Collateral source payments are the benefits you got from somewhere unrelated to the defendant: your own health insurance, disability coverage, employer sick leave. Defendants used to be barred from telling the jury about them. Now they can.

The second change is about medical proof. Act No. 18 of 2025 eliminated the Housley presumption for civil tort cases. Housley helped plaintiffs show their injuries came from the accident rather than a preexisting condition, because a court could presume causation when symptoms appeared shortly after a crash and matched the type of harm. That presumption is gone in civil cases, though it still applies in workers’ compensation. Expert medical testimony now carries the link between the accident and each injury you claim.

Economic Damages

Economic damages are the losses you can calculate from documents. Medical bills, pay stubs, tax returns, repair invoices, receipts. In truck cases these figures run higher than in car-on-car collisions because the injuries are worse and the healing takes months or years.

Medical expenses cover what you have already spent and what you will spend. Past medical expenses are the emergency room, the surgeries, the hospital stays, the imaging, the prescriptions, the physical therapy. Future medical expenses are the projected cost of care you have not had yet.

For serious truck injuries, that future column includes more surgeries, long-term rehabilitation, and assistive devices like wheelchairs or prosthetics. Home modifications such as a ramp or a retrofitted bathroom, hearing aids, and attendant or nursing care are all collectible. A life care planning expert is what puts those needs on paper.

A life care plan is a detailed report from a qualified medical professional projecting every future care need and its cost across your remaining lifetime: treatment, equipment replacement schedules, therapy frequency, home care hours. Insurers take these seriously because credentialed professionals prepare them using a standard methodology.

Lost wages and lost earning capacity are two different things. Lost wages are the income you missed while healing, calculated from pay stubs and employer records. Lost earning capacity is the permanent reduction in what you can earn going forward, and the gap between the two can be large.

If the wreck leaves you unable to go back to the work you did, an economist calculates the difference between what you would have earned and what you can earn now across your remaining working years, accounting for the raises, promotions, and benefits that were coming. Lost wages stop when you go back to work. Lost earning capacity can run for decades.

Property damage covers the repair or replacement value of your vehicle and the belongings destroyed in it. In a truck collision the passenger vehicle is usually totaled.

Out-of-pocket costs are the expenses that came from the wreck and do not fit anywhere else. Mileage to and from medical appointments, household help you had to hire, child care you would not have needed. Keep the receipts, because these add up across months.

A complete economic-damages figure takes an economist and a life care planner projecting future loss, not a stack of current medical bills. How injury settlements get valued in Louisiana is worth reading for the broader picture.

Non-Economic Damages

Non-economic damages pay for harm that never came with a price tag. Real injuries, but nothing you can pull off a bank statement. They take testimony, medical records, and sometimes expert opinion to establish.

Louisiana does not cap non-economic damages in truck cases or in other standard personal injury cases. Medical malpractice is the exception, where a statutory cap limits the total. In your truck case, the value turns on how severe and how permanent the injuries are, how they change your days, and how well the evidence supports it.

Physical pain and suffering covers two stretches of time. Acute pain is what you went through during and right after the crash, through the emergency treatment and the early weeks. Chronic pain is what stays after the injuries stabilize: permanent nerve damage, pain from spinal hardware, mobility you do not get back.

Mental anguish is its own category in Louisiana. It covers post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, disturbed sleep, and fear of driving or riding. These follow serious truck wrecks routinely, and a qualified mental health professional can diagnose them. A documented diagnosis with ongoing treatment records makes this part of the claim solid.

Loss of enjoyment of life applies when the injuries take away what you used to do. You coached your kid’s team, you kept a yard, you played music at church, and now you do not. Courts value this on testimony about your life before and after.

Loss of consortium is your spouse’s claim, not yours. Consortium covers the benefits of the marriage: companionship, affection, intimacy, mutual support. When your injuries change that relationship at its root, your spouse has an independent right to be compensated. The claim is filed alongside yours and evaluated on its own.

Disfigurement and scarring applies when the wreck leaves permanent visible marks. Burn scars from a fuel fire, surgical scars from several procedures, facial lacerations, amputations. Where the scarring is, how visible it is, and whether it is permanent all affect the value.

Non-economic damages sit under comparative fault at La. C.C. Art. 2323 like everything else. For accidents on or after January 1, 2026, you collect nothing if you are assigned 51% or more of the fault (Act No. 15 of 2025). Below 51%, the total comes down by your percentage. Defenses like assumption of risk feed into how that percentage gets allocated.

Punitive Damages and Wrongful Death

Most truck claims involve economic and non-economic damages only. Louisiana adds two categories for specific circumstances: exemplary damages for extreme misconduct, and wrongful death claims when the crash kills someone.

Exemplary damages, also called punitive damages, do a different job. They do not reimburse you for anything. They punish conduct that went past ordinary carelessness. Louisiana is restrictive here and authorizes them only in defined statutory situations.

The statute is La. C.C. Art. 2315.4, which allows exemplary damages where the defendant acted with wanton or reckless disregard for the rights and safety of others. In truck cases that most often means an intoxicated driver. If a commercial driver caused your crash while under the influence of alcohol or drugs, exemplary damages sit on top of your compensatory award. That is one of the narrow openings in a state that generally bars punitive damages.

Wrongful death claims come up when a truck wreck kills someone, and Louisiana gives the family two separate actions. The difference between them matters.

The wrongful death action under La. C.C. Art. 2315.2 lets surviving family members collect for their own losses: loss of love and affection, loss of companionship, loss of financial support, mental anguish, funeral expenses. Their own is the operative phrase. This claim pays the survivors for what the death took from them.

The survival action under La. C.C. Art. 2315.1 covers different ground. It lets those same family members collect the damages the person who died could have claimed had they lived: pre-death pain and suffering, medical expenses between the crash and the death, and lost earnings. It pays the survivors for what the deceased went through.

Both claims follow a strict priority order. The surviving spouse and children come first. With no spouse or children, the right passes to parents, then siblings, then grandparents. Only the highest-ranking tier can bring the claim, and everyone inside that tier shares equally.

Louisiana’s prescriptive period for personal injury claims is two years under Act No. 423 of 2024 (La. C.C. Art. 3493.1, effective July 1, 2024). For a wrongful death claim under Art. 2315.2, the period runs from the date of death. Louisiana’s prescriptive periods and filing deadlines are worth reading in full if a death is involved.

There is no cap on non-economic damages in a Louisiana truck accident wrongful death case. You can hear a former client describe the experience of working with our firm in this truck accident client testimonial.

Before you respond to any settlement number, write down the three columns yourself: bills paid to date, wages missed to date, and what your doctor has told you is still ahead. An offer that ignores the third column is not an offer on the whole claim.

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How a Truck Accident Lawyer Builds Your Case

A truck claim takes a different investigation than a car crash. The trucking company, its insurer, and often a third-party logistics provider all have legal teams and adjusters working the file within hours of impact. Your side has to move at least that fast, and with the same command of the federal rules, the electronic data, and Louisiana liability law.

Preserving Critical Evidence

The most time-sensitive job after a truck crash is locking evidence down before it is gone. We send spoliation letters to the trucking company, its insurer, and any data storage provider within 24 to 48 hours. A spoliation letter is a formal legal demand that the recipient preserve everything tied to the collision. It is not a request. It creates a legal obligation, and a party that destroys evidence after receiving one can face sanctions or a jury instruction that the destroyed material would have hurt them.

Those letters cover electronic logging device data, GPS records, dashcam footage, event data recorder downloads, driver qualification files, dispatch logs, and maintenance records. 49 CFR § 379.5 requires carriers to retain certain records, but those retention periods say nothing about how fast electronic data actually gets overwritten. ELD systems log hours of service on rolling cycles. Depending on the equipment, the cycle can write over your crash within days or weeks.

Dashcam footage runs on an even shorter clock. Many carriers use loop recorders that erase the oldest footage as new footage comes in. Cell phone records, GPS waypoints, and telematics data are all exposed the same way.

Here is the other half of it. Trucking companies do not wait to start defending. Most large carriers keep rapid-response teams or standing contracts with defense firms that put investigators on the scene within hours, photographing, interviewing witnesses, and building the carrier’s version of events before you have talked to anyone. Under La. R.S. 32:398, Louisiana law enforcement prepares a crash report where there is injury, death, or serious property damage. We pull that report immediately as the baseline, but the carrier’s internal file is usually thicker and friendlier to their driver. Evidence disappears before anyone preserves it on your behalf unless someone moves in the first week.

Investigating the Crash

Once the evidence is held, the investigation runs on three tracks: the crash, the driver, and the company.

Reconstructing the collision. We work with accident reconstructionists who pull data off the truck ECM or EDR. An ECM, or engine control module, is the computer running the engine. An EDR, or event data recorder, is a separate device that captures crash data. Both hold speed, braking force, throttle position, and engine RPM in the seconds around impact. Reconstruction specialists put that against the physical evidence on the road: tire marks, debris fields, gouges in the pavement, and measured vehicle damage. What comes out is a timeline of what the driver was doing, how fast the truck was going, and whether anyone tried to avoid you.

Investigating the driver. 49 CFR § 391.11 sets the qualification standards: medical certification, a valid CDL, driving history, and drug and alcohol testing results. We subpoena the full qualification file and put the paper logs next to the electronic ELD records governed by 49 CFR § 395.8. Hours-of-service rules at 49 CFR § 395.3 cap a property-carrying driver at 11 hours of driving inside a 14-hour window that opens only after 10 consecutive hours off. Violations of those limits turn up regularly, and they establish negligence.

Auditing the carrier. The company itself is often the direct source of liability. We review the maintenance and inspection records required by 49 CFR § 396.3, which mandates systematic inspection, repair, and maintenance across the fleet, and we pull the safety record from the FMCSA Safety Measurement System for prior violations, out-of-service orders, and crash history.

Dispatch communications, route plans, and delivery schedules show whether the carrier pushed the driver past hours-of-service limits or through required rest. When a carrier leases vehicles or drivers from another company, 49 CFR § 376.12 extends the motor carrier’s liability to those leased assets, which can add another responsible party and another policy to your claim.

Under La. C.C. Art. 2320, a trucking company answers for its driver through respondeat superior, Latin for let the master answer. In Louisiana civil law it makes an employer responsible for an employee’s negligent act inside the scope of employment. In a truck case it is what reaches past the individual driver to the company assets and the company insurance.

Countering Insurance Company Tactics

A trucking insurer is not the adjuster who handled your fender bender. These are specialized commercial operations with adjusters, defense attorneys, and investigators whose entire job is high-value claims. They know which moves reduce a payout and they start early.

Adjusters call within days, sometimes while you are still in treatment, and ask you to describe the wreck on a recorded line. Everything you say goes in their file and comes back out later.

Social media surveillance is the next one. Adjusters and defense investigators watch your public accounts for a photo, a check-in, or a post that can be pulled out of context to argue you are not as hurt as the chart says.

The independent medical examination, or IME, gets to the same place a different way. The insurer picks the doctor and pays the doctor, and the report tends to shrink your injuries or hang them on a preexisting condition. Independent is doing a lot of work in that name.

Early lowball offers round it out. The number arrives weeks after the crash, before anybody knows the full extent of the injuries. Accept it and you give up the right to anything more. You may not know for months whether surgery, long rehabilitation, or permanent pain management is ahead of you.

We answer those tactics with independent evidence. We arrange medical evaluations with physicians who specialize in the injury you have, whether that is a brain injury or spinal cord damage. We retain life care planners to project the cost of future treatment and assistive care across your life expectancy. Vocational rehabilitation analysts measure what the injury did to your earning capacity. Louisiana courts recognize every one of those categories as compensable under La. C.C. Art. 2315, which creates the right to be compensated for injury caused by another person’s fault.

When negotiation will not produce a fair result, we try the case. Knowing how the coverage layers work across policy types is part of finding every source of compensation your claim can reach.

The Claims Process

A truck claim follows a general sequence, though the timeline moves with the severity of the injuries and the number of parties. Here is how it runs in practice.

The investigation phase takes weeks to several months. We gather evidence, retain experts, and identify every responsible party and every policy. Truck crashes often involve several carriers with separate coverage: the employer carries a primary commercial policy, a leased trailer may sit under a different insurer, and a cargo loading company can have its own liability coverage.

Federal law at 49 CFR § 387.9 requires most interstate carriers to carry at least $750,000 in liability coverage for non-hazardous freight, and many carry more. Mapping those layers matters because one policy alone often does not cover the whole loss.

Once your treatment stabilizes enough to project the future cost, we build the demand package: a liability analysis citing the specific federal violations, your medical records and bills, expert reports on future care, and the economic loss calculations. It goes to each responsible insurer, and negotiation follows.

If the negotiation produces a fair result, the case settles. If it does not, we file suit in Louisiana district court. For a Caddo Parish wreck that means the First Judicial District Court at 501 Texas Street, across the street from our office at 509 Milam. If your wreck was in Bossier Parish, the case goes to the 26th Judicial District Court in Benton instead.

Under La. C.C. Art. 2323, your damages come down by your percentage of fault. For crashes on or after January 1, 2026, Act No. 15 of 2025 adds the 51% bar, and a jury that puts 51% or more on you ends the case with nothing.

That is why the investigation and the evidence-building matter as much as they do. The stronger the proof of what the driver and the carrier did, the less room the defense has to move blame onto you.

Through all of it, we handle the communication with insurers, defense counsel, medical providers, and lien holders. You get told what is happening at every step, and you do not spend your days trading calls with adjusters and opposing lawyers.

One deadline governs the rest. Louisiana’s prescriptive period for personal injury is two years from the date of injury under Act No. 423 of 2024 (La. C.C. Art. 3493.1), for injuries on or after the effective date of that act. A prescriptive period is Louisiana’s version of what other states call a statute of limitations, the legal deadline for filing suit. Let it expire and the right to bring the claim is gone regardless of the evidence. Two years sounds long, but a thorough truck investigation takes months of evidence collection and expert analysis. Starting early buys the time to build the whole case instead of settling under pressure.

Give us the date of the wreck, the location, and the carrier name off the trailer, and we will pull the crash report and get the preservation letter out. Our office at 509 Milam Street is across the street from the Caddo Parish Courthouse, and you can walk in.

Down the street, not a call center

Your Shreveport Trial Team

Meet all 11 attorneys →

The lawyers who work your file. Every Shreveport case is handled by the firm's own trial attorneys.

• Trey Morris Founding Partner
• Brian F. Trainor Attorney
• Elizabeth Hancock Attorney
• Meghan Nolen Attorney
• Joseph B. Odom Attorney
• Caitlin Nerren Attorney
• Seth Blackledge Attorney
• Austin Townsend Attorney
• Maliyah Shavers Attorney
• Lane Robinson Attorney
• Coleman Nerren Attorney