Tractor trailer accidents are not caused by a single wrong act. Insurance companies would like you to believe it is one fluke problem that leads to an accident. It is almost never a single problem. Accidents occur from a series of cutting corners, and failures that add up, until there is the final incident.
For example this is a hypothetical based on a true story: A tractor trailer turns left across a highway, and a truck hits the side of the tractor trailer, killing the individual driving the truck.
At first glance, the only mistake is that the tractor trailer driver turned left across a highway. Yet when the tractor trailer accident is evaluated, there are multiple wrong acts that all lead to the result.
The tractor trailer had little lighting on the side of the truck, so traffic traveling at the side of the truck could not see it. The tractor trailer pulled across the freeway at night. The tractor trailer’s route did not include a safe place for the tractor trailer to turn around. The road was not designed with a large enough merging lane for the tractor trailer, and therefore once halfway across the road, the tractor trailer had to wait until traffic was clear to pull onto the highway. The tractor trailer driver had driven 3 days in a row, with more hours than allowed by law. The tractor trailer company booked the driver for too many days in a row. The tractor trailer driver never read any safety guidelines regarding pulling across highways, and did not consider it was a dangerous condition.
This is the start of all the things that went wrong. Each one of these actions was a single incident, that ended up culminating in the large collision that lead to a man’s death.
Lawyers were able to discover all of this information only after a case was filed. The news did not discover it, the highway patrol did not discover it, nor the police. The lawyers were the ones who learned of all the wrongdoing, and made the community a safer place by bringing the case. The case result was one that told the tractor trailer company that cutting corners is not cost effective when it comes to safety.