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Attorney Greg Deans and Attorney Katie Stepp

Six ways to protect your truck company from liability

On Behalf of | Jul 22, 2024 | Trucking Liability

Truck companies often have a target on their back when one of their drivers are involved in an injurious accident. Crash victims viciously attack the truck companies in hopes of imposing vicarious liability and reaching into deeper pockets to recover the compensation they claim they need.

This can put your business’s financial stability at risk, and it can cause significant damage to your business’s reputation. As frightening as that sounds, there are ways to protect your business.

Some of those protections come in the form of aggressive personal injury defense strategies, but you need to be more forward-thinking than that. To truly reduce the risk of being entangled in personal injury lawsuits, you need to implement preventative measures that prevent truck accidents from occurring in the first place.

Preventative measures a business can implement to avoid truck accidents

It might be hard to think about ways to reduce the risk of truck accidents, but there are several options at your disposal. This includes the following:

  1. Properly training drivers: Truckers need to know how to safely operate their rigs if you want to reduce the chances of them being involved in an accident. So, thoroughly educate them on safe driving practices, proper cargo securement, diligent vehicle inspections, hours of service regulations, and defensive driving. You should also revisit these topics regularly so that you can ensure your drivers are adequately trained and know how to avoid truck accidents that could leave your business facing legal challenges.
  2. Implementing a proper maintenance schedule: Federal regulations require routine inspection and maintenance of trucking fleets, but you want to be extra careful here to ensure that a defective truck doesn’t slip by and cause an otherwise preventable accident. So, develop a maintenance schedule and stick with it.
  3. Maintaining thorough documentation: Documentation can be key to a legal dispute. You should therefore be diligent about documenting all training activities for your drivers, inspections, maintenance, and other areas of regulatory compliance. These records should be thorough and clear, and they should be easily accessible so that you can quickly turn to them when needed.
  4. Auditing trucking logs: You don’t want your drivers to violate federal trucking regulations and thereby put other motorists and your company at risk. You can better ensure that these truckers are adhering to acceptable protocols by using software to audit their trucking logs.
  5. Engaging in drug and alcohol testing: If you suspect that one of your drivers is using drugs or alcohol, you should test them in accordance with the law and your company’s policies. This could take an otherwise dangerous driver off the road and protect you from the liability that could attached if you release them out on the road and they cause a serious wreck.
  6. Implementing accountability measures: There are a lot of regulations out there to ensure safe trucking practices. Though you might be tempted to let your drivers off the hook for seemingly minor infractions, doing so puts you at risk. You need to ensure there’s accountability for regulatory violations so that there’s a demonstrated record of doing everything possible to ensure safe trucking practices.

Know how to mitigate the risks posed to your trucking company

It only takes one successful lawsuit to significantly damage your business. You can’t let that happen, which is why now is the time to get to work protecting yourself. There’s a lot you can do to mitigate the risk, too.