Fort Lauderdale Truck Accident Lawyer
A loaded truck does not leave you with a fender bender. It leaves broken bones, months off work, and a company whose people were at the scene before you were. We can take it from here. Call 954-522-5800 for a free consultation. You pay us nothing unless we win. Our Fort Lauderdale personal injury lawyers have taken these cases across Broward County since 1993.
Truck Accident claims in Fort Lauderdale
The carrier had an adjuster and an investigator on it before you left the hospital, and its own logs start being overwritten within days. In the meantime you are looking at surgery you did not plan for, a paycheck that stopped, and a vehicle you cannot replace. Getting to those records before they are gone is our job, and it starts the day you call.
Broward moves freight in two directions at once: containers off Port Everglades heading west to the interstates, and distribution traffic running the warehouse belt along Powerline and Copans. The carriers behind it are frequently national operations with an adjuster and an investigator working the same day, sometimes at the scene. Federal records, including duty status logs and maintenance history, can be lawfully destroyed on a schedule as short as six months.
A Fort Lauderdale truck claim runs against the carrier as well as the driver, and it is decided by records the company holds. Duty status logs carry a six-month federal retention floor and engine data can be overwritten while the truck stays in service. You have two years to sue for most crashes on or after March 24, 2023, but the evidence deadline arrives long before that.
What to do after a truck accident in Fort Lauderdale
- Get the carrier name and the DOT number, not just the driver. The door of the tractor carries a company name and a US DOT number, and the trailer often belongs to somebody else again. Photograph both. The driver is rarely the party that pays, and the difference between naming the right carrier in week one and finding it in month four is usually the difference between an intact file and a rebuilt one.
- Ask the officer for the crash report number before you leave. A commercial vehicle crash draws a longer investigation than a car crash, and sometimes a separate commercial vehicle enforcement unit. The report will list the carrier, the trailer, the insurer and any citation, and it fixes a date that several federal retention clocks then run from.
- Photograph the trailer, the placards and the load. The trailer number, any hazardous material placard, the way the load sat and whether it had shifted. A tractor is usually back in service within days and a trailer can be interstate the same night. What you photograph at the scene is frequently the only record of how that truck was actually loaded.
- See a doctor even if you walked away. A loaded tractor-trailer transfers force a car does not, and the injuries that matter often present two or three days later as numbness, headaches or a shoulder that will not lift. A gap between the crash and the first visit is the single most common argument a carrier makes about how badly somebody was hurt.
- Say nothing recorded to the carrier or its adjuster. A trucking company often has an adjuster and an investigator working the same day, sometimes at the scene. They will be courteous and they will ask for a recorded statement early, while nobody yet knows the extent of the injury. You have no obligation to give one, and we take that call from the day you hire us.
Where these happen in Fort Lauderdale
Broward moves freight in two directions at once. Containers come off Port Everglades and go west to I-95 and the I-595 corridor, and distribution traffic runs north and south through the same interchanges commuters use. The place a crash happened usually tells us which records will exist.
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The Port Everglades approaches
Container and fuel traffic feeding the port runs on a short list of roads, and much of it is drayage: short local hauls, quick turnarounds, drivers paid by the trip.
- Eller Drive and the SE 17th Street approaches, where port traffic meets tourist traffic
- Fuel tankers serving the port terminals, which carry higher federal coverage minimums
- Short-haul drayage, where a driver may be exempt from some logging rules and the gate records at the terminal become the timeline instead
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The I-95 and I-595 interchange
The busiest freight junction in the county, and the one where a stopping distance measured in hundreds of feet meets traffic that stops without warning.
- Rear-end collisions at the back of stopped traffic on the ramps
- Lane changes across three lanes in the run-up to the interchange
- Rollovers on curved ramps posted for a passenger car rather than a loaded trailer
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Powerline Road and the western warehouse belt
Warehousing along Powerline Road, Copans Road and Sample Road generates constant tractor-trailer movement on roads with driveways and traffic signals.
- Wide right turns across a lane a driver had already checked
- Trucks reversing into loading bays from a live traffic lane
- Loads secured in a yard rather than at a terminal, with no independent record of who did it
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Federal Highway and the surface streets
Delivery and service vehicles working the same streets as everybody else, where the vehicle is commercial but the crash looks like an ordinary one at first.
- Box trucks and delivery vans over 10,000 pounds, which carry commercial policies people do not expect
- Blind spots along the right side on a multi-lane main road
- Vehicles that leave the scene, where the fleet number in a photograph is what identifies the company
What causes them
- Hours behind the wheel beyond what the federal limits allow, which the logs either show or conspicuously fail to show
- A load that was too heavy, badly distributed or not properly secured before the truck left the yard
- Brakes out of adjustment, which is the most common violation found in roadside inspections nationally
- Tires run past their service life on long Florida heat cycles
- A driver who should never have been hired, with a record the carrier could have pulled in an afternoon
The injuries we see, and what each one turns on
Spine and spinal cord
Herniations, fractures and cord injuries that arrive with a force ordinary collisions do not produce. The defense in most spine cases is age: nearly every adult spine shows wear on imaging, and the argument is that the crash found it rather than caused it. What answers that is a clear before and after, which is why the first medical record carries more weight than the last one.
Brain injury
A brain injury does not require losing consciousness and a normal CT does not rule one out. What follows shows up in memory, concentration, sleep and temper, and it is usually the people around somebody who notice before they do. These claims are proved with neuropsychological testing and treating records rather than with the scan taken on the day.
Crush and orthopedic injuries
Pelvis, femur, tibia and complex joint fractures that need hardware, then a second operation to remove or revise it. The first settlement offer usually arrives before anybody has said out loud that a second operation is coming, and it is priced on the bills that exist rather than the ones that will.
What Florida law requires you to prove
The federal rules that decide most of these cases
Interstate carriers run under the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations, and that is the practical difference between a truck case and a car case. A driver may not drive more than 11 hours after 10 consecutive hours off duty, and may not drive at all beyond the 14th hour of a shift, under 49 CFR § 395.3. Carriers must keep records of duty status and the supporting documents behind them for six months under 49 CFR § 395.8(k), which is the clock that decides whether a case is provable.
Who can be held responsible besides the driver
The carrier answers for its driver, and it can also answer for its own decisions: hiring somebody it should not have, keeping them after it knew, training that did not happen, maintenance that was deferred. The trailer owner, the company that loaded it and the broker that arranged the freight can each be separate defendants, which matters because a single policy is often not enough for a catastrophic injury.
The deadlines and the coverage floor
Most Florida negligence claims arising on or after March 24, 2023 carry a two-year limitation period under Fla. Stat. § 95.11. Fault is shared under Fla. Stat. § 768.81, and a person found more than 50 percent at fault recovers nothing. Interstate freight carriers must hold at least $750,000 in liability coverage under 49 CFR § 387.9, and considerably more for some hazardous loads.
The full statutory detail, and the parts that differ by claim type, sit on our statewide truck accident page rather than being restated in every market.
How we prove it in Broward County
What decides a Broward truck case is almost never in dispute at the roadside. It sits in files held by the carrier, and every one of them has a clock on it.
- The crash report, which names the carrier, the trailer, the insurer and any citation, and fixes the date the federal retention periods run from
- Records of duty status and the supporting documents behind them, retained six months, which show whether the driver was inside the 11-hour and 14-hour limits
- Engine control module and telematics data: speed, braking, throttle and hard-brake events in the seconds before impact
- The driver qualification file, the pre-employment record check and the training file, which is where negligent hiring lives
- Maintenance and inspection records for the tractor and the trailer, and any roadside inspection history in the federal database
- Post-accident drug and alcohol testing, which has its own short federal windows
- Bills of lading and weight tickets, which show what the truck was carrying and whether it was loaded correctly
- Camera footage from the port gates, the warehouses and the businesses along the route, most of which is overwritten within weeks
A preservation letter naming the tractor, the trailer and each of those records is the first thing that goes out, and it goes out before the truck is repaired. Sent in the first week it is routine correspondence. Sent in the fourth month it becomes an argument about what was destroyed and when.
Who would handle your case
Being hurt in Fort Lauderdale is hard enough without working out the legal side on your own. The trial lawyers below have handled truck accident claims across Florida since 1993, and one of them will take yours from the first call to the last check. They will tell you what your case is worth and why, and they will be straight with you about the parts that are hard.
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Brett J. Yonon Senior Trial Attorney Selected to Florida Super Lawyers in 2024 and 2025. Brett Yonon is who this firm puts on a catastrophic injury or a death in the family, and he has tried those cases to verdict. Full profile → -
Richard P. Pravato Founding & Managing Attorney Board Certified in Civil Trial Law by The Florida Bar since 2004, and by the National Board of Trial Advocacy. Injury cases exclusively since 1996. Full profile →
How insurance companies handle these claims
A trucking insurer is not the carrier that handles fender benders. It is a commercial file, often with counsel assigned early, and the people running it do this work every day.
- A rapid response team is at the scene before you are out of the hospital
- Many carriers keep investigators on call for exactly this. They photograph, measure and interview while the evidence is fresh, and that file belongs to them. The answer is not to be alarmed by it, it is to have somebody doing the same work for you at the same speed, which is why a truck case is the one type of claim where calling in the first week genuinely changes the outcome.
- The logs and the electronic data quietly age out
- Duty status records have a six-month retention floor and engine data can be overwritten as the vehicle keeps running. A preservation letter goes out naming the specific records, the tractor and the trailer, and it goes out before anybody repairs the truck. Sent early it is routine. Sent late it becomes an argument about what was destroyed and when.
- The offer arrives before anybody knows what the injury is
- An early number is priced on the bills that exist in month one, and it is often made while somebody is still deciding whether they need surgery. Nothing is signed until the treating doctors have said where this settles, because a release cannot be reopened when the second operation is scheduled.
What a claim can include
Medical care, past and future
Everything already billed, and what the treating physicians say is still ahead. Future care is the part an early offer never includes and the part that decides whether a settlement holds up in five years.
Lost income and lost earning capacity
Wages missed, and separately what somebody can no longer earn. A person who returns to work in a lighter role at less money has a loss that a wage statement does not show on its own.
Pain, and what daily life has become
Sleep, mobility, the things somebody used to do without thinking about them. It is proved with the account of the people around the injured person as much as with records.
What we have recovered
Verified matters this firm has handled on truck accident claims. Figures are gross recoveries, before attorney fees, costs and medical liens come out of them.
Our client was a passenger in a work truck on a private dirt road owned by the company.
Settlement on the eve of trialEvery verdict and settlement we publish, with the press coverage for the ones that were reported. No result predicts another case: every claim turns on its own facts, its own evidence and the insurance actually available.
Why Wolf & Pravato in Fort Lauderdale
A Broward truck case is filed in the Seventeenth Judicial Circuit at the Broward County Courthouse, and that is the courthouse this office works in. The circuit a case would be tried in shapes what a carrier offers to settle it, because commercial insurers keep records of which firms in a county actually try cases.
Richard Pravato has been Board Certified in Civil Trial law by The Florida Bar since 2004. The Bar lists 861 lawyers in the state holding it against a membership over 109,000. What it means in practice is that the other side knows the file can go in front of a jury, and files that can go to trial are priced differently from files that cannot.
The first conversation is free. We are paid out of the recovery or not at all, and if we do not think there is a claim worth bringing we will tell you that rather than take it.
Fort Lauderdale truck accident questions
The truck was repaired and back on the road within a week. Is the case gone?
No, but it is harder, and it is worth acting quickly on what is left. Engine data is frequently downloaded by the carrier before a repair, and once it exists in their file it is discoverable. Duty status records, the driver qualification file and maintenance history sit in an office rather than on the vehicle, and those have their own retention periods. What is genuinely lost is the physical inspection, which is why the first call matters more in a truck case than in almost any other kind.
The driver said he works for himself, not the company on the door. Does that end it?
It rarely does. What matters is who controlled the work: the dispatching, the schedule, the equipment, the training. A carrier is also answerable for a vehicle operating under its federal authority regardless of how the driver is labeled on paper. It is a common first answer and it is frequently wrong on the facts.
Their adjuster called me the same afternoon. Is that normal?
It is, and it is not a sign of goodwill or of bad faith. Many carriers put an adjuster and an investigator on a serious crash within hours, sometimes at the scene itself. You have no obligation to give them a recorded statement, and there is no advantage in giving one before anybody knows how badly you are hurt.
How is a truck case different from a car accident case?
Federal regulation. Interstate carriers must keep electronic logging records, driver qualification files, drug and alcohol testing results and maintenance logs. Much of it can be destroyed on a lawful retention schedule, some within six months, which is why a preservation letter needs to go out early rather than when the case is filed.
Who can be held responsible in a Florida truck accident?
Often more than the driver. The motor carrier, the company that loaded the trailer, a maintenance contractor, a freight broker and the vehicle or parts manufacturer can each carry a share. Finding every responsible party matters because commercial policies are layered and the driver’s own policy is rarely the largest one available.
The questions that come up on every kind of claim, deadlines, fees, recorded statements and fault, are answered on our Florida injury claim FAQ.
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Tell us what happened
A lawyer will listen, tell you what Florida law does with those facts, and be straight with you about whether it is worth bringing. We are at 2101 W Commercial Blvd, Suite 1500, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33309.