Truck Accident Claim in Florida: 4 Steps to Take Before the Records Are Gone
By Richard P. Pravato, Board Certified in Civil Trial Law Published October 30, 2026
A truck accident claim is not a bigger car accident claim. It is a claim against a business, and that business has resources you do not.
The driver who hit you works for somebody. That company has a safety department, a lawyer it already pays, and an insurer that can send an investigator to the crash before the road reopens. You have a police report and a phone full of photographs. That is an uneven fight, and it starts on the day of the crash.
Here is what happens if you wait: federal rules let that company delete the driver’s hours 6 months after the crash. Florida gives you 2 years to sue. So the record of how long the driver had been working can be destroyed, legally, more than a year before your own deadline.
Three people end up on a page like this one. A truck hit you, and an insurer has told you to send in the medical bills and wait. Maybe the crash killed a family member, and nobody will say who is looking into it. Maybe an adjuster keeps calling for a recorded statement before you have spoken to a lawyer.
By the end you will know what to save, who the claim is against, which hours rules the driver was under, and how much insurance sits behind the truck. I will walk you through it one step at a time, in the order it happens to you. I am Richard P. Pravato, a trial attorney at Wolf & Pravato, and we bring truck cases across South Florida.
What this guide covers
- Why a truck accident claim is not a bigger car claim
- Step one: stop the records being deleted
- Step two: work out who the claim is against
- Step three: check where the truck was running
- Step four: find the insurance behind the truck
- The two Florida rules that decide what you keep
Why a truck accident claim is not a bigger car claim
A truck accident claim is a claim against a business. A car crash claim is usually one driver and one insurer. The truck accident claim process adds three things: federal safety rules the driver had to follow, company paperwork showing whether the driver followed them, and more than one party who can be made to pay.
That last part is why these cases are worth more and move faster. It is also why the trucking company starts working on yours the same day.
| Car crash | Commercial truck crash | |
|---|---|---|
| Who pays | Usually the other driver | The driver, and often the trucking company, the truck’s owner and others |
| Rules that apply | Florida traffic law | Florida traffic law plus the federal motor carrier safety rules |
| The proof | Police report, photos, medical records | Driver hours records, the driver’s hiring file, repair records, dispatch messages and data from the truck |
| Insurance | Florida does not make drivers carry injury coverage | A federal minimum applies, and many trucking companies buy more |
| The other side | Usually one insurer | A company and its insurer, often investigating within hours |
So the first job is not the lawsuit. The next question is simpler. What is that company holding, and how long does it have to hold it?
Step one: stop the records being deleted
Stopping the records being deleted takes one letter, sent in the first week, to the trucking company and its insurer. It is called a preservation letter, and it tells both of them to keep everything.
Here is what that company is holding: the driver’s daily hours, the paperwork behind them, and a backup copy on a separate device. Truck driver logs are kept on an electronic logging device, a box wired into the truck that records driving time by itself. The company has to keep all three of those for six months.
After that it can delete all of it, and deleting it breaks no rule. Here is that clock drawn out: the driver’s hours can be deleted in month 6, and your own deadline to sue does not fall until month 24.
The driver’s hiring file lasts longer. A trucking company keeps a qualification file on every driver, holding the job application, the driving record the company pulled, and the medical certificate. It keeps that file while the driver works there and for three years after. The file answers one question: did anybody check this driver’s record before handing over the keys?
The truck keeps records of its own, and nobody is required to save them. Most tractors record speed, braking and throttle in the engine computer, and many run forward-facing cameras. A repair writes over that data, and so does putting the truck back into service.
So a truck accident investigation starts with a letter, not a lawsuit. Send it in the first week and your case gets built on documents. The longer you leave it, the more your case rests on what people remember. Data pulled from a truck has reversed the fault call in cases we have handled.
Pro tip: photograph the registration number painted on the cab door. Every interstate truck has to display one, and that number is how a lawyer finds the trucking company’s insurance and its federal safety record in one search, even if the police report gets the company name wrong.
Where that comes from: 49 C.F.R. 395.8(k)(1) for the six months, 395.22(i) for the backup copy and 391.51(c) for the hiring file.
Now you know what to save. The next question is who you are saving it against, because the driver is rarely the only one who pays.
Step two: work out who the claim is against
The claim is against the driver, and usually against the trucking company as well. A commercial truck accident claim can reach several businesses, and the police report rarely names them all.
Here is who is liable in a truck accident, in the order I check it: truck driver negligence comes first, and the trucking company comes next. It answers for what its driver did on the job, and it answers for what it did itself, which is called trucking company negligence.
That second part covers hiring a driver whose record should have stopped the hire. It covers skipping training. It also covers promising a delivery time the hours rules did not allow.
The truck’s owner is a separate question in Florida. Under the dangerous instrumentality doctrine, the owner of a vehicle answers for a driver who borrowed it. Leasing companies are the exception, and a federal law protects a business that rents or leases vehicles when that business did nothing wrong itself.
Two more join the case when the facts call for them. A mechanic or a parts maker joins it when brakes, tires or a coupling failed. Whoever loaded the trailer joins it when the load was the problem, because federal rules make a loaded truck keep its cargo from falling off.
Truck accident liability does not stop at the cab. Our client was sitting on a bus bench in Broward County when an 18-wheeler carrying steel building beams turned across the road in front of them. The whole load came off the trailer and fell on top of them, and rescue crews worked for hours to free them.
We had to work out how the load came loose, and which business answered for it. We resolved the case for them. If you wait for somebody else to work that out, nobody does. Five large commercial truck settlements show how far that list can reach.
Naming the companies is only half of it. The other half is proving the driver should not have been at the wheel that day, and that comes down to where the truck was running.
Step three: check where the truck was running
The truck’s route decides which hours rules the driver was under. A trip that stays inside Florida gets a longer legal day than one crossing a state line.
Hours of service is the trade name for the federal limits on how long a driver may work. A driver hauling freight across state lines takes 10 hours off before driving, then may drive 11 hours. All driving stops 14 hours after the driver came on duty. A 30-minute break comes before 8 hours of driving have passed.
Florida writes its own version for trucks that never leave the state, and it is looser. Here is the same 12-hour day drawn both ways, inside Florida and on a trip crossing into Georgia:
Those hours matter to you for one reason. Say the driver ran 12 hours that day. Inside Florida that driver broke nothing, and on a trip that crossed into Georgia the same 12 hours broke a federal rule.
Florida also gives an in-state driver a 16-hour working window instead of 14, and it holds in-state trucking companies to the federal rule book as it read on December 31, 2023. A rule written since then does not reach them. Work out which set applies early, and the shipping paperwork answers that.
Where that comes from: 49 C.F.R. 395.3 and Florida Statute 316.302.
A broken rule tells you who is to blame. It does not tell you whether there is any money behind the truck, and that is the number most people guess wrong.
Step four: find the insurance behind the truck
A for-hire truck hauling ordinary freight has to carry at least $750,000 of liability insurance, where Florida asks a private driver for no injury coverage at all. Insurance decides how much truck accident compensation a claim can really pay.
Commercial truck insurance requirements rise with the load. Haul oil or most hazardous materials and the floor rises to $1,000,000. Haul the most dangerous materials of all and it is $5,000,000. Those numbers apply to a vehicle rated at 10,001 pounds or more.
Read them as floors, not as the answer. The regulation’s own table dates that smallest figure to January 1, 1985, and a bad truck crash today costs a great deal more. Plenty of trucking companies buy well above the minimum, and a leasing company or a shipper can bring a policy too.
So finding every policy is part of the work, and a standard injury claim rarely has more than one.
Where that comes from: 49 C.F.R. 387.9.
Finding the money is not the same as keeping it. Two Florida rules can take all of it away, and one of them runs out while you are still in treatment.
The two Florida rules that decide what you keep
Two Florida rules decide what you keep: a two-year deadline to file, and a fault line at 50 percent. A truck case is still a Florida injury case, and both rules sit over the whole thing.
Filing a truck accident claim has to happen within two years of the crash. Miss that date and the insurance behind the truck stops mattering.
The second rule splits the blame. A jury puts a percentage of fault on everybody involved, and that includes you. Your truck accident damages then drop by your share, and if you go over 50 percent you recover nothing at all.
Fault is why a trucking company sends an investigator out so early. We go through the arithmetic in Florida’s comparative negligence rule.
Where that comes from: Florida Statutes 95.11(5)(a) and 768.81(6).
What you get in the first week of a truck case
Here is the order I work in: the preservation letter goes out inside 7 days, naming the hours records, the engine data, the camera files and the dispatch messages. I ask for the driver’s qualification file next, because it answers whether that company should have put this driver on the road.
Then I pull the company’s record from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the federal agency that licenses interstate trucking. Last, an engineer gets to the truck and the trailer before either one is repaired or sold. You pay nothing unless we win, and you deal with us rather than with the adjuster.
Questions people ask about truck accident claims
The trucking company’s adjuster wants a recorded statement. Should I give one?
Not before you have spoken to a lawyer about it. That adjuster works for the business you may have a claim against, and the recording is taken to find the share of blame the company can put on you.
The driver owned the truck instead of working for a company. Does anyone else still pay?
Often somebody does. An owner-operator usually hauls under a trucking company’s federal operating authority, and that company can be answerable for the trip it sent the driver on. The shipping paperwork settles which company held the authority on that load.
My husband was killed by a truck. Is that the same claim?
No, a death in a crash becomes a wrongful death claim, and Florida law gives it separate rules about who may bring it and what the family can recover. The same records disappear on the same schedule.
Key takeaways
- A trucking company only has to keep a driver’s hours records for six months. You get two years to file a truck accident claim.
- More than one business can owe you money. The driver, the trucking company, the truck’s owner, a mechanic and whoever loaded the trailer are all on the list.
- A truck that never leaves Florida gets longer driving limits than one crossing state lines. That changes what counts as a violation.
- Federal rules make a for-hire truck carry at least $750,000 of liability insurance. Florida asks a private driver for no injury coverage at all.
Find out what the records in your case still show
Wolf & Pravato handles semi truck accident claims and tractor-trailer cases out of 5 offices across Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties. Request a free case review. We will send the preservation letter the same week, then tell you honestly what your claim looks like. No fee unless we win.
This article is general information about Florida and federal law, not legal advice, and every case turns on its own facts. Federal motor carrier rules and state statutes change, so the requirements in your case may differ. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.
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