What to Do if You are Injured in a Tractor Trailer Crash

If you’ve been involved in a tractor trailer accident and you’re hurt, call 911 immediately. After
emergency personnel have seen to your injuries, call our Personal Injury Lawyers at 314-542-2222 or 618-272-2222. We
can make sure that you get the full recovery that you are owed.

What if you’ve been in an accident involving a tractor trailer, but you haven’t sustained life threatening injuries?
What do you do? What are the steps you should take to protect your claim and make sure that you get everything you
are owed. Is a truck accident claim different from a car accident claim? If so, what is different?

In this FAQ, Gary details the different steps you can take to make sure that your Truck Accident claim is fully
protected and that your rights and recovery are also guaranteed. Truck Accidents aren’t like normal accidents and
often involve much higher levels of damage. Remember, if you’re seriously hurt, call 911 and then call our
team. Our Personal Injury Lawyers in St. Louis don’t charge any fees for their
consultations, and we never charge any attorneys fees unless we win your claim.

What should I do immediately after a Truck Accident?

What do you do if your vehicle is hit and you’re injured by a tractor-trailer that leaves the scene? Well, there are a
number of things you need to do. One is keep the company name down. Write that down so you know, “It was a Swift, it was
a CRST, it was a C.R. England type of tractor-trailer.” Two, see what numbers you can get off the back of the vehicle.
See if you can get the “1-800-How’s my driving?” number. See if you can get the license plate number. What other in this
do you have? If you can keep going, go follow that vehicle, catch up to it and get what you can about it.

Call the police. Call 911. Advise them that you’ve just been in an incident. That vehicle is leaving and that they need
to be attended to. I was on the roadway literally yesterday, and a trash truck was dumping all this stuff on the
roadway. I didn’t call the 911, but I called the local officers, and I said, “Hey (I won’t say the name of the company),
there was a trash truck dumping all kinds of stuff. Can you guys tell that company not to do that? And someone needs to
pick up the debris on the roadway. That’s dangerous.”

So, do those things. Try to identify the vehicle that you’re doing. I have a client. We’re trying to settle the case now
where the truck actually did a U-Turn on the roadway and it tossed her to skid and hit a guardrail. After she got her
senses, she went and followed, got off an exit, went safely, came back around, went down, found that truck at a stop
down the road, wrote down her information and then made a claim. So, try to track down that liable driver. Don’t go to
too great a length that you put yourself in any danger to do so. You don’t want to be going 90 miles an hour trying to
do it because you’re going to cause more damage to yourself.

If you can’t get any of that information, at least get the name of the trucking company because we can call them and
say, “Hey listen. There was a tractor-trailer at Milepost X on Roadway Y at Z Time, and they caused an injury.” And
these tractor-trailer companies dispatch their vehicles with GPS. They know exactly who was when, where, how, so we can
track that down also to try to find the liable driver and the company, and then we make a claim against them. We try to
get 100% of your compensation, your medical expenses, your wage loss damages, pain and suffering, disability, whatever
the damage to your vehicle was.

There are many occasions where commercial truck drivers and 50,000 to 70,000-pound vehicles break the rules of the road
and injure or kill people, and I’ve had many cases and helped a lot of people recover from them. But, there are also
good responsible trucking companies that want to be safe on the roadways, that are required by federal and state law to
do that, and they want to be responsible. They want to own up and stand up to their obligations and good for them
because that’s what you ought to be doing. You’re required to do it by law, and we shouldn’t be only defined by the bad
actors in our industries. I mean I am plaintiffs’ lawyer, Gary Burger of Burger Law. In the media plaintiffs’ lawyers
are portrayed badly, and plaintiffs, injured people are portrayed badly, and there’s this dim view of that in some
corners of America.

But, just like those plaintiffs or those plaintiffs’ lawyers shouldn’t define me or my industry, bad truck drivers
shouldn’t define the whole truck driving industry too. I don’t want me to get too far off-point, but the point is that
when we do contact these trucking companies, many a times they do stand up and say, “You know what, we did have a driver
there. We’ll contact him. He will do it. You know what, we’re not going to dispute this. We’re not agreeing to it, but
we’re not going to dispute that you were injured. Here’s what we’re going to offer to settle this case. Thanks for
contacting us. We want to have a good reputation in our community because we’re comprised of our community. I mean our
truck drivers may be your neighbors, and we want to have that reputation.”

So, get what information you can, anything identifying. Write it down. You’ll forget it later. Communicate it to the
police or whoever is reporting the incident. Get a police report. Then, contact me if you’d like, 314-542-2222, and
we’ll be able to make a claim for you. Thank you.

Gary Burger

Founder | Injury Attorney
Gary Burger has dedicated his career to standing up against bullies. The founder and principal attorney of Burger Law | St. Louis Personal Injury Lawyer has helped hundreds of Missouri and Illinois individuals and families recover th …
Years of experience: 30 years
Location: St. Louis, MO

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