Texas Truck & 18-Wheeler Accident Lawyers

Why Families Across Texas Trust Patterson Law Group

Commercial truck crashes are not just bigger car wrecks. They involve federal regulations, corporate defendants with deep pockets and aggressive defense lawyers, hours-of-service logs, electronic logging devices, black box data, and a rapid-response defense team that's typically on scene before the wreckage cools.

If you've been hit by an 18-wheeler, you're in a fight from the moment the crash ends. Patterson Law Group has been winning that fight for more than 30 years. We've recovered over $100 million for injured Texans, and trucking cases are where size and experience matter most.

We work on contingency. The consultation is free. The truck company already has a team working against you — let's level the field.

Offices in Fort Worth, Arlington, and San Antonio. Every case is taken on a contingency fee — no recovery, no fee.

Commercial Truck Cases We Handle

Trucking cases come in many shapes. We handle them all:

Federal Trucking Regulations & Texas Law

Commercial motor carriers are governed by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations (FMCSR), enforced by the FMCSA. Drivers have hours-of-service limits, mandatory rest periods, drug-testing requirements, and electronic logging device (ELD) requirements. Carriers must maintain vehicles, vet drivers, and keep specific records.

When a carrier or driver violates these rules and a crash follows, the violation is powerful evidence of negligence — sometimes as a matter of law (negligence per se). Critical records like ELD data, driver qualification files, and post-crash drug tests can disappear if a preservation letter doesn't go out fast.

Texas's two-year statute of limitations (CPRC §16.003) still applies, and Texas comparative fault rules govern damages allocation. Trucking insurance policies are typically 750,000 to several million dollars — vastly larger than auto coverage, which is why these cases require lawyers who know how to handle complex litigation.

How We Work With You

Our process is simple. You focus on your recovery. We handle everything else.

1. 1
   Call us. Tell us what happened. Free, confidential, no obligation. We'll give you an honest answer about whether you have a case.
2. 2
   We investigate. Police reports, surveillance footage, medical records, witness statements, expert consultations. We build the case the right way from day one.
3. 3
   You focus on healing. We handle every insurance call, every demand, every negotiation. If they refuse to pay fairly, we take them to trial.

Local Offices & City Pages

Patterson Law Group serves all injured Texans from our physical offices in Fort Worth, Arlington, and San Antonio. For city-specific information on this practice area:

How Truck Accidents Are Different From Car Wrecks

A collision with an 80,000-pound tractor-trailer is not a bigger version of a car wreck. It is a different kind of case, governed by a different body of law and decided on a different kind of evidence. Federal regulations published by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) reach into nearly every aspect of a commercial truck's operation, from how long a driver can sit behind the wheel to how often a brake adjustment must be inspected. The Hours-of-Service rules at 49 CFR Part 395 cap most property-carrying drivers at 11 hours of driving inside a 14-hour on-duty window, after at least 10 consecutive hours off. Commercial driver licensing requirements in 49 CFR Part 383 dictate who is even allowed in the cab. Minimum insurance limits set by 49 CFR Part 387 — generally $750,000 and as high as $5 million for certain hazardous loads — reflect the scale of harm these vehicles can cause.

The evidence is different too. Modern tractors carry an Engine Control Module (ECM), often called a "black box," that records speed, throttle position, brake application, and hard-braking events in the seconds before a crash. Many fleets add forward-facing and driver-facing dashcams, electronic logging devices (ELDs) that capture every minute of duty status, and telematics systems that ping GPS location continuously. Maintenance files, driver qualification files, post-accident drug and alcohol test results, and dispatch records all live with the motor carrier — not with the driver. Pulling those records out of a defense-minded trucking company is its own discipline. A car-wreck playbook, focused on a police report and a couple of repair estimates, simply misses the case. Truck cases are won or lost on the federal regulatory record and on the data the truck itself wrote down before the dust settled.

Where and Why Truck Accidents Happen in Texas

Texas carries more freight tonnage than any other state, and the geography shows up in our caseload. Interstate 35 is the NAFTA corridor — a constant column of cross-border trucks running from Laredo through San Antonio, Austin, Waco, and into Dallas–Fort Worth before splitting off to Oklahoma and the upper Midwest. The split at I-35E and I-35W, the construction zones north of Austin, and the bottleneck through downtown San Antonio all produce serious crashes. Near Fort Worth, the AllianceTexas inland port and the BNSF Alliance intermodal facility funnel thousands of trucks a day onto I-35W, US-287, and SH-114, and the on-ramps at peak hours leave little margin for error.

Interstate 45 between Houston and Dallas is one of the most heavily trafficked freight lanes in the country. Interstate 10 east of San Antonio runs the petrochemical traffic out of the Houston Ship Channel and across to Louisiana. Interstate 20 carries oilfield and energy traffic from the Permian Basin through Midland–Odessa, Abilene, and Fort Worth. Interstate 30 ties Dallas–Fort Worth to Texarkana and the southeastern interstate network. Interstate 40 across the Panhandle moves long-haul freight between California and the East Coast through Amarillo. Interstate 69, still being assembled out of US-59, US-77, and US-281, is now the main truck route from the Rio Grande Valley north toward Houston. Add the loops — I-635 around Dallas, Loop 820 in Fort Worth, the Sam Houston Tollway in Houston — and you have a network where heavy trucks share pavement with daily commuters at 70 mph. Most of the truck crashes we handle are not random; they cluster where freight volume, construction, weather, and driver fatigue all collide.

Types of Trucks Involved

"Truck accident" is a loose label. The vehicle, the load, and the regulatory regime change the case. The classic 18-wheeler — a Class 8 tractor pulling a 53-foot trailer — is the vehicle most people picture and the one most often involved in catastrophic interstate crashes. Dump trucks working construction and aggregate hauls cause a different kind of wreck, often at urban intersections, often with overloaded axles. Tanker trucks carrying fuel, chemicals, or compressed gas turn an ordinary collision into a hazardous-materials response, with potential liability for the shipper that loaded the tank as well as the carrier that moved it.

Delivery box trucks — Amazon, FedEx Ground, UPS, USPS contractors, regional LTL carriers — have multiplied with e-commerce and are now a routine feature of residential streets and apartment-complex driveways. Many are operated by independent contractor fleets, which raises immediate questions about who actually employs the driver and who is responsible for training, maintenance, and supervision. Garbage and waste-hauling trucks operate on tight routes with frequent stops, blind spots, and pedestrian exposure. Oilfield trucks — water haulers, sand trucks, frac tankers, rig-movers — concentrate on I-20, US-285, and the Permian Basin's farm-to-market roads, often running long hours on poorly maintained shoulders. Tow trucks, flatbeds with construction equipment, concrete mixers, livestock haulers, and logging trucks each carry their own risk profile and their own regulatory exposure. The first job in any truck case is to identify exactly what kind of commercial vehicle was involved, because that answer drives everything else.

Severe Injuries Specific to Truck Crashes

Mass and momentum are physics, not legal theory. A loaded tractor-trailer can weigh 20 to 30 times what a passenger car weighs, and the injuries it inflicts reflect that ratio. Traumatic brain injuries — from mild concussion through diffuse axonal injury and post-concussive syndrome — are common in occupants of cars struck by trucks, even when the head never contacts the interior. Spinal cord injuries, ranging from herniated cervical and lumbar discs that require fusion to complete paraplegia and tetraplegia, regularly appear in our truck files.

Crush injuries to the chest, abdomen, and pelvis frequently follow underride crashes, where a passenger car slides under the rear or side of a trailer. Traumatic amputations of the arm or leg, complex orthopedic fractures requiring multiple surgeries, internal organ lacerations, and severe burns from post-collision fires all carry into long-term disability and lifetime medical needs. And in too many cases the injury is fatal. PLG has handled wrongful death cases arising from truck collisions, including an eight-figure 2024 Texas wrongful death settlement on behalf of a surviving family. Catastrophic injuries change the economics of a case: future medical care, attendant care, home modifications, loss of earning capacity, and the disfigurement and physical impairment elements of non-economic damage all expand. They also change the urgency of investigation. The evidence that proves how the crash happened needs to be preserved on day one, while the family is still in the ICU waiting room.

Steps To Take After a Truck Accident

The first 72 hours after a serious truck crash decide what evidence survives. Call 911 and get medical attention — that is the only step that comes before anything else. If you are physically able, or if a family member can act for you, photograph the scene, the trucks, the trailer markings, the DOT number, the MC number, the cargo, and the license plates. Get names and contact information for any witnesses. The investigating officer will generate a Texas Peace Officer's Crash Report (CR-3); that report is important, but it is not the whole story.

What happens next is the part most people miss. Federal regulations require motor carriers to retain certain records — driver logs, dispatch records, post-accident drug and alcohol tests — but those retention windows are short, sometimes as little as six months. ECM data can be overwritten the next time the truck is started. Dashcam footage on a continuous loop can be gone in days. That is why our first move on every truck file is to send a spoliation preservation letter to the carrier, the broker, the shipper, and the insurer, demanding that ECM downloads, ELD records, dashcam video, driver qualification files, maintenance and inspection records, dispatch and bill-of-lading documents, and post-accident testing be preserved and not altered or destroyed. Do not give a recorded statement to the trucking company's insurance adjuster. Do not sign a medical authorization sent to your house in the first week. Get a lawyer who handles truck cases on the file before the truck is back on the road and the data is gone.

Who Can Be Held Liable

Truck cases rarely involve a single defendant. The driver is usually the first name on the petition, but the driver's employer — the motor carrier — bears responsibility under respondeat superior for negligent operation during the course and scope of employment, and bears independent liability for negligent hiring, training, supervision, and retention if the carrier put an unqualified or unsafe driver on the road. The trailer may belong to someone else. The cargo may have been loaded by a third-party shipper or warehouseman whose improper loading shifted in transit. A maintenance contractor may have signed off on brakes that were out of adjustment. A parts manufacturer may share liability for a defective tire, coupling, or underride guard.

Freight brokers — the intermediaries who connect shippers with motor carriers — have become an increasingly important defendant. Courts have steadily moved toward holding brokers liable when they negligently hire unsafe carriers, and the U.S. Supreme Court's 2026 ruling addressing broker liability has further clarified that brokers cannot hide behind federal preemption to escape responsibility for negligent carrier selection. The practical effect is that a broker who hands a load to a carrier with a documented history of unsafe-driving violations on its FMCSA SAFER record may be on the hook for the resulting crash. Sorting through corporate structures, leasing arrangements, owner-operator agreements, and broker-carrier contracts to identify every responsible party — and every available insurance policy — is one of the first things we do on a truck file. The named defendants on the petition determine how much insurance is in play, and how much insurance is in play often determines how completely a catastrophically injured client can be made whole.

How We Investigate Truck Accident Claims

Investigation on a truck case starts the day we are hired and continues until the file is resolved. We send preservation letters within hours. We request and analyze the FMCSA SAFER snapshot for the carrier, pulling its USDOT history, BASIC scores, unsafe-driving and hours-of-service compliance percentiles, prior crash history, and out-of-service rates. We retain a qualified accident reconstructionist — often a former DPS trooper or licensed engineer — to download the ECM and reconstruct the collision from physical evidence, scene measurements, and vehicle damage profiles. We obtain the ELD record and audit it for hours-of-service violations, comparing duty status to fuel receipts, bills of lading, toll records, and dashcam timestamps for falsification.

We pull the driver qualification file required by 49 CFR Part 391: application, motor vehicle record, road test, medical certificate, prior employer inquiries, and any disciplinary record. We request the maintenance and inspection history under Part 396, including pre-trip inspection reports and any DVIRs. We obtain post-accident drug and alcohol testing results required under Part 382. We subpoena the broker's carrier-selection file, the shipper's load tender and bill of lading, and any third-party loading or sealing records. Where appropriate we add a human factors expert, a trucking-industry safety expert, an economist for future earnings and household services, and a life care planner for projected medical needs. None of this is theatrical. It is the standard of care for a serious truck case, and the size of the recovery usually tracks the depth of the investigation. PLG's truck files include a verified $8 million recovery in a distracted-driver truck case — the kind of result that follows from doing the regulatory and forensic work the case requires.

What Compensation You Can Recover

A Texas truck accident plaintiff can recover economic damages, non-economic damages, and — where the facts support it — exemplary damages. Economic damages cover past and future medical expenses, past and future lost earnings and loss of earning capacity, attendant care, home and vehicle modifications, household services, and out-of-pocket costs caused by the crash. Texas Civil Practice & Remedies Code §41.0105 limits recovery of medical expenses to amounts actually paid or incurred, which makes accurate medical-billing proof a necessary piece of every demand. Non-economic damages cover physical pain and mental anguish, physical impairment, disfigurement, and loss of consortium for a spouse, parent, or child. There is no statutory cap on non-economic damages in an ordinary Texas personal injury case.

Exemplary (punitive) damages are available where the plaintiff proves by clear and convincing evidence that the harm resulted from fraud, malice, or gross negligence under §41.003. The §41.008 cap limits exemplary damages to the greater of (a) $200,000 or (b) two times economic damages plus an amount of non-economic damages not to exceed $750,000. Truck cases produce gross-negligence facts more often than most — falsified logs, ignored maintenance, a carrier that knew its driver had a pattern of fatigue or substance abuse and dispatched him anyway. The Texas comparative-fault statute, §33.001, bars recovery if the plaintiff is more than 50% at fault and reduces recovery proportionally below that threshold; defense counsel will routinely try to push fault onto the injured driver, which is why preserving the truck's data is so important. The statute of limitations on most truck cases is two years from the date of the crash under §16.003, and shorter notice deadlines can apply if a governmental vehicle is involved. The shortest path to a full recovery starts with a phone call. PLG handles truck cases across Texas on a contingency fee — no fee unless we recover — from our physical offices in Fort Worth, Arlington, and San Antonio. Call (817) 784-2000. Se Habla Español.

Frequently Asked Questions