It’s All In The Details

I’ve had a great change in my work life, given that I’m working from home full-time for an expert witness consortium out of Arizona, and I have a huge number of cases in my pipeline. I’m surely staying busy, and I’m working an equal amount of plaintiff’s and defense cases – something I haven’t done before. What I have done before, and what I’m seeing on a regular basis in almost every case, is that no matter what happened in a case, it all comes down to the details. The paperwork. The employee files. Training documentation.

Even if we’ve gotten past the attitude of, “It won’t happen to me,” details discovered through subpoenaed documents can quickly derail anything you or your people have done correctly – and the bad quickly outweighs the good, and you still lose.

For example, I dealt with a case where a driver would routinely switch between local and OTR

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driving while moving equipment. On one of his out of state runs, only three or four hours from his home yard, he got into a crash where he was sideswiped by a car entering the freeway. The driver’s license, medical card, electronic logs, bill of lading, load securement… everything checked out and was perfect. His company, though, had failed to adhere to FMCSA 49 CFR 391.51 and take care of all the details of his driver qualification (DQ) file. There were several elements missing. Right in 49 CFR 391.51, to paraphrase, it says that if all of the required items are not present, the driver “SHALL NOT” drive. It was determined that the driver should not have been on

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an out-of-state run, driving under FMCSA OTR rules at the time, and therefore, shouldn’t have been on that freeway at that particular time. Because he shouldn’t have been there, the car wouldn’t have hit him, so a large portion of the responsibility and liability falls on him and his company. Minor injuries were involved, and now the company’s insurance paid out the maximum amount – when if a few pieces of paperwork had been completed – they wouldn’t have paid anything at all. Then again, he shouldn’t have been there, according to 49 CFR 391.51.

In another case, a young lady decided to “ghost” her electronic logs while moving around, trying to save time and not burn her 70-hour clock. At the time, I’m quite sure she never thought she’d be in a crash. After all, no one PLANS for a crash. And the longer most people go between near-misses, the more indestructible they feel.

This person made her truck “vanish” between El Paso and Dalhart, Texas, while carrying a load. It also moved in “ghost” form from Dalhart to Albuquerque, New Mexico, magically reappearing after two full days. She was using an electronic log phone app, and had simply logged out of the app. The problem was that the system still tracked her movements, even though she wasn’t signed in and making changes on her duty status. When she crashed into the rear of a Ford F-250 on I-17 south of Flagstaff, the Arizona state trooper did a full inspection on her truck and paperwork. In addition to an at-fault preventable crash, she now faces over $20,000 in fines for log falsification. And another $15,000 – 18,000 in fines for having an incomplete driver qualification file. The company only had one truck, and she was the “vice president” of the company. She was not only fined as a driver, but also as a company officer responsible to ensure compliance with FMCSA regulations, including hours of service and the DQ file. This is in addition to whatever the lawsuit settles or is adjudged for – since her insurance company dropped her due to the non-compliance issues.

One last thing on details – we all know that details matter, but the details seem to be the first thing set aside and overlooked, when they’re usually the most important in any given situation. A heavy tow operator responded to

a construction site to tow a cement mixer that had broken down. When the mixer driver was getting his things out of the truck, the tow operator had already began setting the truck up for tow by running air to it and pulling the driveshaft. The tow operator failed to ensure that the mixer driver was out of the truck and went about his process. The mixer driver went to get out of the truck and fell to the ground, since the mixer’s entry steps were now two feet higher than they were before. Rhetorical question: Do you think details matter when it comes time to ask both guys who was aware of what and what conversation occurred? We now have a major injury, and like with every vehicle-related injury, it has to be someone’s fault. Do you think the details matter?

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