A collision with a fully loaded tractor-trailer rarely resembles an ordinary car accident. Between the interstate corridors feeding the port, the industrial traffic along the river, and the freight moving through New Orleans every day, large trucks share the road with everyone else here, and a crash involving one often leaves victims with catastrophic injuries.
Frischhertz & Impastato represents people hurt in these collisions and looks past the driver to the company, contractor, and equipment that may have contributed to the crash.
Truck accident cases are rarely simple because trucking companies, insurers, and sometimes multiple layers of contractors are involved from the moment a crash is reported. Our New Orleans truck accident lawyers work to get ahead of that process quickly, securing evidence before it can be lost or explained away.
Call (504) 276-6962 for a free consultation if you were injured in a truck accident. Our team is ready to start investigating right away.
A fully loaded commercial truck can weigh 20 to 30 times more than the passenger vehicles around it, which is part of why truck crashes so often cause catastrophic rather than minor injuries. Unlike a routine two-car accident, a truck wreck usually involves a driver who works for someone else, a truck owned or leased by a separate motor carrier, cargo loaded by yet another company, and equipment built and maintained under federal inspection standards.
That layered structure means fault is rarely limited to a single decision made in the moments before impact.
The Federal Rules That Often Decide Fault
Commercial drivers and the carriers that employ them operate under federal hours-of-service regulations limiting how long a driver may be on the road before resting (49 C.F.R. Part 395). Fatigue is a documented factor in a meaningful share of large truck crashes, and violations of these rules, whether a driver ran over the allowed hours or a dispatcher pressured a driver to keep moving, can be central to proving negligence.
Electronic logging devices now record this data automatically, which means a driver's actual hours are often recoverable even when paper logs tell a different story. As local truck accident lawyers in New Orleans, we know how to secure key evidence such as this in order to investigate and build a strong case for our client.
Who Can Be Held Responsible?
Louisiana law holds an employer answerable for the negligent acts of an employee committed within the course of that employment, a principle that generally makes a trucking company responsible for the actions of its drivers on the job (La. Civ. Code art. 2320).
Depending on the facts, liability in a truck accident case can extend well beyond the driver to include:
The motor carrier, for its own negligent hiring, training, or supervision of the driver
A shipper or loading company, if improperly secured or overloaded cargo contributed to the crash
A maintenance or repair contractor, if poor upkeep led to a mechanical failure
A parts or equipment manufacturer, if a defective component was involved
Preserving Truck Accident Evidence
Trucking companies are required to keep certain records, but many of those records are only retained for a matter of months before routine deletion or overwriting. Electronic control module data, dashcam and inward-facing camera footage, driver qualification files, and maintenance logs can all be central to proving what happened, and much of it exists only until a company's retention policy erases it.
Sending a formal preservation letter early in a case, before evidence is gone, is one of the most consequential steps an attorney can take in a truck accident claim. This is also why timing matters from a legal standpoint: claims arising from these crashes are generally subject to Louisiana's prescriptive period for personal injury lawsuits, which runs two years from the date of the accident for injuries occurring on or after July 1, 2024 (La. Civ. Code art. 3493.11).
What Causes New Orleans Truck Accidents?
Every accident is different, and some collisions have multiple causes, but there are several factors we see more frequently with trucking crashes in the New Orleans area.
These include:
Driver fatigue from excessive hours or irregular schedules
Distracted driving, including cell phone and dispatch device use
Improperly loaded, overweight, or unsecured cargo
Wide turns and blind spots at intersections and on-ramps
Poor brake maintenance or worn tires
Congested freight traffic near the port, rail yards, and industrial corridors
Determining the cause (or causes) of a collision is one of the most important steps our New Orleans truck accident attorneys take, because it helps us identify who can be held accountable.
What Recovery Can Include
A successful truck accident claim can account for medical treatment and future care, lost income and diminished earning capacity, property damage, and physical pain and the disruption a serious injury causes to daily life. Because these cases often involve a trucking company's commercial insurance policy rather than a single driver's personal coverage, the scale of a claim, and the resistance to paying it, tends to be much larger than in a typical car accident case.
We Build Cases Insurers Do Not Want to Try
Trucking litigation tends to draw well-funded defense teams from the outset, precisely because commercial insurers know these cases carry higher stakes. Our New Orleans injury attorneys, with more than 85 years of combined experience across the firm, have spent that time preparing cases the way a trial demands, not just the way a settlement negotiation requires, and that distinction shapes how an insurance company responds from the first letter we send. We have recovered more than $700 million on behalf of clients, often in cases where a corporation or its insurer initially disputed responsibility altogether.
A New Orleans truck accident claim moves fast in the days after a crash. Call (504) 276-6962 to talk with our team at no cost, and pay nothing unless we recover compensation for you.
A compilation of the Frischhertz & Impastato attorneys and staff at work and interacting with clients.
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