It was great to see everyone at this year’s DRI Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.  The opportunity to be entertained by President Bill Clinton and the Honorable Antonin Scalia (Associate Justice of the Supreme Court ) all in two days was an experience of a lifetime.

On behalf of Kurt, Tamara and myself, a special thank you to this year’s trucking law breakout group speakers Stacy Erin Rowell, Esq., manager of accident claims/legal at Southeastern Freight Lines and Philip M. Gulisano, Esq. of Burden, Gulisano and Hickey, LLC for their informative presentations.
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The transportation industry is under siege from a serious challenge to the way it interacts with drivers.  But this time, it is not only the plaintiff bar taking aim at the types of relationships trucking companies and other transportation providers have with their drivers.  Now, the federal government and multiple state agencies are joining forces with plaintiff attorneys armed with a threatening new weapon:  independent contractor misclassification.

As we saw with wage and hour litigation, the plaintiff bar has included the transportation industry as one of its primary targets in alleging that employers are misclassifying employees as independent contractors and depriving them of various rights including overtime pay, unemployment compensation, workers compensation and health/retirement benefits.  State and federal governments soon joined the fight in an attempt to increase tax revenues from companies who allegedly misclassified their drivers as independent owner-operators.
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This article will touch on the general principles involving the defense of trucking cases, from the moment an accident occurs, throughout the course of discovery, and up until trial. 

General Information 

As anyone who has defended a trucking case knows, you basically start out with one -- if not two -- strikes against you.  Generally speaking, jurors have negative opinions of defendant trucking companies.  Plaintiff's attorneys know this, and can usually find something (e.g,. a DOT violation, previous tickets or accidents involving the driver in question, etc.) to attempt to inflame the jury.  These difficulties can be compounded by the venue in which the case is pending.  Generally speaking, this is determined by either the location of the accident or where the defendant resides or does business.  Depending on the venue, the facts of the case may not matter in some places as much as they do in others.  As an example of this, there was recently a case tried in the state in which I practice (Alabama) involving a minor rear-end collision, only $2,500 of retail medical bills and absolutely no "heat" in the case.  After deliberating briefly, the jury returned a verdict in favor of the plaintiff in the amount of $250,000.  On the other hand, it is important to note that some of even the more rural venues depend on trucking companies as being vitally important to the local economy, and thus are more friendly towards trucking companies than one would assume.
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