I Spent My First Years Defending Insurance Companies. Here’s What That Taught Me About Truck Crashes.
I get a version of this question a lot, usually from someone still in a neck brace or calling from a hospital parking lot: A truck hit me. The company already called. What am I supposed to do?
I want to answer that honestly, and to do it I have to tell you where I started.
I Used to Work for the Other Side
I graduated from the University of Pittsburgh law school in 2006 and moved down to South Florida with my wife, Desiree. My first job was insurance defense. I sat on the carrier’s side of the table, and my job was to evaluate claims brought by injured people and to help the company resolve them for as little as the file justified.
I was not a villain, and neither were my colleagues. But I learned how the machine works, and there are two things I saw over and over that I still think about twenty years later.
The first is that the file gets built in the first two weeks, and the injured person almost never realizes it. By the time someone called a lawyer, the recorded statement had already been taken, the broad medical authorization had already been signed, and the adjuster already had a version of events on paper. We did not have to be sneaky about it. People are polite. They answer the phone. They want to be helpful and they want it to be over.
The second is that the number attached to a claim early is usually about what has already happened, not about what is coming. Emergency room bill, imaging, maybe a first orthopedic visit. That is a real number. It is also frequently the smallest number in the person’s actual future.
After that, I spent a year at a personal injury firm in Boca Raton and then opened my own practice. I have handled personal injury claims in Palm Beach County ever since. Everything I do now is shaped by having watched it from the other direction first.
Why a Truck Case Is Not a Car Case
People use “accident” for both, and I understand why, but they are structurally different problems.
A loaded tractor-trailer carries force a passenger car simply does not. That changes the injuries. In car cases, I see a lot of soft tissue and a lot of fractures. In truck cases, I see traumatic brain injuries, spinal cord damage, internal injuries, burns, amputations, and fractures that mean multiple surgeries and a year of rehabilitation. The crash can last two seconds and reorganize a family’s next decade.
It also changes who is responsible. In a car case, usually one driver made one mistake. In a truck case, the driver may be the last link in a chain. Depending on the facts, there may be a trucking company, a separate vehicle owner, a maintenance contractor, whoever loaded the cargo, a freight broker, a parts manufacturer, or another driver entirely. Hiring practices, training, scheduling pressure, and internal safety rules can all matter, and those live inside a company rather than at the scene.
And it changes the clock. A passenger car sits in a lot. A commercial truck goes back into service, gets repaired, and keeps running its route. Electronic logging data, dispatch messages, driver qualification files, maintenance records, dash camera footage, and onboard system data all have retention windows, and some of them are short. Nearby business surveillance video is often overwritten in days.
That is the practical reason I tell people not to wait. Not to alarm you. Because some of what proves your case has an expiration date, and once it is gone, no amount of effort brings it back.
The Injuries That Show Up Late
The composite I would offer, drawn from the pattern I see rather than from any one client’s file, goes like this.
Someone is struck when a commercial vehicle changes lanes in heavy rain on I-95. At the hospital, the fractured leg is the story. That is what gets treated, documented, and photographed. Everyone, including the injured person, organizes around the leg.
Six weeks later, the leg is healing on schedule and something else is wrong. Headaches that will not quit. Losing words mid-sentence. Reading the same email four times. Sleeping badly, then sleeping too much. Snapping at a spouse over nothing and not understanding why.
A traumatic brain injury does not always announce itself at the scene, and it does not show up in a photograph. Someone can look completely recovered and still be unable to do the job they held for fifteen years. When a working parent cannot return to physically demanding work, the proof does not come from one MRI. It comes from treating physicians, rehabilitation records, employment history, and, honestly, from the family, because a spouse notices changes the patient cannot see in themselves.
That is why I ask questions that seem unrelated. What did a normal Tuesday look like before? Who does the grocery run now? What did you used to do with your kids that you have stopped doing? A claim that only reflects the first hospital visit is not describing the injury. It is describing the receipt.
What I Would Tell You If You Called Me Tonight
Take care of your health first. That is not a throwaway line. Gaps in treatment hurt people medically and they hurt claims, and the medical reason is the more important of the two.
Be polite to the adjuster and understand that politeness does not obligate you to anything. You do not have to give a recorded statement on the spot. You do not have to sign a blanket medical authorization that opens your entire history. You do not have to accept a number before anyone knows what your recovery actually requires. Ask for time. That request is completely normal and the adjuster has heard it a thousand times.
Keep things in one place while you can. Photos of the scene, the vehicles, and visible injuries. Medical records, prescriptions, discharge instructions. Every letter and email from any insurer. Witness names and contact information. And a plain notebook where you write down symptoms, missed work, and what you could not do that day. That notebook is often more persuasive months later than anything else a client brings me, because memory fades and contemporaneous notes do not.
The Part Nobody Likes to Say Out Loud
No claim undoes a catastrophic injury. I have never once handed someone a resolution and watched it give them their old life back. If a lawyer promises you that, walk away.
What a claim can do is more limited and still worth a great deal: identify who is actually responsible, preserve the proof before it disappears, describe the full scope of the harm rather than the first invoice, and take the pressure off you to make permanent decisions while you are in the worst weeks of your life.
I built my practice so that you talk to me, not to a case manager reading from a file. I have been doing this in Delray Beach for two decades, I know these courts, and I started out learning exactly how the other side builds its file. If it would help to talk it through, you can reach aDelray Beach truck accident lawyer directly, and the conversation is confidential and free.
August makes this worse around here, incidentally. Afternoon storms, standing water on I-95 and the Turnpike, school traffic back on the roads, and delivery volume that does not slow down for weather. If you are driving Atlantic Avenue or the interstate this month, give the trucks more room than feels necessary.
If You Are Reading This for Someone Else
Some of the people who find this page are not the injured person. They are a spouse, an adult child, a parent doing research at 2am because the person in the hospital bed cannot.
You are the right person to be asking. Start the notebook. Save the paperwork. Do not let anyone sign anything yet. And when you are ready,talk to a Delray Beach personal injury lawyer about what the next months actually look like, because the decisions that matter most tend to get made early, before anyone feels ready to make them.
Peter Porcaro has practiced personal injury law in Palm Beach County for over 20 years. He is admitted in Florida and Pennsylvania and before the U.S. District Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.