How We Secured a $2 Million Settlement in a Trucking Case Every Other Lawyer Refused to Take

By the time this case reached us, several lawyers had already turned the client away. The rest called us crazy for even trying. There was no winning it, they said, let alone landing a large settlement. Our client was a man in his eighties who lost his leg under the wheels of a semi-truck. The police cited him, not the trucker. And the only eyewitness to the crash was the local chief of police, whose account pointed straight at our client. Two and a half years later, we closed the case with a $2,000,000 settlement.

A Sedan, a Semi-Truck, and an Impossible Set of Facts

It happened in Albany, Georgia. That’s farm country, about three hours south of Atlanta, where passenger cars and heavy rigs share the same narrow roads. Our client, then over 80, was making a left turn. According to police, he failed to yield. A semi-truck hit him, and the report put the blame entirely on him.

The facts only got worse from there. Medical records showed he had dementia. The lone witness wasn’t a random bystander but the chief of police himself, and what he saw supported the other side. That’s the kind of witness you never want against you. The injury was catastrophic: he lost his leg. He’ll never walk on his own again, and he gets around now with a prosthetic and a walker. The disability is permanent. He had been working before the crash. Afterward, that became almost impossible.

Rural Georgia roads are unforgiving when these collisions happen. According to the Georgia Governor’s Office of Highway Safety, 244 people died in crashes involving large trucks across the state in 2021, and on rural highways the fatality rate for these wrecks runs nearly five times higher than on urban routes. Albany and Dougherty County sit right inside that higher-risk zone.

Why Trucking Companies Play by Different Rules

An ordinary fender-bender is the kind of case car accident lawyers handle every day, and the logic is simple: two drivers, two insurers, and a question of who yielded and who didn’t. A truck changes everything, and most people don’t realize it. The man behind the wheel of a sedan and the man driving an 80,000-pound rig do not answer to the same law.

Commercial carriers fall under the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) and a thick rulebook in Title 49 of the Code of Federal Regulations that ordinary drivers never touch. Georgia doesn’t just recognize those rules. The state folded 49 CFR directly into its own law through O.C.G.A. § 40-1-8 and the regulations of the Department of Public Safety, so federal standards carry the force of state law here.

Here’s part of what a trucking company has to follow:

• Limits on time behind the wheel. No more than 11 hours of driving after 10 hours off, and no getting back on the road past the 14th hour of a shift
• Electronic logging devices (ELDs) that record those hours automatically, so the schedule can’t be rewritten after the fact
• A pre-trip inspection before every run, with a signed report on any defect the driver finds
• A qualification file on each driver: medical card, violation history, and drug and alcohol test results

Every one of those rules leaves a paper trail. And each time a carrier breaks one, it becomes evidence that the company strayed from the safety standard its own industry lives by. That’s what we built the case on. Not the single second of the turn, but the whole chain of decisions that trucking accident lawyers know how to pull apart, long before the moment of impact.

The Deposition That Broke the Case Open

The turning point came at a deposition, where questions are asked under oath. We walked through every rule the trucking company was bound to follow, one by one. On each one, their representative had to admit the same thing: it wasn’t done. The hours weren’t tracked, the truck was barely inspected and the records didn’t exist.

Then we asked the driver himself a plain question. Who caused the crash? He couldn’t answer. The man the police report had fully cleared could not, under oath, name who was at fault or pin it on our client.

That was the key. A jury would see exactly what we saw. When a truck driver can’t explain who made the mistake and can’t point to the other side, there’s a strong chance he carries some of the blame himself. And in Georgia, that share, measured in percentages, decides everything.

From a $100,000 Offer to $2,000,000

Georgia law put up one more wall. To recover anything at all, an injured person has to be less than 50 percent at fault. At 50.1 percent, they get nothing (O.C.G.A. § 51-12-33). Proving the carrier was negligent wasn’t enough. We had to show that its negligence was the main cause of the crash, that the truck driver was 51 percent or more to blame. With the police report and the chief’s testimony stacked against us, that looked close to impossible.

At first the company offered nothing. Then it threw out $100,000, just to make the case go away. We said no and kept working it: the carrier’s internal records, the federal violations and the admissions under oath. The final settlement came in at $2,000,000, roughly twenty times what our client ever thought he’d see. That figure covered more than medical bills and lost wages. It covered pain and suffering, the life he had before the crash and lost in a single day.

For him, these aren’t numbers on a page. The money lets him buy a home built for a wheelchair, live on his own, and leave something behind for his children. Where he lives, a house runs $100,000 to $200,000, so the settlement will carry him a long way.

Hurt in a Trucking Accident? Your Case Is Different

A wreck with a semi isn’t just a bigger version of a regular car accident. Different rules, different defendants, and evidence that vanishes first. Black box data gets overwritten within days, camera footage disappears in a day or two, and a driver’s logs and qualification file can simply go missing if no one demands they be preserved in time.

Georgia generally gives you two years from the date of a crash to file an injury claim (O.C.G.A. § 9-3-33), but waiting that long is risky. The sooner a lawyer steps in, the more proof survives. Kermani LLP works on contingency, which means you pay nothing unless we win. Plenty of people wrote this case off as hopeless. We took it to $2,000,000, and we’ve delivered where other firms walked away. Look through our case results, then call us before you talk to the insurance company. The first consultation is free.

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