In The News

Every catastrophic trucking case begins with a story.

The driver has one.  The company has one.  The crash report has one.  But those are just the first chapters.

The real story behind the crash is often found in the chapters they hope no one digs up — in the records that were not initially produced, the communications that were never volunteered, and the evidence that only comes to light after difficult questions are asked.

In a recent trucking case involving FedEx and its delivery network, Petersen & Petersen pursued discovery to obtain evidence we believed was critical to understanding what really happened.

The Court entered four separate sanctions orders compelling additional discovery and addressing discovery deficiencies.

The litigation ultimately concluded with the following agreed Judgment Entry:

“Defendants agree to pay Plaintiffs’ counsel the requested fees and expenses in the amount of $180,134.19.”

The amount is noteworthy.  But it is not the story.  The story is what persistence uncovered through these Judgment Entries and through our firm’s own due diligence to dig up the truth.

We know the chapters where the truth is often found:

Phone records. Driver communications.  Training materials.  Personnel records.  Electronic data.  Safety documentation.

These are the records which often reveal what happened long before the collision itself.  Serious trucking cases are rarely decided by what occurred in a few seconds on the roadway.  They are built by understanding everything that happened before those seconds ever occurred.

Who hired the driver?  How was the driver trained?  What policies governed the driver’s conduct?  What communications existed?  What evidence remained hidden until someone insisted on finding it?  These questions matter because accountability depends upon complete information—not partial information.

At Petersen & Petersen, we measure success by whether we uncover the truth.  The first story is rarely the full story.

We dig deeper.