What fleets are doing, or not doing, that leads to 'nuclear' verdicts

Matt Cole:
What types of behaviors most often lead to verdicts against fleets and what can the industry do about it?

Jason Cannon:
Hey everybody. Welcome back. I'm Jason Cannon and my co-host is Matt Cole. Last week we heard from Alex Leslie with the American Transportation Research Institute about the group's recent research on litigation targeting the trucking industry, including trends and more. This week, we continue that conversation with Alex to cover the rest of ATRI's report.

Matt Cole:
Cases against fleets are filed on the basis of a plaintiff alleging some sort of negligence on the part of the trucking company. ATRI's research digs into which types of negligence are most common and which ones lead to the highest verdicts.

Alex Leslie:
So in general, the cases or rather the types of negligence that result in the biggest payouts are often the rarest cases. So these are things like hours of service violations, cell phone usage, fatigue at the wheel. These things are overall pretty rare, relatively small in the overall data set, but these are the ones that really often generate the big ticket numbers. So something like an HOS violation, for example, we saw that the median award for a case with an HOS violation was $28 million. Three quarters of cases with that violation ended up being nuclear over 10 million, but those are relatively rare. We saw less than 1% of the whole data set had HOS violations involved. The things that are most common are things like failure to stop, failure to keep a proper lookout, improper turn. And in general, those ones tend to have smaller median awards.

Not always, of course. Again, every case is its own unique creature, but again, overall, that's what we see.

Jason Cannon:
Injuries to people involved in crashes with tractor trailers also play a factor in how high a verdict can be.

Alex Leslie:
As with negligence, the biggest ones are the ones you'd think, right? Paralysis, for example, internal organ damage. These are the ones at the very top. One of the things that we tried to do in this report too is to break out severity types. So for example, one of the most common injury types in a majority of the cases in our dataset, for example, is traumatic brain injuries or TBIs. But TBIs, it's not like breaking your leg. There's so much variation across different types of TBIs. So we looked at what was actually reported and then sort of delineated different categories. So on the one hand, we've got severe TBIs. Those are the ones where surgical intervention is necessary. We've got the moderate TBIs. Those are the ones that have lingering side effects that are more than just headaches. And then the mild TBIs, which are just headaches and not generally long-lasting effects.

Those severe and those moderate ones, they have award sizes that are over two million, but those mild TBIs are much lower. So again, the importance here of trying to clearly delineate which degree of severity you see with these injuries is one of the really important tasks for the defense because in, again, TBIs or spinal injuries, it can often be a case of the plaintiff is reporting their experience. There might not be a lot of great scientific medical data to prove one way or another. So these are often the really tricky injuries that can swing one way or the other.

Matt Cole:
Just like with roadside violations, some states have tougher litigation environments than others based on state laws and other factors.

Alex Leslie:
Unfortunately, if you're in California, Georgia, Michigan, Florida, those were our top floor in that order. Unfortunately, if you're in a state that is known to have a tough litigation environment where the laws are stacked against the defense, unfortunately, that fact is baked into the settlements. Plaintiffs know this just as well as anyone. So merely settling isn't going to protect you because they're going to ask for a higher settlement as a result. Frankly, the only thing you can do to really protect yourself from these geographic differences state by state is to work for tort reform. And what we've seen is actually several of the states in our top 10 list that we published in this report have actually done that in these last couple years. So Georgia and Florida, for example, they were in our top four for the highest median awards, but they both just in these last couple years passed comprehensive tort reform that it looks like can have a impact going forward.

Other states in our top 10 that also pass tort reform, Missouri, Indiana, Texas, Louisiana. So that's six of the top 10. That's meaningful progress. California, New York, Alabama, Michigan, that's the rest of the top 10. They haven't gotten stuff across the finish line recently. But unfortunately, tort reform is really one of the things that needs to happen to level the playing field. When we're talking about things like the seatbelt gag rule where you can't tell a jury that the plaintiff wasn't wearing their seatbelt, and that contributed to the injury. Things like not being able to say whether there's a third party that's secretly financing all the litigation and manipulating the litigation process. Things like phantom damages where the actual medical bill was only this, but the amount requested was three times higher because that was technically the billed amount, even though no one actually paid it.

It's ways that, frankly, that state laws are stacked against defendants. And hopefully this reform will continue to help, again, creating not just an even playing field, but just an accurate picture of what is actually being litigated.

Jason Cannon:
Now, ATRI's report offers plenty more detail on trucking litigation and advice for the industry moving forward.

Alex Leslie:
Well, like I said at the start, part of the goal of the report was to give a good primer, again, to help us all understand just the state of things. But part of it too is to get into a bit more of the details of how exactly those different litigation strategies play out, because ultimately that is where, again, the plaintiffs are making their money. So this report goes into some really neat detail. For the first time, really looking at this quantitatively into some of the categories that, again, the folks that deal with litigation on a regular basis are going to be really familiar with. Things like exaggerated non-medical claims, pain and suffering awards being 50 times higher than the medical awards. Things like the practice of anchoring, which is when a plaintiff comes in and says, "This is a $50 million case," and just keep repeating that number to set the jury expectation.

How does that impact the outcome? Things like, what does the defense strategy do or unfortunately in most cases not do when it comes to stipulating to liability versus denying versus counterclaiming? So all of those areas, again, it gets into the details, but really again, this is how the process actually works. And our report really has a lot of interesting insight into, again, where trucking is really struggling and where some of that jury bias actually rubber hits the road. If you're in management with a carrier, you need to understand this because if it hasn't happened to you yet, it could happen to you. Again, it's the second biggest industry issue in 2025. It's a huge driver of your insurance costs. And as we see, more and more fleets are looking to understand, how can I retain more of my own risk that is to spend less on the insurance, you're going to have to be able to deal with this and understand this litigation side more and more.

So again, this report, I really think, yes, it's of benefits certainly to folks who are involved in litigation, but it's something that the whole industry needs to get smart on and quickly because it's going to be the whole industry it's going to require, that is the whole industry, to solve some of these problems like better understanding what we're up against, like pushing for tort reform, like having better documentation policies to not have easy ins for plaintiffs to take advantage. So there's certainly a lot of, I should say, there are definitely tips in here as well, especially from, we have several legal experts from outside Atri who weigh in on a couple liability concerns at the end of the report that gives some really good tips on how fleets can help mitigate their risk or the potential damage that a lawsuit could cause.

Jason Cannon:
That's it for this week's 10-44. You can read more on ccJdigital.com. While you're there, sign up for our newsletter and stay up to date on the latest in trucking industry news and trends. If you have any questions or feedback, please let us know in the comments below. Don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell for notifications so you can catch us again next week.