What Is a Truck Accident Quick Response Team?

A commercial truck accident can be physically, mentally and economically devastating for a victim. Unfortunately, the trucking company’s main priority will be to avoid a large payout. This mission will make the truck company use many strategies to protect its bottom line. One of these is to send out a truck accident quick response team immediately after the collision – sometimes even before the police or paramedics arrive.

What Is a Quick Response Team?

A truck accident quick response team, also called a rapid response team, is a group of professionals hired by the truck company to preserve and collect evidence immediately after a truck accident. The job of the quick response team is to preserve evidence quickly, before anyone else can interfere with the scene of the 18-wheeler accident. This team is not unbiased, however, and has the truck company’s best interests in mind during its investigation.

Most trucking companies have the power and resources to deploy a team of investigators to the scene of a truck accident immediately. The rapid response team is often the first outside party to the scene of a truck accident – even before law enforcement, depending on how fast the truck driver reports the crash to the company. This is intentional; it gives the trucking company an edge over the accident case as the first investigating party to the site.

Who Is on a Truck Accident Quick Response Team?

A quick response team may include a defense attorney, an accident reconstruction expert, a forensic professional and crash investigators. It will consist of people trained and experienced in both truck accident investigation and personal injury law. That way, the quick response team can preserve evidence with the ultimate goal of defending the trucking company from allegations of fault, negligence and liability.

How Does the Quick Response Team Serve the Trucking Company?

Although the rapid response team collects evidence, its main purpose is to build a strong defense against a victim’s truck accident case. The team wants to find evidence at the scene it can use against the victim later. As players hired by the trucking company, the rapid response team is far from neutral. Rather than only protecting and collecting evidence from the scene of the crash, the team may take or destroy key evidence that it knows the victim would otherwise be able to use against the trucking company. The team may even be guilty of altering the crash site.

The evidence collected by the truck accident quick response team may include the truck’s black box, which is an electronic data recorder that collects information about the truck, such as its speed and truck driver’s braking patterns leading up to the crash. Evidence collected may also include the truck driver’s daily logs, cell phone records, hours-of-service logs, maintenance statements, inspection reports, eyewitness statements, video footage and photographs.

What Can You Do to Protect Your Rights as an Injured Victim?

Claims of police investigation interference and evidence destruction follow truck accident quick response teams wherever they go in Texas. Even if a response team is ethical, it is not on your side. These professionals have been hired by the trucking company to protect them from your lawsuit. The best way to safeguard your rights after a truck accident in Texas is to hire a team of professionals of your own to investigate: a personal injury law office.

A plaintiff’s law firm can deploy its own investigators and accident reconstructionists to the scene of your truck accident. A personal injury attorney can find out which information and documents the rapid response team has. Then, he or she can make phone calls and file subpoenas to force the trucking company to preserve key evidence (saving it from destruction) and present it during the discovery phase of your lawsuit.

Contact a Houston truck accident attorney in Houston as soon as possible if you get into an accident. Hiring a lawyer right away can even the playing field between you and a truck accident quick response team.