Brain Injury Lawyer Blog

The Blog below about sick truck drivers hits close to home for me, both as an attorney who believes our lawsuits ultimately make the roads safer, but also as an advocate for those injured.

In seemingly every case, I have a client whose ability to drive is impaired in some way by his or her brain injury. If you were to run a list of brain injury symptoms, almost every symptom on that list would reduce to some extent, a person’s capacity to drive under certain traffic conditions. While taking someone’s drivers license is the equivalent to a prison sentence in some ways, it is still imperative to the public safety and the already vulnerable person’s safety, that they not take unnecessary risk of a wreck.

In most of my cases, the brain injured person works out a compromise on this issue, driving only under limited circumstances, near home, during periods of light traffic. I am never happy with this, because one can never completely plan for the unexpected when driving, and it is the unexpected that causes the distraction, that results in the wreck.

But while all life is compromises -balancing risk against rewards, when you are talking about the huge public safety issue involved in driving an 18 wheeler, then there can be no compromise. The risk is so great, no individually based reward can justify it. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety rules are strict for a reason: trucks are just too dangerous in the hands of someone incapable of handling all of the stresses involved. But we must do more than have strict rules, we must have a compliance policy that ensures that all truck drivers are safe.

We discuss these issues at length at our page http://semi-accident.com/ While as an advocate, I am always pushing to able, not disable my clients, trucking is not an a field for accommodation, trial and error. Drivers, carriers and regulators must assure that everyone behind the wheel of an 18 wheeler is fully capable.