Midland, I-20, and the 18-Wheeler That Rolled Over Near Loop 250 — What This Crash Means for You
You are reading this because an 18-wheeler turned on its side on Interstate 20 in Midland on a Saturday evening — shutting down the eastbound lanes near Loop 250, bringing a hazmat team to the scene, and leaving the whole corridor closed while emergency crews worked. Maybe you were on that road. Maybe someone you love was. Maybe you are sitting in a hospital waiting room right now, or you are at a kitchen table at 2 a.m. trying to understand what happens next. We are writing this for you — the person whose life just intersected with an 80,000-pound machine on one of the busiest oilfield corridors in the country, and who needs to know, in plain language, what the law protects, what the trucking company is already doing, and why the clock on the evidence started ticking before the tow truck even arrived.
Here is the first thing you need to hear: this is not an ordinary car crash. An 18-wheeler rollover on I-20 in Midland is a commercial truck accident, and commercial truck accidents are governed by an entirely different legal and regulatory framework than a fender-bender between two passenger cars. The federal government has a rulebook — the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations, found in Title 49 of the Code of Federal Regulations — that controls everything from how many hours that driver was allowed to be behind the wheel, to how often the truck had to be inspected, to how much insurance the carrier is required to carry, to what the company must do with the driver’s electronic logs after a crash. Those rules create evidence. And that evidence is perishable.
We are Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. We are trial lawyers who handle 18-wheeler accident cases across Texas, including the Permian Basin, and we built this page to answer every question you have about what a crash like this one means under Texas law. We are going to tell you what the trucking company is doing right now, what the insurance adjuster will try to do to you, how fast the proof of what happened is legally allowed to disappear, and what your case may actually be worth. We will tell you in plain English, and we will tell you the truth — even the parts that are hard to hear.
If you want to talk to a human being right now, at any hour, call us at 1-888-ATTY-911 (1-888-288-9911). The consultation is free. We do not get paid unless we win your case. And we have live staff, 24 hours a day — not an answering service.
What This Crash Means Under Texas Law
Texas is a modified comparative negligence state. What that means in plain English: if you were partly at fault for the crash, your recovery is reduced by your percentage of fault — and if you were 51 percent or more at fault, you are barred from recovering anything. But if you were 50 percent or less at fault, you can still recover, reduced by your share. This is critical in a truck accident case because one of the insurance company’s first moves will be to try to pin percentage points of fault on you. Every percentage point they can hang on you is money off their payout. A driver who was doing nothing wrong — who was simply on I-20 near Loop 250 when an 18-wheeler rolled over — should not absorb a single point of fault, but the adjuster will look for anything: Were you in the truck’s blind spot? Did you change lanes near it? Were you speeding? This is why what happened in the seconds before the rollover matters, and why the evidence of those seconds has to be preserved before it is gone.
Texas gives you two years to file a personal injury lawsuit from the date of the crash. The same two-year deadline applies to a wrongful death claim. This is set by the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code — the state’s statute of limitations for personal injuries. Two years sounds like a long time when you are sitting in a hospital bed. It is not. The medical treatment alone for a serious truck crash injury can take a year or more to reach the point where a doctor can tell you what “maximum medical improvement” looks like. And the evidence — the truck’s electronic logs, the driver’s hours-of-service records, the dash camera footage, the ECM data from the engine — can be legally destroyed long before those two years run.
Texas does not cap non-economic damages in truck accident cases. Unlike medical malpractice cases, where Texas law limits what a jury can award for pain and suffering, there is no statutory cap on what a jury can award for the human losses in a commercial truck crash — the pain, the fear, the lost ability to live the life you had before. This is one of the strongest features of Texas law for a person hurt by a commercial truck, and it is exactly why the insurance company will fight so hard to keep the case out of a courtroom and in a settlement room where they control the number.
“A motor carrier shall retain records of duty status and supporting documents required under this part for each of its drivers for a period of not less than 6 months from the date of receipt.”
— 49 CFR § 395.8(k)(1)
Read that again. The federal government only requires a trucking company to keep the driver’s hours-of-service logs for six months. After that, the company is allowed to destroy them. Those logs — which show how many hours the driver had been behind the wheel, whether he was fatigued, whether he violated the 11-hour driving limit or the 14-hour shift limit — are the single most important evidence in many truck crash cases. And the law gives the company permission to erase them in six months. This is not a loophole. It is the clock we are racing the day you call.
Who Is Responsible When a Big Rig Rolls Over Near Loop 250
The 18-wheeler that rolled over on I-20 near Loop 250 may look like one truck and one driver, but behind it sits a stack of separate companies, each with its own insurance and each with its own reason to point the finger at someone else. This is the first thing our trial team pulls apart when we take a truck crash case — because naming the wrong defendant, or missing a defendant entirely, can be the difference between a full recovery and a fraction of one.
The first layer is the operating carrier — the trucking company whose USDOT number is registered to that truck and whose name appears on the cab door. This is the company that holds the federal operating authority, that is responsible for the driver’s hours, that must maintain the truck, and that carries the federally mandated insurance. The operating carrier is almost always your primary defendant.
But the operating carrier may not be the company you think it is. The truck may be leased to a larger carrier under a federal leasing arrangement. Under 49 CFR § 376.12, when a carrier leases a truck and driver, the law requires that carrier to take “exclusive possession, control, and use of the equipment” and “assume complete responsibility for the operation of the equipment” for the duration of the lease. This means the company whose name is displayed on the trailer — the one the public sees — is the company the law put in control of that truck on the road. The carrier cannot simply wave the driver off as “just a contractor” when its own name is on the door and federal law gave it exclusive control.
The second layer is the driver. The driver is the person whose fatigue, whose speeding, whose inattention, or whose medical condition may have caused the rollover. The driver’s own conduct is the heart of the liability case — but the driver’s insurance is usually just the federal minimum or even a personal policy that excludes commercial use. The driver is a defendant, but rarely the deep pocket.
The third layer — the one that matters most in a catastrophic case — is the corporate parent or holding company behind the operating carrier. National trucking companies operate through layered LLCs: an operating company with few assets, a leasing company that owns the tractors, a holding company that holds the real value. If the operating carrier is a subsidiary of a larger national fleet, the parent company’s balance sheet and its excess insurance towers may be reachable — but only if the right entities are named in the lawsuit.
In the Permian Basin, there is a fourth layer that is especially relevant to a crash on I-20 in Midland: the oilfield operator or shipper that hired the truck. If the truck was hauling water, frac sand, crude oil, drilling chemicals, or equipment for a specific oil and gas operator, the company that arranged the haul may share responsibility for the crash — particularly if it set a schedule that forced the driver to rush, or if it loaded the truck in a way that created a rollover hazard. In Permian Basin oilfield truck accident cases, the shipper’s role is a critical line of investigation that generalist attorneys often miss entirely.
The hazmat team’s presence at this scene adds another dimension. If the truck was carrying hazardous materials — and in Midland, on I-20, in the heart of the Permian Basin, that possibility is real — the federal insurance requirements jump. A standard interstate freight carrier must carry at least $750,000 in liability coverage under 49 CFR § 387.9. But a carrier hauling oil or certain hazardous materials must carry at least $1,000,000. And a carrier hauling the most dangerous hazmat in bulk — explosives, poison gas, large quantities of the most toxic chemicals — must carry at least $5,000,000. The same crash, with the same injuries, can have a coverage tower that is nearly seven times larger if the truck was hauling hazmat. Knowing what was in that trailer, and what the carrier was required to insure for that cargo, is part of the first investigation we run.
The Evidence That Is Already Disappearing — and How Fast It Can Legally Die
This is the section that matters most to you right now, sitting wherever you are, reading this on a phone. Every piece of evidence that would prove what happened on I-20 near Loop 250 is on a clock. Some of those clocks are short. And the trucking company knows exactly when each one expires.
The driver’s electronic logs — six months. The driver’s Record of Duty Status — the electronic log that shows when he started driving, when he stopped, how many hours he had been behind the wheel, and whether he was within federal limits — is only required to be retained by the carrier for six months from the date of receipt. After that, the law allows the company to destroy it. If the driver had been on the road for 13 hours when federal law says he must stop at 11, the log is the proof. If the log is gone, the proof is gone with it.
The driver’s supporting documents — six months. Federal law also requires the carrier to keep up to eight supporting documents for every 24-hour on-duty period — fuel receipts, dispatch records, toll records, bills of lading, payroll records, and GPS pings. These are the records that prove whether the logbook was honest. A log can be edited. A fuel receipt from a truck stop 200 miles from where the log says the driver was sleeping cannot be edited. These die on the same six-month clock.
The truck’s engine control module data — can overwrite in hours. The truck’s ECM — its engine computer — captures hard-brake events and last-stop data, including speed, RPM, throttle position, and brake application in the seconds before a crash. But unlike a passenger car’s event data recorder, which federal law requires to be locked when airbags deploy, a heavy truck’s ECM data sits in a small buffer that can be overwritten the next time the truck is driven hard or put back into service. If the carrier puts that rig back on the road after the crash — and they sometimes do, within days — the ECM data from the crash is written over and gone forever. This is why the preservation demand has to go out before the truck moves another mile.
The dash camera footage — can overwrite in days to weeks. Many commercial trucks now carry forward-facing or multi-angle camera systems. Some are tied to telematics platforms that grade the driver on speed, braking, and phone use. The footage from the moment of the rollover — which may show exactly what happened in the seconds before the truck went over — sits on a server or an SD card that overwrites on a rolling cycle. Some systems overwrite in as little as a few days. The footage is not saved for you. It is saved for the company’s risk management department, and it disappears unless someone formally demands it be preserved.
The driver’s daily vehicle inspection reports — three months. Under 49 CFR § 396.11, drivers are required to file a daily report on the condition of the truck’s brakes, steering, lights, tires, coupling devices, and emergency equipment. If a prior driver had already written up bad brakes, a worn tire, or a steering defect, that report is proof the company knew the truck was dangerous. But the carrier only has to keep these reports for three months — the shortest retention clock in the entire federal trucking regime. A defective-equipment case can live or die on a preservation letter sent within weeks.
The driver’s post-crash drug and alcohol test — done within hours or never. Federal law requires a trucking company to test the driver for alcohol within eight hours of a serious crash and for controlled substances within 32 hours. If the test is not administered within those windows, the company must stop trying and document in writing why it was not done. That missing test — or the written excuse for why it was not done — is itself evidence. The testing window closes in hours, not months. If the company did not test, the fact that they did not test is proof you can use.
The 3-year accident register. The carrier is required to keep a register of all its crashes for three years. That register can show a pattern — the same type of crash, the same type of violation, the same route. It is where a “this was not their first time” argument lives. Three years is longer than most clocks, but it still expires.
Here is what ties all of these together: the preservation letter. The day you call us, a written demand goes to the trucking company, the driver, the carrier’s insurance company, and any third-party data vendor (like the telematics or camera provider), ordering them to preserve every record, every log, every video, every data file related to this crash. That letter is what converts an automatic deletion into sanctionable destruction. Once the letter is on file, if the company lets the evidence die, a judge can tell the jury to assume the lost evidence was as bad for the company as you say it was. That is leverage. But the letter only works if it goes out before the evidence is gone — which is why the day you call is the day the clock starts working for you instead of against you.
The Insurance Money Behind an Interstate Carrier
When a passenger car driver carries Texas’s legal minimum, the policy may be as low as $30,000 per person and $60,000 per accident. One night in a trauma center can burn through that. But an interstate commercial truck is in a different universe of coverage.
The federal minimum financial responsibility for a for-hire interstate carrier of non-hazardous property is $750,000. If the truck was hauling oil or certain hazardous materials, the minimum jumps to $1,000,000. If it was hauling the most dangerous hazmat in bulk, the minimum is $5,000,000. These are floors — the legal minimum the carrier must carry to operate. Many national fleets carry far more, stacked in layers: a primary policy, an excess policy, an umbrella policy, and sometimes a self-insured retention where the company’s own dollars sit on the first layer of any claim.
This is the insurance tower, and knowing which policies exist, in what order they pay, and in what amount is half the value of the case. A lawyer who only sees the primary policy and files against it may leave millions on the table that an excess layer would have paid. A lawyer who understands the tower — who demands the declarations pages, the MCS-90 endorsements, the excess policies — is the one who can push the recovery to the full measure of the loss.
There is also the question of your own coverage. Texas requires insurers to offer uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage, and if you did not reject it in writing, you may have UM/UIM coverage on your own auto policy that stacks on top of the truck’s coverage. In a catastrophic case, your own UM/UIM can be the difference between a recovery that covers your lifetime care and one that falls short. We look at every policy that might pay — not just the truck’s.
If you were on the job when the crash happened — if you were driving for an employer, hauling for an oilfield operator, or working as a contractor on I-20 — there is a fork in the road that most people do not know exists. Workers’ compensation is one lane: it pays faster, it does not require you to prove fault, but it is capped and it bars you from suing your own employer. The third-party tort claim is the other lane: it lets you sue the trucking company, the carrier, the shipper — anyone other than your employer whose negligence caused the crash — for the full measure of damages, including pain and suffering, lost earning capacity, and the human losses that workers’ comp never pays. In a Permian Basin truck crash, where the injured person may be an oilfield worker on the road, this fork can reorder the entire financial picture for the family. Contact us and we will help you understand which lane is yours.
The Injuries a Rollover Crash Inflicts
An 18-wheeler weighs up to 80,000 pounds when fully loaded. A passenger car weighs about 4,000. That is a 20-to-1 ratio. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety reports that in fatal crashes involving large trucks, about two of every three people killed are not in the truck — they are in the other vehicle. The physics are simple and brutal: when a truck that outweighs your car by twenty-to-one collides with you, the energy that has to go somewhere goes into the smaller vehicle and the people inside it.
A rollover adds another dimension. When a truck rolls over, it can sweep across multiple lanes of traffic, crush vehicles beside or behind it, shed its load — which, if it is hazmat, can create a fire, a chemical exposure, or an environmental contamination zone — and block the highway in a way that causes secondary crashes. The rollover itself may have been caused by excessive speed in a curve, a sudden steering input, a tire failure, a load shift in a partially filled tanker, or a collision with another vehicle. The reconstruction of what made the truck roll is a engineering question, and the answer is written in the skid marks, the gouge marks in the pavement, the truck’s final position, the load distribution, and the ECM data.
The injuries we see in truck rollover crashes on highways like I-20 include:
Traumatic brain injury. The brain does not have to hit the skull to be injured. In a violent crash, the head undergoes rapid acceleration and deceleration — the skull stops, the brain keeps moving — and the stretching and shearing of the brain’s white-matter tracts can cause a diffuse axonal injury that never shows up on a standard CT scan. The word “mild” in a mild traumatic brain injury is a hospital triage term, not a prognosis. More than a third of people who score a 13 on the Glasgow Coma Scale — still in the “mild” range — have potentially life-threatening intracranial bleeding. A person who “looks fine” after a truck crash may not be fine, and the symptoms — headaches, memory loss, personality changes, inability to concentrate — can emerge over days and persist for years.
Spinal cord injury. The forces in a truck crash can fracture or dislocate vertebrae and damage the spinal cord. A cervical injury can mean tetraplegia — paralysis from the neck down. A thoracic or lumbar injury can mean paraplegia. The National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center puts the lifetime cost of care for a young adult with high tetraplegia at more than $6 million — and that figure excludes every lost paycheck. Even an incomplete spinal cord injury, where some function remains, can mean a lifetime of neurogenic bladder, chronic pain, and repeated hospitalizations.
Crush injuries and amputation. If the passenger compartment is compromised — if the truck rolled over the car, or if the car was pinned beneath the trailer — the injuries can include crush syndrome, compartment syndrome, and traumatic amputation. The lifetime cost of an above-knee amputation, including the prosthetic device that must be replaced every three to five years, runs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars — and a microprocessor-controlled knee that lets an amputee walk without falling can cost as much as a new car, every time it is replaced.
Burns and inhalation injury. If the hazmat on the truck ignited — or if the truck’s diesel fuel tanks ruptured and caught fire — the injuries can include thermal burns, chemical burns, and inhalation injury. A serious burn follows a brutal arithmetic: roughly one day in the hospital for every percent of the body burned, plus years of grafting and scar-release surgeries. The Parkland Formula governs the IV fluid resuscitation in the first 24 hours, with half of the total due in the first eight hours — and the clock starts at the moment of the burn, not the moment the ambulance arrives.
Toxic exposure. If the hazmat team was called because the truck was carrying hazardous chemicals — acids, solvents, fracking chemicals, crude oil, produced water — the people exposed to the release may face a different kind of injury entirely. Benzene, for example, is a known cause of leukemia, and the latency between exposure and disease can be years. The law accounts for this: Texas, like most states, applies a discovery rule for latent injuries — the statute of limitations may not begin to run until you knew or should have known that your illness was connected to the exposure. But proving that connection requires the exposure records, the air-monitoring data, and the hazmat response reports — all of which are generated at the scene and all of which have their own retention clocks.
In Midland, there is an additional medical reality that affects every catastrophic case. Midland Memorial Hospital can stabilize and treat many injuries, but for the most severe trauma — a traumatic brain injury requiring neurosurgical intervention, a spinal cord injury requiring specialized care, severe burns requiring a burn unit — the patient may need to be transferred to a Level I trauma center. In West Texas, that means Lubbock — University Medical Center — roughly 120 miles north on the highway. That is a helicopter flight or a ground ambulance run of more than an hour, and those are hours that matter to the case as much as to the patient. The delay in reaching definitive care is not just a medical fact; it is a damages fact, because the harm caused by delayed treatment is part of what the law compensates.
What the Insurance Adjuster Will Try to Do — and How to Counter Each Play
The trucking company’s insurance adjuster is not your friend. The adjuster is a professional whose job is to pay you as little as possible to close your file. Here are the plays you should expect — and the counter to each one.
Play 1: The “just checking on you” recorded statement call. Within days of the crash, someone friendly will call to ask how you are doing and whether you would be willing to “just tell us what happened” on a recording. This call is engineered to get you to say “I’m feeling okay” or “I think I’m getting better” — statements that will be quoted back to a jury two years later to argue you were not really hurt. The counter: do not give a recorded statement without a lawyer. You are not required to. The adjuster’s request is not a legal demand. It is a fishing expedition, and the fish they are trying to catch is you.
Play 2: The quick settlement check with a release. A check may arrive in the mail fast — sometimes within weeks — with a release form printed on the back or included in the envelope. The release, once signed, closes your claim forever. The check is designed to arrive before the MRI results do, before the surgeon has said whether you will walk again, before the life-care planner has priced out what your future will cost. The counter: never sign a release from an insurance company without a lawyer reviewing it. A check that looks generous when you are drowning in medical bills is almost always a fraction of what the case is worth — and once you sign, there is no going back.
Play 3: The “independent contractor” defense. The carrier will tell you the driver was not their employee — he was an independent contractor, and they are not responsible for what he did. The counter: federal leasing rules put the carrier in exclusive control of the truck and made it responsible for the truck’s operation on the road. The company whose name is on the door is the company the law put in charge, regardless of what the internal paperwork says about the driver’s employment status. This is a fight, not a concession.
Play 4: The “you were partly at fault” argument. The adjuster will look for anything — your speed, your lane position, your phone records, the fact that you were in the truck’s blind spot — to argue you contributed to the crash. Under Texas’s modified comparative negligence rule, every percentage point of fault assigned to you reduces your recovery. The counter: the reconstruction evidence — the ECM data, the skid marks, the dash camera footage, the truck’s speed and braking before the rollover — is what proves the truck caused the crash, not you. But that evidence has to be preserved before the company lets it die.
Play 5: The independent medical examination with a doctor the insurer picks. The insurance company may send you to a doctor of their choosing for an “independent” medical examination. That doctor is not independent. He is selected by the insurer, paid by the insurer, and his report will almost always say you are less injured than your own doctors say. The counter: your own treating physicians’ records, built from the moment of injury forward, are the contemporaneous evidence that beats a defense IME. But the records only work if the treatment was sought early and documented thoroughly — which is why getting medical care immediately, even if you think you feel “okay,” is critical.
Play 6: Social media surveillance. The insurance company will monitor your social media. A photo of you at a family barbecue, smiling, will be presented as proof you are not injured — even if you went home and took pain medication and could not get out of bed the next day. The counter: set your accounts to private, do not post about the crash, do not post about your activities, and assume everything you put online will be shown to a jury.
Lupe Peña, our associate attorney, spent years inside a national insurance-defense firm before he came to this side of the table. He sat in the rooms where adjusters and their software decided how to deny, delay, and devalue people exactly like you. He knows how the reserve is set in the first 48 hours — before the real injuries are diagnosed. He knows how the claim is fed into valuation software that discounts pain it cannot see. He knows how the quick check arrives with a release printed on the back before the MRI results do. He now uses that knowledge for injured people, not against them. That is the advantage we bring to every truck crash case — the other side’s playbook, read from the inside.
How a Truck Accident Case Is Actually Built
Here is how a case like this is built, from the day you call to the day a number is put on the table.
Week one: the preservation letter goes out. A written demand is sent to the trucking company, the driver, the carrier’s insurer, and every third-party data vendor, ordering them to preserve the electronic logs, the supporting documents, the ECM data, the dash camera footage, the driver qualification file, the daily vehicle inspection reports, the accident register, the post-crash drug and alcohol test results, the truck’s maintenance records, and the dispatch records. This letter freezes the evidence. If the company destroys anything after receiving it, the jury can be told to assume the worst.
Weeks one through four: the records demands. Formal demands go out under the federal regulations for the driver’s DQ file, the carrier’s accident register, the maintenance records, the hours-of-service logs, and the insurance filings. The FMCSA SAFER database is pulled — the carrier’s safety rating, its crash history, its out-of-service inspection rate, its BASIC percentile scores in categories like Unsafe Driving, Hours-of-Service Compliance, and Vehicle Maintenance. These are public records, and they can show a pattern — the same violations, the same crashes, the same failure to maintain the fleet.
Weeks four through twelve: the investigation. The truck is located and photographed before it is repaired or scrapped. The ECM is downloaded with the right forensic tool by a trained expert — because the wrong move, even just turning the key, can corrupt the data. The accident scene is documented: skid marks, gouge marks, fluid trails, the truck’s final resting position, the road geometry, the speed limit, the signage. Witnesses are identified and interviewed while their memories are fresh. The hazmat response reports, the police crash report, the fire department incident report, and the EMS run sheets are obtained.
Months three through six: the experts. An accident reconstructionist analyzes the physical evidence — the speed of the truck before the rollover, the braking, the steering input, the load distribution, the road conditions — and produces a report that ties the physics to the driver’s and the carrier’s conduct. If the injuries are catastrophic, a life-care planner builds a document that prices out, year by year, every surgery, every therapy session, every medication, every piece of durable medical equipment, every wheelchair and prosthetic and home modification the injured person will need for the rest of their life. A forensic economist takes that life-care plan and reduces it to present value — the lump sum that, invested, would cover the future care stream. These experts are what turn “lifetime care” from a phrase into a figure a jury can trust.
Months six through eighteen: discovery and depositions. The lawsuit is filed in the county where the crash occurred — in this case, Midland County, where the jury will be twelve people from your own community, people who drive I-20, who know what the oilfield traffic is like, who understand what a truck rollover on that road means. The carrier’s safety director is deposed under oath and made to explain the company’s hiring, training, supervision, and maintenance choices. The driver is deposed about his hours, his fatigue, his route, and what happened in the seconds before the truck went over. The corporate representative is deposed about the company’s safety culture, its CSA scores, its prior crashes, and its decision to put that driver in that truck on that road on that day.
The number. The number at the end of the case is built from all of it — the medical bills and the future medical care, the lost wages and the lost earning capacity, the household services the injured person can no longer perform, the pain and the suffering, the disfigurement, the loss of the life the person had before, and — in a wrongful death case — the value of the life itself, the lost companionship, the lost guidance, the lost financial support. Texas is one of the states where a jury may compensate the full value of a life, not just the paychecks that stopped. The insurance company’s lawyers know that case by heart. Now you do too.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. The firm has recovered more than $50 million dollars in aggregate across its cases, including $5 million-plus in a brain injury settlement, $3.8 million-plus in an amputation settlement, and $2.5 million-plus in a truck crash recovery. Those numbers are not a promise — they are proof that we have built cases of this scale before and that we know how to build them again.
What to Do in the First 72 Hours
Get medical care — even if you think you feel okay. The adrenaline of a crash masks pain. A traumatic brain injury can present with a perfectly normal CT scan. Internal bleeding may not cause symptoms for hours. The defense’s favorite argument is a “gap in treatment” — if you waited a week to see a doctor, they will argue you were not really hurt. Close that gap by seeking care immediately. If you were in or near the crash on I-20, go to Midland Memorial Hospital or an urgent care center the same day. Document everything.
Do not give a recorded statement to the trucking company’s insurance adjuster. You are not obligated to. The adjuster’s call is designed to gather material to use against you, not to help you. If they call, say: “I am not giving a statement at this time. I will contact you through my attorney.” Then call us.
Do not sign anything. No release, no authorization, no settlement offer. If someone puts a document in front of you, do not sign it. If a check arrives in the mail, do not cash it. Bring everything to a lawyer first.
Do not post on social media. Set your accounts to private. Do not post photos, do not post about the crash, do not post about your activities or how you are feeling. Assume everything you post will be shown to a jury.
Document what you can. If you are able, take photographs of your vehicle, your injuries, the scene, the truck, the road conditions. Save the names and phone numbers of any witnesses. Keep a journal of your symptoms, your pain levels, your medical appointments, and how the injury is affecting your daily life. This contemporaneous record is evidence that no one can reconstruct later.
Call a lawyer. The preservation letter is the most time-sensitive action in the entire case. The ECM data can overwrite the next time the truck is driven. The dash camera footage can overwrite in days. The driver’s logs can be destroyed in six months. The day you call is the day that evidence is frozen. Call us at 1-888-ATTY-911 (1-888-288-9911). The consultation is free. We are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and we have live staff — not an answering service.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long do I have to file a truck accident lawsuit in Texas?
Texas law gives you two years from the date of the crash to file a personal injury lawsuit, and the same two-year deadline applies to a wrongful death claim. This is set by the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code. Two years can pass faster than you expect — especially when you are in treatment, dealing with medical bills, and trying to rebuild your life. But the more urgent clock is the evidence clock: the truck’s electronic logs can be destroyed in six months, the ECM data can overwrite in hours, and the dash camera footage can disappear in days. The statute of limitations is the deadline to file a lawsuit. The evidence clock is the deadline to save the proof.
What if the trucking company says the driver was an independent contractor?
This is one of the oldest defenses in the trucking industry, and it is usually not as strong as the company claims. Under federal leasing rules (49 CFR § 376.12), when a carrier leases a truck and driver, the carrier must take “exclusive possession, control, and use of the equipment” and “assume complete responsibility for the operation of the equipment.” The company whose name is on the door is the company the law put in control of that truck on the road. The carrier cannot simply disclaim the driver as a contractor when its own name is displayed on the trailer and federal law gave it exclusive control. This is a fight we are prepared to have, and it is not a concession we will make.
How much is my truck accident case worth?
No honest lawyer can answer that question on the day of the crash, because the value of a truck accident case depends on the full picture of the harm — and the full picture takes time to develop. The medical bills are just the start. A serious case includes future medical care (priced by a life-care planner), lost wages and lost earning capacity (calculated by a forensic economist), the cost of replacing household services the injured person can no longer perform, pain and suffering, disfigurement, and the loss of the life the person had before. In a wrongful death case, the value includes the lost financial support, the lost companionship, and the value of the life itself. The firm has recovered more than $50 million dollars in aggregate, including $2.5 million-plus in a truck crash recovery. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.
What if I was partly at fault for the crash?
Texas follows a modified comparative negligence rule with a 51 percent bar. If you were 50 percent or less at fault, you can still recover — but your recovery is reduced by your percentage of fault. If you were 51 percent or more at fault, you are barred from recovering. This is exactly why the insurance adjuster works so hard to pin fault on you: every percentage point is money. The reconstruction evidence — the ECM data, the skid marks, the truck’s speed before the rollover — is what proves the truck caused the crash, not you. But that evidence has to be preserved before the company lets it die.
What should I do if the insurance adjuster calls me?
Say: “I am not giving a statement at this time. I will contact you through my attorney.” Then hang up and call us. The adjuster’s call is not a legal requirement — it is a strategic move designed to gather material to use against you. The call may be recorded. The questions may seem casual. The goal is to get you to say something — “I’m feeling okay,” “I think it was partly my fault,” “I didn’t see the truck until the last second” — that can be quoted back to a jury. You have no obligation to help the insurance company build its case against you.
What if the truck was hauling hazardous materials?
If the truck was carrying hazmat — and in Midland, on I-20, in the Permian Basin, that is a real possibility — several things change. The federal minimum insurance requirement jumps from $750,000 to $1,000,000 for most hazmat, and to $5,000,000 for the most dangerous categories. The hazmat response itself generates evidence: the manifest, the shipping papers, the spill response reports, the air-monitoring data. And if the hazmat caused a toxic exposure, the statute of limitations may not begin to run until the disease appears — Texas applies a discovery rule for latent injuries. The hazmat angle is not just an environmental issue; it is a coverage issue, an evidence issue, and a damages issue.
Can I still recover if I didn’t go to the hospital right away?
You can, but it makes the case harder. The defense’s favorite argument is a “gap in treatment” — if you waited days or weeks to see a doctor, the insurance company will argue you were not really hurt, or that something else caused your symptoms in the meantime. This is why we tell everyone involved in a truck crash to seek medical care immediately, even if they think they feel okay. Adrenaline masks pain. A traumatic brain injury can present with a normal scan. Internal injuries can develop over hours. The contemporaneous medical record — built from the day of the crash forward — is the evidence that defeats the “gap in treatment” defense.
What happens to the truck’s black box data after a crash?
The truck’s engine control module (ECM) captures data in the moments before a crash — speed, RPM, throttle position, brake application. But unlike a passenger car’s event data recorder, which federal law requires to be locked when airbags deploy, a heavy truck’s ECM data sits in a small buffer that can be overwritten when the truck is driven again. If the carrier puts the truck back on the road — and they sometimes do within days — the crash data is written over and gone. This is why the preservation demand has to go out before the truck moves another mile. The ECM download must be performed by a trained expert with the right forensic tool, because improper handling can corrupt the data.
How long does a truck accident case take?
A serious truck accident case can take 12 to 24 months from filing to resolution — sometimes longer if it goes to trial and is appealed. The timeline depends on the severity of the injuries (a case cannot settle until the medical picture is clear), the complexity of the investigation, the number of defendants, and the willingness of the insurance company to negotiate in good faith. Some cases settle faster; some take longer. What you should not do is rush — the insurance company’s first offer is almost always a fraction of the case’s true value, and accepting it early can mean walking away from the money that would have covered your lifetime of care.
Why do I need a lawyer for a truck accident?
Because the trucking company has a team of lawyers, adjusters, and risk managers who began building their defense before the truck was even towed from I-20. They have the resources. They have the playbook. They have the advantage of knowing the regulatory framework and you do not. A lawyer who handles truck crash cases — who knows the FMCSA regulations, who knows the evidence clocks, who knows the corporate shell game, who knows the insurance tower, and who has been on the other side of the adjuster’s desk — is the only thing that levels that playing field. The consultation is free. The fee is contingency — we do not get paid unless we win. You have nothing to lose by calling and everything to lose by waiting.
Why This Firm — Ralph Manginello and Lupe Peña
Ralph Manginello has spent 27+ years in courtrooms, including federal court. He is admitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. He is a member of the Texas Trial Lawyers Association and the Houston Bar Association. He was a journalist before he was a lawyer, which means he knows how to find the story the other side does not want told. He is the managing partner of The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC, and he does not like losing.
Lupe Peña is our associate attorney. He is a former insurance-defense attorney who spent years inside a national defense firm — the rooms where adjusters and their software decided how to deny, delay, and devalue claims. He is fluent in Spanish and conducts full consultations in Spanish without an interpreter. He is a third-generation Texan with family roots that run deep in this state. He knows how the other side prices a claim, how it selects an IME doctor, how it uses surveillance, and how it delays. He now uses that knowledge for injured people — because he has seen what the insurance industry does when no one is watching, and he decided to be the one watching.
We handle commercial truck accident cases across Texas, from the Permian Basin to the Gulf Coast. We handle wrongful death claims when a truck crash takes a life. We work on contingency: 33.33% before trial, 40% if the case goes to trial. We do not get paid unless we win. The consultation is free. We have live staff 24 hours a day, 7 days a week — not an answering service. Call 1-888-ATTY-911 (1-888-288-9911) or contact us online.
Hablamos Español.
This page is legal information, not legal advice. Every case is different. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. Contacting the firm is free and confidential. The firm is based in Houston, Texas, and takes commercial vehicle, catastrophic injury, and wrongful death cases across Texas, working with local counsel and pro hac vice where required.