The lawsuit after a serious commercial vehicle crash arrives months later. The decisions that shape it are made in the first hours, in the scene inspection, the vehicle preservation, the driver interviews, and what gets said to investigators and to the other side. By the time suit is filed, most of the physical and electronic evidence either exists or does not.
Topkin Law defends motor carriers, trucking companies, fleet and delivery operators, commercial drivers, and the insurers and third-party administrators behind them. Partner Carl C. Schreck leads this work, with more than thirty years as a trial lawyer, roughly eighty jury trials, and a practice concentrated in commercial motor vehicle and trucking defense.
Catastrophic injury, wrongful death, and fatality collisions
We defend motor carriers and their insurers in multi-vehicle crashes, fatality cases, and matters involving traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury and paralysis, amputation, severe burns, and multi-system trauma, including cases that carry punitive damages exposure. The defense is built on liability, causation, comparative fault, and apportionment among the drivers, vehicle owners, shippers, brokers, maintenance providers, and any public entity or contractor responsible for the roadway, with accident reconstruction and biomechanical experts retained early enough to matter, and with the case positioned for resolution within the available coverage.
Direct negligence claims against the carrier
Plaintiffs routinely plead negligent hiring, training, retention, supervision, and entrustment alongside vicarious liability, because those counts open the carrier’s files to discovery and support a punitive claim. We defend them on the merits and litigate the scope of the resulting discovery into driver qualification files, hours of service records, safety scores, and prior incidents.
Industrial and workplace catastrophic matters
We defend corporate and industrial clients in workplace catastrophic injury and death matters that fall outside the workers’ compensation system, including third-party actions against premises owners, equipment manufacturers, contractors, and other parties on industrial sites. These matters frequently involve overlapping comp, civil, and OSHA proceedings, and the defense requires coordination across all three.
Regulatory compliance issues in litigation
Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations issues surface in nearly every commercial vehicle case, from driver qualification and hours of service records to electronic logging data, drug and alcohol testing, vehicle inspection and maintenance records, and load securement. We work through the compliance record with the carrier and address the violations plaintiffs will attempt to convert into liability or punitive exposure.
Commercial auto, delivery, and fleet claims
Beyond long-haul trucking, the practice covers delivery fleets, service vehicles, passenger transport, and the growing volume of claims involving vehicles operated by contractors and franchisees, where the question of who employed the driver and whose policy responds is frequently the whole case.
Coverage, risk transfer, and Medicare compliance
Commercial transportation losses usually sit under layered primary, umbrella, and excess coverage, and often involve indemnity obligations running between carriers, brokers, shippers, and lessors. We handle that analysis alongside the defense. The firm also advises on Medicare Secondary Payer compliance, which routinely affects how these claims are documented and closed.
Physical evidence disappears quickly in these cases. Vehicles get repaired or sold, and electronic data overwrites on its own schedule. When the firm is reached early, the first work is preservation and evaluation rather than pleading.
The second priority is keeping the case about the collision. Plaintiffs’ counsel would generally rather try the carrier’s safety record than the accident, and much of the defense is holding that line while addressing the compliance record candidly where it has to be addressed.
At intake. The first months of a catastrophic case set the realistic range of outcomes. Evidence preservation, witness statements, expert retention, regulatory response, and risk transfer decisions in that window are difficult to undo later, and files engaged early are positioned differently from files engaged after the litigation is underway.
