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Truck Accident Lawyer in Central Pennsylvania
Jameson Stone Law represents people injured by commercial trucks across Central Pennsylvania. Ethan Stone leads the firm’s injury work, and the firm has litigated injury matters in both state and federal court. Federal rules let a trucking company delete its driver’s logs six months after the crash, while Pennsylvania gives you two years to file. That gap is where these claims are made or lost.
The Six Month Clock
The Records Can Be Deleted Before You File
Under 49 CFR § 395.8(k)(1) a motor carrier has to keep a driver’s records of duty status, and the supporting documents behind them, for six months. Six months, not two years. Pennsylvania gives an injured person two years to file suit, so the electronic record of what that driver had been doing in the hours before impact can be lawfully purged eighteen months before anyone files a complaint asking about it. The required backup copy of the logging device data runs for the same six months and no longer.
Other windows are shorter still. Daily vehicle inspection reports run three months. Post-crash alcohol testing has to happen within hours of the collision or the result simply does not exist. Dashcam and telematics footage is often overwritten on a thirty to ninety day cycle.
Once a carrier has notice of a claim a duty to preserve attaches, which is why getting an attorney onto a written preservation demand in the first days matters more in trucking than in any other kind of injury case.
Who Is Liable
The Claim Rarely Stops at the Driver
A tractor-trailer usually has several businesses standing behind it, each with its own insurance, and the driver is often the least well insured of them.
Responsibility can reach:
- The motor carrier — for the driver’s conduct, and separately for its own hiring, training, and supervision decisions
- The loader or shipper — where freight was secured badly, overloaded, or allowed to shift in transit
- The maintenance contractor — where a brake, tire, or lighting failure traces back to work somebody else was paid to do
The Federal File
What the Records Actually Prove
Listing the documents is the easy part. What matters is what each one establishes, because that decides whether the claim reaches the carrier or stops at the driver.
Where the case is usually made:
- Electronic logging data — whether the driver was past the eleven hour driving limit or outside the fourteen hour on-duty window
- The driver qualification file — what the carrier knew about this driver’s record before putting them in the cab
- Inspection and repair history — whether a defect had already been reported and left unaddressed
Cases We Take
Truck Accident Cases We Handle
Tractor-Trailer Collisions
Crashes on I-81, I-83, and the Turnpike, where the weight difference decides the outcome before anything else does.
Driver Fatigue Cases
Hours-of-service violations, falsified logs, and dispatch pressure that put a tired driver on the road.
Cargo and Loading Failures
Freight secured badly, overweight trailers, and loads that shift and put a rig over on a ramp or a bend.
Catastrophic Injury Claims
Brain and spinal injuries, amputations, and burns, where the value turns on a lifetime of care rather than the bills to date.
Our Process
How We Build a Truck Accident Claim
01
Send the Preservation Demand
A written demand goes to the carrier and its insurer straight away, covering logs, engine data, dispatch records, and footage, so the six month window stops being the deadline that matters.
Pull the Federal File
Driver qualification records, hours-of-service data, inspection and repair history, post-crash testing, and the carrier's own federal safety record.
Value It Against Every Policy
Injuries at this level outrun a single policy, so the demand is built against the carrier, the driver, and anyone else carrying coverage in the chain.
Frequently Asked Questions !!
Trucking claims run on a different set of rules from an ordinary collision, and the practical consequences catch people out in the first week rather than the first month. Most of it is worth knowing before you speak to anyone.
Does my limited tort election limit a claim against a trucking company?
Sometimes, and the reason matters. The exception people reach for, the one covering occupants of vehicles other than private passenger cars, applies to the vehicle you were in rather than the one that hit you. Sitting in your own car when a tractor-trailer hits you does not by itself release you from a limited tort election. What often does release you is the truck’s registration, because the restriction lifts where the party at fault was operating a vehicle registered in another state, and interstate carriers frequently are. Whether the carrier maintained the financial responsibility the law requires can open the same door. It is one of the first things worth establishing, and it is established from the paperwork rather than from the crash.
The insurance company already called me. Should I give a statement?
Not before you have spoken to someone of your own. Large carriers run rapid response arrangements, and it is normal for an adjuster or an investigator to make contact within a day or two, sometimes before the injured person has left hospital. They are working from the engine data download and the driver’s account, and you are not. A recorded statement given at that point, before anyone knows how the injury will develop, becomes a fixed version you have to live with. Being polite and declining to give a recorded account until you have advice costs nothing, and you are under no obligation to provide one to the other side’s insurer.
Does the trucking company's safety record matter?
It can matter as much as this particular crash. Carriers operate under federal oversight, and their inspection results, crash history, and safety performance data are recorded and largely available to the public. A carrier with a pattern of hours-of-service violations sits in a very different position from one with a clean file, because the pattern speaks to what the company knew about how its drivers were running and did anyway. That is the difference between a claim against a driver who made a mistake and a claim against a business that created the conditions for it, and the two are not worth the same.
Six Months Is Not Long
The carrier’s investigators were at the scene within days. The logs showing what its driver had been doing can be gone in six months. Ethan Stone handles the firm’s injury work, and the first conversation costs nothing.