How We Forced a Trucking Giant to Take Responsibility After One Family’s Preventable Loss

Note: We have changed the names to protect the privacy of our clients.

CRST assigned a new driver, inexperienced with snow and mountain driving, to navigate a Montana mountain pass while the designated training driver slept in the cab. This decision led to the tragic and preventable death of Mrs. Anderson.

Anderson Wrongful Death Truck Accident

Few cases are as profoundly heartbreaking as this one. Mr. and Mrs. Anderson were driving across Montana on their wedding anniversary to buy a new bull in Billings for their ranch in Washington. The two had been married for 35 years, and Mr. Anderson described his wife as his “best friend.” They worked their small ranch together, raised two girls, and were active in their agricultural community.

Mrs. Anderson was driving when she pulled over safely into a designated pullout to trade places with her husband. Consequently, she was hit and killed by a CRST truck driving too fast for the conditions.

The crash was needless and easily could have been avoided by having an experienced truck driver behind the wheel.

Addressing Our Client’s Needs

Truck companies and their insurance companies argue that a dead person is not worth anything. From their point of view, no amount of money will bring a dead person back to life, so why should a jury award any significant sum of money as compensation?

CRST kept trying to “lowball” the resolution of this case.

Our team of tractor-trailer accident attorneys at Stinson Law Group knew that Mrs. Anderson’s death was needless, easily avoidable, and would scar Mr. Anderson and her two girls for the rest of their lives.

Our lawyers flew to Washington State and sat at the kitchen table with the family. We knew these were good people. We could feel it. We knew their lives had been made worse forever.

What our clients needed was grief counseling. We hired a grief counselor to spend time with the family and to help them cope with the death of Mrs. Anderson. This grief counselor became a powerful expert in the case, writing a 40-plus page report for the court.

Stinson Law’s Legal Strategy

We knew this would be a very hard-fought case. We suspected the best lawyers would be hired on the other side, and they were.

Stinson Law Group spared no expense to hire the right experts – truck standards, meteorology, crash reconstruction, psychology, and grief counseling. We worked for months with these experts to show that CRST’s lazy training culture, not just the events of that day on the mountain pass, led to Mrs. Anderson’s death.

If it were not Mrs. Anderson, it would have been someone else.

Only one thing will make greedy corporations change: the penalty of money. The family knew this, too.

We understood that leveraging experts, focus groups, and early depositions would put us and our clients in a superior position.

Challenges We Faced

Getting CRST and its lawyers to understand the depth of Mrs. Anderson’s life and the profound loss felt by Mr. Anderson and their daughters was the biggest hurdle beyond the legal issues.

Mrs. Anderson was not a nameless person. She was a wife, a mother, a grandmother, a retired brand inspector, a cattle woman, a member of her small agricultural community, a mentor to youth in agriculture, and so much more to so many more people.

She was everything to her husband, who adored her. These two were going to spend their golden years together on the ranch.

Results & Outcome

Because of the strategy employed early in the case, Stinson Law Group was able to resolve this case for a total value in excess of half a million dollars, which included a “structured settlement” that would provide for the husband’s medical needs and care for twenty years.

The actual settlement amount was lower, but the structured settlement increased the total value received by the client.

Conclusion

Stinson Law Group was honored to represent the memory of Mrs. Anderson, her husband, and her family. We knew this family had a lot of lawyers they could have chosen, and we thank them for choosing us. They are part of our family now.

It is our belief, and the belief of the Anderson family, that this case will force CRST to be a better and safer company.

If you or a loved one has been injured in a truck accident, please reach out to Stinson Law Group today for aggressive, compassionate representation.

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