The Nuclear Trucking Verdict Fallacy

Earlier this year, the American Transportation Research Institute released a study about large trucking verdicts and their impact on the industry. The article discusses what has become an insurance and trucking industry buzzword: “nuclear verdicts.” So-called nuclear verdicts are defined in the article as verdicts exceeding $10 million. The intended effect of the term is to scare the public into believing that such verdicts are excessive and unfair.

The Truth About Truck Accident Nuclear Verdicts

In reality, large truck accident verdicts are most often the result of catastrophic injuries or death. Where a lot of harm is done by a trucking company, a lot of damages are owed. Ask any insurance company representative or defense attorney whether a $20 million verdict is unreasonable for a severely injured victim with $20 million in medical bills to be incurred in the future, and they will tell you no. Why? Because even reasonable industry ambassadors recognize that such a verdict is not unreasonable. The purpose of the civil tort system is to make injured and often faultless victims whole again. Unfortunately, we don’t have the technology to make a paralyzed person walk again or reverse the damage of a shattered shoulder. Instead, we allow money for injured victims to “make up for” their often-catastrophic losses. Certainly, providing enough money for medical bills incurred as a result of a defendant’s misconduct cannot be controversial.

For every so-called “nuclear trucking verdict,” there are hundreds of full policy verdicts and settlements from wildly underinsured trucking companies. As we know from decades of statistics, semi-tractor trailers cause significantly more damage in crashes. Despite this known risk of devastating injuries, many trucking companies – in an effort to protect the bottom line – have the minimum or near the minimum level of required insurance. For the last 40 years, the minimum insurance coverage amount for trucking companies has remained at $750,000. For the victim with more than $1 million in bills alone, that minimal insurance policy doesn’t come close to making him whole.

These full policy cases don’t make the news as often as nuclear verdicts do, but maybe they should. First, they are far more prevalent than nuclear verdicts. Second, they leave faultless and injured victims holding the bag when the insurance coverage doesn’t cover the tremendous damages caused. When that happens, it’s usually the taxpayers who end up footing the bill.

Trucking industry and insurance industry representatives for years now have been attempting to paint large trucking verdicts as some sort of runaway unreasonable problem. Instead, trucking companies and their insurers need to look in the mirror and address the underlying causes of these verdicts. If these companies spent a fraction of the amount of money they spend on lobbying and media manipulation on the development and promulgation of more effective safety programs and tools, nuclear verdicts would be far less frequent and our roads would be much safer.