Ten years ago, if you ran a solid crew and kept your trucks in decent shape, insuring your fleet was fairly routine. A fender-bender was a fender-bender. That world is gone.
Today, a single serious accident involving one of your trucks can turn into a verdict measured in the millions. Not because your business did anything wrong, but because the environment around commercial auto claims has shifted underneath all of us. Your fleet didn’t change. The courtroom did.
We recently brought together a claims expert, a commercial auto underwriter, and a fleet safety consultant to talk through what’s really happening, and we walked away with information worth passing along.
What’s driving it
The claims expert put it plainly: these oversized awards, sometimes called “nuclear verdicts,” climb every year, and they’re rising faster than inflation. She walked us through a real case. A commercial truck rear-ended a car. The driver had a record the company hadn’t checked, and the company hadn’t followed its own hiring policies. Even though the person who was hit said at the scene he wasn’t hurt, the jury came back with a verdict north of $100 million.
Here’s what stuck with us. Almost none of that number came from the crash itself. It came from choices the company made before the accident ever happened.
The part that should give you hope
That’s the encouraging news. If the size of these claims comes down to what a company does beforehand, then you have far more control than you might think.
The underwriter shared what she looks for when deciding whether to insure a fleet, and it isn’t a mystery. She rewards the things a good operator can already do: knowing who’s behind the wheel and checking their records, training drivers and keeping proof of it, maintaining equipment on a schedule, and taking real action after an incident. Her strongest piece of advice was simple. If you don’t already have a safety program in place, one that includes defensive driving, start building one now. It’s one of the clearest signals to an insurer that you take the risk seriously.
The hardest call
The safety consultant added the piece most owners miss. You need a corrective action process, and you have to use it on everyone. The toughest violation to act on is almost always your best, hardest-working employee, the one you can least afford to sideline. But giving your most valuable driver a pass is how a record quietly builds, and it’s the first thing a plaintiff’s attorney looks for. Same standard for everyone, especially the people you count on most.
One thing this week
If you do one thing, make it this. Put a rapid post-incident response protocol in place before your next accident, not after.
That means a simple written plan every driver knows by heart: what to do in the first minutes after a crash. Check on people, call it in, document the scene, gather witness information, and start the claim right away. So much of what turns a manageable accident into a runaway verdict traces back to what did or didn’t happen in those first hours. A one-page plan in every glovebox costs almost nothing, and it protects you when it matters most.
The green industry runs on its trucks. Protecting them has gotten more complicated, but the path forward is clearer than most people expect. It starts with a few good habits and a willingness to look.
David Roos is a commercial insurance consultant at Snellings Walters Insurance Agency, where he helps green-industry and construction businesses across Georgia manage risk and protect what they’ve built.
David Roos | Commercial Insurance Consultant | Snellings Walters
