An 18-wheeler does not hit you the way a car does, and the company behind it does not respond the way a private driver does. Its investigators can be at the scene the same day. Jose Robles Jr is an Air Force combat veteran and an experienced San Antonio truck accident lawyer who takes on trucking companies for injured people across Bexar County, from the I-35 freight corridor to Loop 410 and I-10.
A San Antonio truck accident lawyer pursues the trucking company, not just the driver, and moves quickly because federal rules let a carrier destroy driver logs after six months. Commercial trucks must carry at least $750,000 in liability coverage compared with $30,000 for a private Texas car. Jose Robles Jr Law Firm offers a free consultation and charges no fee unless we win.
Three things: the trucking company is regulated by federal law, far more insurance sits behind the claim, and the evidence that proves fault belongs to the company that hit you.
A collision between two private cars is governed almost entirely by Texas law. A collision with a commercial truck brings in the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations, which dictate how long a driver may work, how a vehicle must be maintained, how cargo must be secured, and how records must be kept. Every one of those rules is a place a carrier can be shown to have fallen short. The insurance picture is different too, and the difference is not small.
Required minimum coverage, not the amount any claim is worth. Texas minimums for cars, federal minimums for commercial trucks.
The bar for a private car is not a rendering error. Texas requires 25 times less coverage from the driver next to you than federal law requires from the freight truck behind you.
Therefore that gap is why a serious injury caused by a car can exhaust the available coverage in a single hospital stay, while the same injury caused by a truck usually does not. It is also why trucking insurers defend hard from day one. There is real money at stake, and they know it before you do.
Often several parties. The driver is the obvious one, but the carrier, the loader, the maintenance shop, a parts manufacturer, and sometimes the broker or shipper can each carry a share.
This matters for a practical reason. Each additional responsible party can bring its own insurance policy, and identifying all of them early is the difference between a claim capped by one policy and a claim that reflects what actually happened to you.
The driver
Speeding, distraction, driving impaired, or driving past the legal hour limits.
The motor carrier
Negligent hiring, inadequate training, pressuring drivers to run past the hours-of-service caps, or skipping required maintenance.
The cargo loader
Loads that are overweight, unbalanced, or improperly secured and shift in transit.
The maintenance contractor
Brakes, tires, or coupling devices serviced improperly or not at all.
The parts manufacturer
A defective tire, brake component, or trailer coupling that failed in use.
The freight broker or shipper
Hiring a carrier with a known unsafe record, or setting delivery schedules that cannot be met legally.
However, sorting this out requires the carrier's own paperwork: the driver qualification file, the maintenance records, the bill of lading, and the dispatch instructions. None of it arrives voluntarily, which is why truck accident attorneys send formal demands rather than requests.
Faster than most people expect. Federal rules require a carrier to keep driver duty records for six months, and engine data can be overwritten in days once the truck returns to service.
This is the single most important thing on this page, and it is the thing the other San Antonio truck pages leave out. Federal rules make a trucking company keep its driver logs and the paperwork behind them for six months, with a backup copy of the electronic logs kept separately. Six months is the floor the law sets, not a promise the records survive longer. A written preservation demand, sent early, is what turns routine deletion into destruction of evidence a court can act on.
HOURS
The carrier's rapid response team can reach the scene before you leave the hospital, photographing and measuring while the evidence is fresh.
DAYS
The truck goes back into service. Engine control module and telematics data can be overwritten as new miles accumulate.
WEEKS
Nearby business and traffic camera footage is typically recycled. A preservation letter has to arrive before this, not after.
6 MONTHS
The period federal rules require a trucking company to keep its driver logs runs out.
2 YEARS
The Texas filing deadline. Your suit must be on file, though by now the proof may be long gone.
Consequently, reading that timeline backwards is the argument for calling a San Antonio truck accident lawyer in the first week rather than the sixth month. Nothing about a two-year deadline protects the records that prove your case.
Federal law caps how long a trucker may drive. When the logs show the driver was past those limits, fatigue stops being speculation and becomes a documented violation.
These are the limits for property-carrying drivers under federal rules. They are not guidelines.
| Limit | What it requires |
|---|---|
| 11-hour driving limit | May drive at most 11 hours after 10 consecutive hours off duty. |
| 14-hour on-duty window | May not drive after the 14th consecutive hour on duty. Breaks do not extend it. |
| 30-minute break | Required after 8 cumulative hours of driving time. |
| 60/70-hour weekly limit | Capped at 60 hours in 7 days or 70 in 8. A 34-hour off-duty period restarts the clock. |
A violation is rarely the driver acting alone. Dispatch records and delivery schedules frequently show a load that could not be delivered on time without breaking the rules, which moves responsibility up to the company that set the schedule.
Because the busiest freight gateway between the United States and Mexico sits 150 miles south, and almost everything crossing it travels north through San Antonio on I-35.
Port Laredo handled $353.94 billion in trade during 2025, with roughly 12,000 trailers moving through its crossings on an average day and as many as 21,000 on peak days. That freight does not stop at the border. It runs up I-35 through Bexar County, mixing with commuter traffic on a corridor that was not designed for it.
In addition, the distribution activity along I-10 and the constant merging where Loop 410 and Loop 1604 meet the interstates, and San Antonio drivers share the road with heavy commercial vehicles far more than drivers in most Texas cities. A crash on those corridors frequently involves an interstate carrier headquartered somewhere else, which changes which rules apply and which records exist.
Our office is in the South Texas Medical Center off Loop 410, minutes from the hospitals where the most seriously injured are taken. If you cannot come to us, we come to you.
Fatigue, unsecured or overweight cargo, neglected brakes and tires, and blind spots account for the majority. Each one leaves a different paper trail, which is why the cause determines what an attorney goes looking for first.
Driver fatigue. A tired truck driver is the most common thread in serious commercial wrecks, and it is also the most provable, because the hours are logged electronically. When the logs and the dispatch records disagree, that contradiction is the case.
Cargo that was loaded wrong. An overweight or unbalanced trailer changes how a rig brakes and corners. Rollovers on the Loop 410 and Loop 1604 connector ramps frequently trace back to the dock rather than the cab, which puts the loading company in the claim alongside the carrier.
Brake and tire failure. Federal rules require systematic inspection and repair. Maintenance files, driver vehicle inspection reports, and any roadside inspection history show whether a known defect was ignored.
Blind spots and stopping distance. A loaded 80,000-pound truck needs far more room to stop than the car beside it, and it has large no-zones on all four sides. Insurers lean on these physics to argue the smaller vehicle was at fault, which is why independent reconstruction matters in truck accidents more than in ordinary collisions.
Experienced truck accident lawyers do not treat these as interchangeable. Attorneys who handle commercial claims regularly know that a fatigue case, a cargo case, and a maintenance case each require a different set of records demanded on a different timetable.
Get treated, get the crash report number, say nothing recorded to the carrier's insurer, and get a preservation demand sent before the truck goes back on the road.
If the crash was weeks ago and none of this happened, the case is not lost. It just has to be built from what still exists, which is work we do regularly.
You talk to the attorney handling your case, not a rotating queue of case managers. That is the whole model of this firm.
Jose Robles Jr is a decorated Air Force combat veteran with a 95% success rate, $5M+ recovered, 1,000+ cases handled, and a 4.9 star Google rating.
Before becoming a personal injury lawyer, Jose "Joe" Robles Jr served nearly 15 years as an Air Force Military Police officer, including four combat tours in the Middle East, and earned his law degree from Texas A&M University School of Law. Afterward he spent four years at Bailey & Galyen, rising to Managing Attorney of the Pre-Litigation Personal Injury Department, before founding this firm.
As a result, he has seen from the inside how carriers and their insurers handle a commercial claim in the first two weeks. He built a smaller practice deliberately, so the person deciding what to do about your case is the person who answers when you call. For San Antonio clients that means a bilingual team, an office in the South Texas Medical Center, and an attorney who understands the military community at Joint Base San Antonio.
Choosing a San Antonio truck accident lawyer should come down to who returns your call and who moves first. We also handle San Antonio car accident claims and wrongful death claims across Texas. For the firm's full range of services in the area, see our San Antonio personal injury page.
There is no reliable average, and any firm quoting one before reading your medical records is guessing. What can be said concretely is that truck claims are not capped the way many car claims are. A private Texas driver need only carry $30,000 of injury coverage, while an interstate freight truck must carry at least $750,000 under federal rules, rising to $5,000,000 for bulk hazardous cargo. The value of your claim still comes from your injuries, your treatment, your lost income, and who is proven at fault, but the money available to pay it is usually far larger.
Yes. Truck cases are handled on contingency, which means the fee is a percentage of what is recovered rather than an hourly bill, and there is nothing to pay if the case does not succeed. Under Texas attorney conduct rules, that agreement must be in writing and must state how the fee is calculated. Jose Robles Jr Law Firm charges no fee unless we win, and the consultation is free. Ask any firm you speak with for the fee terms in writing before you sign.
Look for a licensed Texas attorney in good standing with the State Bar of Texas who handles commercial vehicle cases specifically, and confirm you will speak with that attorney rather than only a case manager. Ask what they will do in the first two weeks, because trucking evidence is governed by federal retention rules and some of it can be lawfully destroyed after six months. Our San Antonio office is at 6323 Sovereign Drive in the South Texas Medical Center, and the consultation costs nothing.
If you were treated by a doctor, missed work, or the carrier disputes fault, then yes. A trucking company is not a private driver: it has a claims department, retained defense counsel, and often a rapid response team that reaches the scene within hours. Evidence such as electronic logging records and engine control module data sits in the carrier's hands, and a preservation demand is what stops it from being overwritten. If your injuries were minor and fully resolved, handling the claim yourself may be reasonable.
Texas law gives two years from the day the claim arises, generally the date of the crash, and for a claim involving a death it runs two years from the date of death. That deadline is not the urgent one. Federal rules require a trucking company to keep driver logs and supporting documents for only six months, so the records that prove an hours violation can be gone long before the filing deadline arrives.
You can still recover as long as you were not more than half to blame. Texas law bars recovery only when you were more than half to blame, and below that line your damages are reduced by your share rather than wiped out. Carriers and their insurers know this, which is why fault gets assigned to the injured driver early and why a recorded statement given without advice can be expensive.
Not before you have advice. You are not required to give the other side's insurer a recorded statement, and the adjuster calling you works for the company whose driver hit you. Anything you say about speed, distance, or how you felt at the scene can be used to shift responsibility onto you. Report the crash to your own insurer as your policy requires, and let your attorney handle the carrier.
This page is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Consult a licensed Texas attorney about your specific situation.
6323 Sovereign Drive, Suite 220
San Antonio, TX 78229
(726) 241-2523
In the South Texas Medical Center off Loop 410. Home and hospital visits available across Bexar County.
No fee unless we win. Call us now or schedule your free consultation online.