If a commercial truck crash has left you with injuries and a carrier's insurer already on the phone, our Youngstown truck accident lawyers have handled these claims since 1971.
A loaded tractor-trailer can weigh twenty times what your car weighs, and physics decides most of what happens next. IIHS counted 5,340 deaths in crashes involving large trucks in 2024, and 62 percent of the people who died were in passenger vehicles rather than in the truck. The driver of the semi-truck usually walks away. The family in the car usually does not.
Truck accident victims carry that imbalance for years afterward, and it shapes the injuries as well as the odds. A truck accident tends to produce catastrophic harm rather than the sore neck and dented fender of a low-speed collision: spinal damage, brain injury, crush injuries, burns where fuel ignites, and the psychological trauma that follows people who survive something that size. Recovery is measured in years, and the medical bills start arriving long before any of it is settled.
Anzellotti, Sperling, Pazol & Small has handled truck accidents out of Youngstown for over 55 years, across Mahoning, Trumbull and Columbiana Counties and along the freight routes that run through them. Personal injury is the whole of what we do, and there is no fee unless we recover compensation for you.
Most serious truck crashes happen at highway speed, which leaves everyone involved very little time to react. What sits behind them is usually something that happened long before the impact, on a schedule somebody set or a repair somebody skipped. The causes we see most often include:
Any one of these can put a rig through an intersection, and a truck that runs a light and T-bones a car at thirty-five miles an hour does the damage a car would do at seventy. When a crash traces back to something like this, negligence is rarely the driver’s alone.
This is where a truck accident stops resembling an ordinary auto accident. A collision between two cars usually has one at-fault driver and one insurance policy behind them. A commercial crash can have several parties on the hook at once, and finding all of them is most of the work.
The truck driver is the obvious one. Behind the driver sits the trucking company, which can be liable for its employee’s conduct and separately liable for its own choices about hiring, training, supervision and how tightly it scheduled the run. Beyond the carrier there may be a maintenance contractor that serviced the vehicle, the company that loaded it if the cargo shifted or was overweight, and the manufacturer of a part that failed. Trucking companies also carry far larger insurance policies than ordinary motorists, which is one reason their insurers respond so quickly and so hard.
Federal rules cap how long a driver can be behind the wheel. A property-carrying driver may drive up to 11 hours after ten consecutive hours off duty, cannot drive past the fourteenth hour of a shift once it has started, has to take a break of at least thirty minutes after eight hours of driving, and is capped at 60 hours in seven days or 70 in eight. Those hours of service limits exist because tired drivers crash, and the electronic logging device in the cab records whether they were kept.
That data is the reason speed matters after a truck crash. Electronic logs, engine control module data, dispatch records, inspection and repair histories, the driver’s qualification file and any in-cab camera footage all live with the trucking company or its contractors, and retention periods are shorter than people assume. A preservation letter sent early is often the difference between a file built on records and a file built on argument, which is why the carrier’s investigator is at the scene within hours and why it helps to have a legal team acting to protect your rights just as quickly.
Ohio gives you two years from the date of the crash to file a lawsuit for bodily injury, with narrow exceptions, and a wrongful death claim runs two years from the date of death instead. Truck cases consume that window faster than car cases do, because the investigation is larger and the defendants are more numerous.
Fault is not all or nothing here. You can recover even when part of the blame lands on you, as long as your share is not greater than everyone else’s combined, and whatever you do carry comes off your award proportionally. Carriers and their insurance companies work that percentage hard, because in a case this size every point they move is worth real money.
What a claim covers includes medical expenses and lost wages, the cost of future care, reduced earning capacity, long-term disability, pain and suffering, and emotional distress. Where a carrier’s conduct went well beyond ordinary carelessness, punitive damages may also be available.
We move on evidence first, because the records that decide a trucking case are held by the people being sued. From there the work is reconstruction, which often means the crash scene, the vehicle itself, the maintenance history and the logs read against the dispatch schedule, so that what the carrier says about the run can be checked against what the truck recorded.
The rest is the insurers. Our clients stop taking those calls, and we negotiate first, because a settled claim pays sooner. When an offer does not reflect what the file is worth, we are prepared to try the case.
This is a local firm. Our personal injury attorneys have practiced from Youngstown since 1971, personal injury is all we do, and we are not a volume operation. A truck accident claim is not the kind of file that rewards speed of settlement, and out of town firms advertising into this market are built to move cases quickly. We would rather take fewer and work each one for what it is genuinely worth.
Our office is at 21 N. Wickliffe Circle in Youngstown, and we handle claims across Mahoning, Trumbull, Columbiana, Cuyahoga, Portage, Stark, Summit and Ashtabula Counties, which covers Warren and the rest of the Mahoning Valley as well as the interstate corridors running through it. If you were hurt in a truck accident in Youngstown itself, that is our home ground. If your case is broader than one practice area, our lawyers in Youngstown handle the full range of personal injury claims across the same region, and the first conversation with an injury lawyer costs nothing.
Often both. A carrier can be liable for what its driver did while working, and separately liable for its own decisions about who it hired, how it trained and supervised them, how it maintained the vehicle and how tightly it scheduled the run. Those are different claims resting on different evidence, which is part of why these cases take the shape they do.
Nobody can tell you from a phone call, and be wary of anyone who does. Value turns on the injuries, the medical picture over time, lost earnings, how liability is divided and how much coverage sits behind the parties at fault. Published average settlement figures mix minor claims with catastrophic ones, so they describe nothing in particular.
We work these cases on a contingency basis, so there is no hourly bill and no fee unless we recover compensation for you. The case expenses of a trucking claim, things like accident reconstruction and engineering analysis, are carried by the firm as the case runs rather than invoiced to you along the way.
Two years from the date of the crash for injury claims in Ohio, and two years from the date of death for a wrongful death claim. Waiting is a bigger problem in trucking cases than the deadline suggests, because logs, engine data and camera footage can be gone long before the two years are up.
Yes. Trumbull County is part of our regular service area along with Mahoning and Columbiana, and a case arising from a crash there is generally filed in Warren rather than Youngstown. We handle claims throughout Ohio as well.
You should not have to work out what a claim is worth on your own, or make decisions on a trucking company’s timetable. A short call is usually enough to clarify your options, and it comes with no cost and no commitment. For the clients who go ahead, we handle the legal process and fight for what the case is actually worth. There is no fee unless we recover compensation for you.
Call ASP&S ASAP at 330-778-ASAP (2727), or contact us today for a free consultation and we will call you back.