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Why a semi crash is its own fight, and the evidence that disappears in week one.
Most people go through this once, without a map. The numbers below are the official count, not our estimate. The rest of this guide is the map.
Source: Michigan Traffic Crash Facts, 2024 fact sheets.
Each phase protects the one after it. Get medical care fast, open the claim on time, build the record, then settle from strength.
Get medical care today, even if you feel fine. Photograph everything at the scene if you can: both vehicles, the trailer's markings and DOT number, skid marks, the wider road. Get the police report number. Report the crash to your own insurer briefly and honestly. Do not give the trucking company's insurer a recorded statement. Its investigators are often working the scene before the tow truck leaves.
Electronic logging data, dashcam footage, and driver logs get overwritten on a schedule, sometimes within days. A preservation letter in the first week forces the company to keep them. This is the single biggest reason truck cases reward early action. If you do nothing else this week, make sure someone sends that letter.
Like any Michigan crash, your own PIP benefits pay first: medical bills, wage loss, attendant care, mileage. File the application honestly, minimally, and on time.
The claim against the trucking side carries the real weight, and it often runs against more than one company: the driver, the carrier, the broker, the maintenance contractor, sometimes the loader. Each brings its own policy, and finding every policy is a large part of what the case is worth.
Several of the strongest levers are ready early: preserved logs, complete policies, a clean treatment record. If your case is not worth pursuing, we say so and tell you what to do instead.
Every injury claim in Michigan runs on clocks that start the day you are hurt. The forms are simple and the deadlines are unforgiving.
Time from the crash to each cutoff. Every case has facts that can shift these, which is exactly what a free first look confirms.
No formula survives contact with a real case, but the drivers are knowable. Economic damages are receipts and math. Pain and suffering is argued, not calculated, and multiplier rules of thumb are internet folklore.
Reported contributing factors, statewide. The other driver's behavior is often the heart of the fault argument.
Source: Michigan State Police 2024 year-end crash data.
Your own PIP benefits pay first: medical bills, wage loss, attendant care, mileage. The claim against the trucking side carries the real weight, and it often runs against more than one company, each with its own policy.
Electronic logging data, dashcam footage, and driver logs get overwritten on a schedule, sometimes within days. Federal record-retention windows are shorter than any lawsuit deadline. A preservation letter in the first week forces the company to keep them.
Trucking insurers price claims on preparation. Several of our attorneys came from the insurance defense side and know how these claims get valued. If your case is not worth pursuing, we say so and tell you what to do instead.
In May 2026 the Supreme Court held that a freight broker can be sued for negligently hiring an unsafe carrier. The Sixth Circuit, which covers Michigan, got there ten months earlier. Six decisions, newest first, on brokers, carriers, owner liability, and the no-fault threshold.
July 28, 2026
In May 2026 the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a freight broker can be sued for negligently hiring an unsafe carrier. The Sixth Circuit, which covers Michigan, had reached the same answer ten months earlier. That changes who can end up in a Michigan truck case. Here is that ruling and five others that shape a claim now, newest first.
Supreme Court of the United States, decided May 14, 2026, 608 U.S. ___ (2026) (No. 24-1238)
Shawn Montgomery was driving a tractor trailer when another truck hit him. He was left with severe and permanent injuries. The other driver was hauling a load of plastic pots through Illinois for Caribe Transport II, a motor carrier. A freight broker, C.H. Robinson, had arranged the shipment. Montgomery sued the broker too. His claim was that Robinson knew or should have known from the carrier's safety rating that putting it on the road was reasonably likely to hurt someone.
The district court threw that claim out. It ruled that the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act, which blocks state laws related to trucking prices, routes and services, preempted the negligent hiring claim. The Seventh Circuit agreed. The Supreme Court reversed, unanimously, in an opinion by Justice Barrett.
The Court held that the statute's safety exception saves the claim. States keep their authority to regulate safety "with respect to motor vehicles," and the Court read that phrase to mean a claim that concerns the vehicles used in transportation. Asking a broker to use ordinary care when it picks a carrier concerns the trucks that haul the load. The Court was careful about the edges. State laws about prices, routes and services with no relationship to safety stay preempted.
For an injured person in Michigan, this settles a question that had split the federal courts for years. The broker who selected the carrier is no longer outside the case on preemption grounds alone.
United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, decided July 8, 2025, 142 F.4th 847
Greta Cox died in a crash. Her husband, Robert Cox, sued Total Quality Logistics, the freight broker, for negligently hiring an unsafe motor carrier. A federal district court dismissed the case on preemption, the same reasoning that had sunk claims like it elsewhere.
The Sixth Circuit reversed. Writing for the panel, Judge Stranch worked through it in two steps. First, the court agreed the claim falls inside the statute's preemptive reach, which lined it up with every circuit that had looked at the question. Then it turned to the safety exception and found the claim survives there. Common law duties are part of a state's authority to regulate safety. And a negligent hiring claim against a broker is "with respect to motor vehicles," because the exception describes which state laws stay alive, not which companies can be sued.
The Sixth Circuit covers Michigan. Federal judges in the Eastern and Western Districts of Michigan follow it. This decision landed roughly ten months before the Supreme Court reached the same conclusion, which means Michigan claimants were already on the better side of the split.
Michigan Supreme Court, decided July 31, 2023, Andary v. USAA Casualty Insurance Company, Docket No. 164772
Ellen Andary and Philip Krueger were both catastrophically hurt in motor vehicle crashes before 2019. Under the no-fault act and the policies in force back then, they had uncapped lifetime medical care paid through personal protection insurance. Then in 2019 the Legislature rewrote the no-fault act. The new version of MCL 500.3157 sharply cut reimbursable hours for attendant care provided by family members and capped rates for services Medicare does not cover. Their insurers moved to apply the new limits to them.
The Michigan Supreme Court said no. In an opinion by Justice Welch, joined by Chief Justice Clement and Justices Bernstein, Cavanagh and Bolden, the Court held that the 2019 amendments do not reach care that was already being provided and already reimbursable before the amendments passed. Their rights to those benefits were contractual as well as statutory, and the amendments did not retroactively modify vested contractual rights. The Court dismissed the separate constitutional challenges to applying the amendments going forward.
Truck crashes produce the kind of injuries this case is about. Attendant care, home modifications, decades of treatment. Under Andary, the date of the crash matters to what an insurer owes.
Michigan Supreme Court, decided July 31, 2010, 487 Mich 180; 795 NW2d 517
Michigan no-fault limits when an injured person can sue the at-fault driver for pain and suffering. You have to clear the threshold in MCL 500.3135, which the statute calls a serious impairment of body function. For six years, a 2004 decision called Kreiner v. Fischer had read that threshold narrowly, and a lot of real injuries did not clear it.
The Court overruled Kreiner. Justice Cavanagh wrote that Kreiner departed from the plain language of the statute, and that its list of extra factors and its near-permanency requirement were not in the text at all. The Court laid out the three prongs the statute actually sets: an objectively manifested impairment, of an important body function, that affects the person's general ability to lead his or her normal life.
Then it applied that test. The plaintiff broke his ankle, could not put weight on it for a month, had two surgeries across ten months and did not return to work for 19 months. The Court held he met the threshold as a matter of law. Michigan courts still use that test, and in most truck injury suits it is the first fight.
Michigan Court of Appeals, decided June 7, 2005, 266 Mich App 61; 697 NW2d 558
In July 1999 a car owned by a dealership, driven by an intoxicated teenager, struck the rear of a tractor trailer on I-75 and flipped. Ronny Hashem died. A jury returned $12 million in noneconomic damages on the wrongful death claim. The trial court had directed a verdict for the party store that sold the alcohol, and it made the dealership jointly and severally liable for the entire judgment.
The Court of Appeals reversed and remanded on both of those rulings. Judge Hoekstra's opinion treated one point as undisputed along the way. As the owner of the vehicle, the dealership was statutorily liable under MCL 257.401(1) for damages caused by negligent operation, even though it was not driving.
That owner liability statute is a large part of why the company whose name rides on the trailer can end up in a Michigan truck case. Hashem also shows the second half of the problem. Establishing liability and deciding how a judgment gets split among the responsible parties are two separate fights.
Michigan Supreme Court, decided July 23, 2002, 466 Mich 645; 649 NW2d 23
On a June afternoon in 1996, Daimon Rogers left westbound I-96 in Eaton County and struck a tractor trailer parked on the north shoulder. He did not survive. J.B. Hunt owned the rig, and its driver had been working in the course of his employment. Hunt answered the lawsuit and denied negligence. The driver never appeared, and he failed to show for depositions across fourteen months. The court defaulted him.
The estate argued that the default settled the carrier's liability too, since a default conclusively established the driver's negligence and the carrier answers for its driver. The trial court and the Court of Appeals agreed.
The Michigan Supreme Court reversed. Justice Weaver wrote that a default entered against an employee, which conclusively determines that employee's negligence for his own personal liability, is not a proper foundation for an order holding the employer vicariously liable. The Court noted the driver's alleged negligence had never actually been litigated, and it expressed no opinion on the merits of negligence or causation.
A driver who disappears does not decide the carrier's case. The proof still has to be built against the company.
If a commercial truck hurt you or someone in your family, the questions in these cases are the questions your claim will run into. Who was the carrier. Who brokered the load. What your policy said on the day of the crash. You can call Azzo Law at 844-ASK-AZZO, which is 844-275-2996. Intake will take your information and route your question to the right person at the firm. No pressure, and no cost to ask.
Lauren Sitto Azzo, lead attorney at Azzo Law, PLLC, is responsible for the content of this page. This section is general information about Michigan court decisions and not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship.
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