20 DC VELOCITY MARCH 2014 www.dcvelocity.com
newsworthy
Shippers and property brokers have grown increasingly
concerned that personal injury lawyers would capitalize on
the uncertainty surrounding CSA 2010 to hold them liable
for catastrophic accidents involving truckers hauling their
loads. The plaintiffs’ bar, always on the lookout for new and
lucrative revenue streams, has become aware of the confusion. In what may be the most extensive tutorial to date, a
law firm in Tennessee has prepared a 25-page primer showing plaintiffs’ lawyers how to sue brokers for post-accident
damages stemming from an alleged failure to vet a carrier’s
safety record before tendering a load to its driver.
The primer, called “Broker Busting B.A.S.I.C.s,” was
drafted by attorneys at Keith Williams Law Group, a firm
with offices in Nashville and Lebanon, Tenn. The document, which takes the form of a PowerPoint presentation,
is divided into five categories: acquainting lawyers with the
many acronyms of the freight world; looking beyond the
broker’s safety rating of the carrier to see what actual data
were available prior to an accident; identifying the broker’s
methods of selecting and qualifying carriers; formulating a
plaintiff strategy; and anticipating and countering defense
attorney arguments.
The word “B.A.S.I.C.s” is an acronym for “Behavior
Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories,” a series of
safety categories under which the Federal Motor Carrier
Safety Administration (FMCSA) grades carrier fitness by
analyzing comparative scores.
The firm crafted its presentation near the end of 2013
and has included it in a series of webinars conducted for
personal injury lawyers, according to a person familiar with
the matter. While it is not a new practice for plaintiffs’ law-
yers to “go up the supply chain” to pursue personal injury
claims against brokers or shippers, the Williams tutorial is
the most detailed effort yet to put together an instructional
presentation, the person said. Keith Williams, one of the
attorneys in the two-man firm, did not respond to an e-mail
request for comment.
On the cover page, the firm said the document’s objective
is to help make “our highways safer by taking ‘trucking
cases’ beyond the driver and motor carrier to the negligent
brokers who hire them.” Separately, on its website, the firm
said the broker industry has “attempted to push all respon-
sibility onto the feet of others and avoid any liability when
they hire unsafe carriers.”
According to the firm’s website, brokers are being advised
by industry leaders to not consider the CSA’s safety mea-
surement formula when evaluating a carrier and should
instead just rely on whether a carrier holds government
authority to haul freight. The firm, however, believes that
brokers should use the BASIC scores because they are
developed through reliable and current data. By contrast,
the safety criteria used by regulators to award operating
authority become obsolete almost as soon as the permit is
issued, according to the firm.
Because the FMCSA has limited resources and can only
re-evaluate a fraction of carriers each year, many carriers
operate over long periods of time with an “extremely outdated assessment,” the firm said.
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alliances
Personal injury lawyers coached on fine points of “broker busting”
