$6 Million Settlement in a Louisiana Highway Truck Crash
BDM attorney Scott Richard recently secured a $6 million settlement for a man whose life was permanently altered when a commercial truck failed to slow for stopped traffic on a Louisiana highway and struck the vehicles ahead at highway speed. Our client, who was doing nothing more than driving in his own lane, absorbed the force of that collision and now faces a lifetime of consequences because of it.
This is the kind of case we have in mind when we describe a wreck as catastrophic. A fully loaded tractor-trailer traveling at highway speed carries tremendous force, and when it slams into slowed or stopped traffic, the people in the smaller vehicles are the ones who suffer for it.
The Injuries
Our client left that highway with injuries that will stay with him for the rest of his life. He sustained a traumatic brain injury severe enough to leave him with a permanent seizure disorder, and he will need anti-seizure medication indefinitely. He also injured his cervical and lumbar spine, and over the next several years he endured repeated injections and radiofrequency ablation procedures in an effort to avoid the operating room. When those measures were no longer enough, he underwent fusion surgery in his neck and decompression surgery in his lower back.
Those operations were not the end of his treatment but the beginning of a longer road. He is unable to return to work and will depend on pain management for the rest of his life. He will also require additional spinal surgery in the years ahead, both to address his existing injuries and to treat the adjacent-segment breakdown that commonly develops when the healthy discs beside a fusion are forced to carry the load the fused segment once bore. That progression is not a remote possibility but the predictable course of a spine that has absorbed this kind of trauma.
How The Case Resolved
Scott litigated the case over several years, with the parties ultimately attending mediation without reaching a resolution. Scott then prepared the case for trial. Roughly a month before the trial date, with our client’s injuries, disability, and lifetime medical needs fully documented and ready to present to a jury, the defendant trucking company agreed to settle.
That outcome was no accident. Cases resolve on fair terms when the defense becomes convinced that the attorney across the table is genuinely prepared to try the case rather than merely threaten to, and that is the standard Scott brings to every file he handles.
What The Number Means
A $6 million settlement is not a windfall. It is a measure, in the only terms a court has to offer, of everything this man has lost and everything it will cost to care for him going forward: the surgeries still ahead of him, the income he will never earn again, and the decades of medical appointments that now define his future. No settlement can restore what the crash took from him, but it does require those responsible to answer for the harm they caused, and that is what this work is ultimately about.
About Our Firm
Broussard, David & Moroux is a catastrophic injury firm based in Lafayette, with offices in Covington and New Orleans. Trucking collisions, brain and spinal cord injuries, and wrongful death make up the whole of our practice, and we have recovered hundreds of millions of dollars for clients across Louisiana, including the largest personal injury verdict in the history of Lafayette Parish. When a case is serious, we treat it that way from the very first phone call.
If you or someone you love has been seriously injured in a trucking crash or another catastrophic accident, contact us today for a free consultation at (337) 233-2323 locally or (888) 337-2323 toll-free.
Justice. Obtained.