A client of ours was sitting in stop-and-go afternoon traffic on a six-lane highway when a tractor came up behind her and never slowed down. The responding officer wrote a two-line narrative, cited the truck driver for failing to control his speed, and left the scene. That citation turned out to be worth more than anything else gathered that day, and the reason has to do with which state she was in.
Most people assume a rear-end collision proves itself. Somebody hit you from behind, so somebody was careless. That instinct is right in Louisiana and wrong in Texas, and the gap between those two answers decides how a case gets built from the first week.
Here’s what gets lost when a crash gets filed under “minor rear-end.” The vehicle that hit her weighed many times what hers did, and it needed far more road to stop. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration puts it plainly: loaded trailers require 20 to 40 percent more braking distance than passenger vehicles. Put a tired or distracted driver behind that much mass in congested traffic and the collision is both foreseeable and preventable. That is the daily condition on the I-10 and I-12 corridors through Baton Rouge, on the approaches to the Port of New Orleans, and on the Houston tollways.
The physics is the same in every state. The law is not.
A following motorist in a rear-end collision is presumed negligent, and the burden shifts to that driver to exonerate himself. Mart v. Hill, 505 So. 2d 1120 (La. 1987). The statutory hook is La. R.S. 32:81(A), which bars following another vehicle more closely than is reasonable given speed, traffic and road conditions.
That presumption does real work. It puts the carrier on its back foot from the first pleading and forces the defense to produce an explanation rather than sit back and demand proof.
A following driver in Texas must keep an “assured clear distance” under Tex. Transp. Code § 545.062(a). But as the Houston Court of Appeals has put it, “the mere occurrence of a rear-end collision does not establish negligence as a matter of law.” The burden stays on the plaintiff to prove specific acts of negligence by the driver and to prove proximate cause. Bibai v. Nguyen, No. 01-07-00138-CV (Tex. App.—Houston [1st Dist.] Nov. 15, 2007) (mem. op.). In a truck case that means building out:
In the case I described, the officer’s citation for failing to control speed did that work for us, and so did the crash report narrative putting the truck in stop-and-go traffic on a clear, dry afternoon. Strip those out and the same facts are a much harder sell to a Harris County jury.
Comparative fault is where the two jurisdictions have just converged, and Louisiana practitioners need to sit up about this one.
Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 33.001 bars a claimant whose share of responsibility is greater than 50 percent. Texas has worked that way for decades. Louisiana used to let an injured person recover at any percentage of fault, no matter how high. That is over. La. Civ. Code art. 2323 was amended by Acts 2025, No. 15, effective January 1, 2026, and now bars a claimant who is 51 percent or more at fault, with damages reduced proportionally below that line. For crashes before January 1, 2026, the earlier pure comparative fault rule generally still governs.
So in both states the defense is hunting percentage points. A brake light out. A lane change. A stop they’ll call sudden. Past the bar, those points don’t shrink the case. They end it. We’ve written about how defendants work that angle in the empty chair defense and Louisiana’s new 51% fault rule.
This part is federal, so it reads the same on either side of the Sabine.
The driver in this case got out, apologized, and asked her to pull into a parking lot. That apology helps. It tells us nothing about what his logs or his engine control module will show, and those records don’t sit still waiting for a lawsuit.
If a commercial vehicle hit you, a preservation letter needs to go out immediately covering:
Photograph the cab door. The DOT number is painted on it, and that number is how we find out who the carrier really is and whether a broker or shipper put an unsafe one on the road. The related problem of carriers that shut down and reopen under a new name makes identifying the right defendant early even more valuable.
The federal minimum liability insurance for a general-freight motor carrier is $750,000 under 49 C.F.R. § 387.9, not the million dollars most people assume. Hazmat carriers face higher minimums; ordinary freight does not.
That number disappears fast. The client in this case ran six figures in past medical bills before anyone mentioned surgery, and a cervical fusion estimate can run north of $300,000 on its own. In more than 50 years and over $500 million recovered for our clients, we’ve learned where to look when an entity one step removed from the crash shares responsibility for it. Finding every layer of coverage, including a broker’s or shipper’s policy, often matters more than the crash photographs do.
In Louisiana, for delictual actions arising on or after July 1, 2024, La. Civ. Code art. 3493.1 gives you two years from the day the injury is sustained. Claims arising before that date fall under the old one-year period. Texas has long set two years under Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 16.003.
Two years sounds generous. It isn’t. Electronic logs and camera footage can be gone in months, long before anyone files anything.
More than you’d think. Louisiana presumes the rear driver was negligent; Texas makes you prove it with specific facts. Both states now cut off recovery once your own share of fault crosses the line, but they arrived there at different times and phrase the threshold differently. Which law applies turns on where the crash happened and where the parties are, not on where you live. I’m licensed in both, so the file doesn’t have to change hands at the state line.
No. It helps, and I’ll put it in the demand package. But an apology isn’t a log book, a download, or a driver qualification file. Liability on a commercial case gets proven with the carrier’s own records, and those have to be demanded before they’re destroyed in the ordinary course of business.
Usually both, and sometimes more. The driver was working, so his employer answers for what he did. Beyond that, whoever arranged the load may be exposed if they put an unsafe carrier on the road. That is why the DOT number off the cab door matters so much in the first week.
Not the way the adjuster will tell you. A normal CT rules out a fracture and a brain bleed, not a disc or facet injury, and those often take months to document. That’s a long enough subject to deserve its own treatment, so we wrote one: your CT scan came back normal, and what that does and doesn’t mean.
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