Fatal Truck Crash Claim Lawyer in Dallas, TX Carrier Records and Federal Rules

How much of the Dallas County crash picture involves commercial vehicles

TxDOT's 2025 county tables, processed as of April 7, 2026, record 3,778 crashes in Dallas County involving a commercial motor vehicle, including 33 fatal crashes that produced 37 deaths, along with 101 suspected serious injury crashes. Set against 258 fatal crashes and 274 traffic deaths countywide for the same year, commercial vehicles appear in a minority of fatal crashes but a substantial one.

Dallas County's road pattern explains part of that. Freight moving through North Texas uses I-20, I-30, I-35E, I-45, I-635 and the connecting state highways, and the warehouse and distribution corridors of southern Dallas County generate local truck traffic on arterials that also carry commuters and pedestrians. A crash on a service road, an entrance ramp or an industrial access street can involve a very different set of records than one on the mainlanes.

Federal driving limits are written as numbers

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's summary of the hours of service rules describes an 11-hour driving limit after 10 consecutive hours off duty, a bar on driving beyond the 14th consecutive hour after coming on duty, a required 30-minute break after 8 cumulative hours of driving, weekly limits of 60 hours in 7 days or 70 hours in 8 days, a 34-hour restart, and a sleeper-berth split requiring one period of at least 2 hours and another of at least 7 consecutive hours in the berth. Adverse driving conditions can extend the driving window by up to 2 hours, and a short-haul exception applies within a 150 air-mile radius.

Those figures matter because they can be compared against documents. A log showing time behind the wheel, a dispatch record showing when a load was assigned, and a delivery receipt showing when it arrived describe the same hours from three directions.

The retention clocks are short

Under 49 CFR 395.8(k)(1), a carrier is required to keep each driver's records of duty status, together with the supporting documents behind them, for a minimum of six months running from the date they were received. Under 49 CFR 390.15(b), a carrier must maintain an accident register for three years after the date of each accident.

Six months is less time than many families spend on funeral arrangements, insurance correspondence and estate paperwork. Nothing on this page can create a duty for a carrier to keep material longer, but the dates are public and they are the reason a preservation request in a truck case is usually described as urgent rather than routine.

Chapter 71 has older language aimed at carriers

Section 71.002(c) of the Civil Practice and Remedies Code extends liability to a proprietor, owner, charterer or hirer of an industrial or public utility plant, a railroad, a street railway, a steamboat, a stagecoach or another vehicle for the transportation of goods or passengers. The vocabulary is dated, but the idea behind it is current: the entity that owns or hires the vehicle can be inside the statute alongside the person driving it.

More than one company is often named in the paperwork

The tractor, the trailer, the load and the driver are frequently associated with different businesses. A motor carrier, an owner-operator, an equipment lessor, a freight broker, a shipper and a maintenance contractor may all appear somewhere in the file. Which of them has legal responsibility depends on contracts, control over the work and the facts of the crash, and it is not something that can be read off a door placard or a bill of lading.

The report is the beginning of the record, not the whole of it

A peace officer's crash report identifies vehicles, parties and a preliminary view of what happened. Alongside it there may be a post-crash inspection, driver qualification material, drug and alcohol testing documentation, telematics or event data, and dashcam footage. In a fatal case the Dallas County medical examiner's file is separate again. Keeping the report number, the examiner number and the exact spelling of every name recorded at the scene makes each of those requests easier later.

Several defendants means an allocation fight

Where a tractor-trailer, one or more passenger vehicles and possibly a road authority all appear in the same crash, Chapter 33 governs how responsibility gets divided. Section 33.003 has the trier of fact determine a percentage of responsibility for each claimant, defendant, settling person and responsible third party submitted to it. Section 33.013 then makes a liable defendant severally liable for its own percentage unless the statutory threshold for joint and several liability is met.

That is why a defense theory in a truck case is often aimed less at denying negligence outright than at moving percentages onto another party, and why the carrier's own records tend to be litigated so heavily.

A preservation request works better when it is specific

A letter that asks a carrier to preserve everything is easy to answer with a general acknowledgment. A letter that names the driver, the unit and trailer numbers, the date range, the dispatch and load numbers, the electronic logging device provider and the telematics system is harder to satisfy without actually locating the material. The retention periods in the federal rules are the reason the specificity matters within weeks rather than months.