The Graves Amendment and the Rental Car Liability Gap
The Graves Amendment preempts state vicarious liability laws that would hold rental companies liable solely as vehicle owners. This piece e…
Category
Auto Accidents
Liability, UM/UIM, MIST defense trends
Signal Timing Evidence and Intersection Liability in Auto Cases
When an intersection crash turns on who had the light, signal timing data can either confirm or dramatically reframe the liability picture.…
Getting Dashcam Footage Into Evidence in Auto Cases
Dashboard camera footage can be the most powerful evidence in an auto case, but only if you lay the right foundation at trial. Practitioner…
NHTSA August Recalls and FMCSA SMS Rebuild: PI Exposure Map for Auto Counsel
The August 3, 2026 NHTSA recall batch covers 599,000-plus vehicles, led by a Ford Explorer seat-entrapment campaign with 133 field reports…
Beating the "It Was Already There" Defense in Auto Cases
The defense will call your client's spine chronic and degenerative and argue the crash changed nothing. Here is how to prove aggravation of…
Beating the Named Driver Exclusion in Auto Claims
Carriers deny liability coverage by pointing to an excluded household driver or a non-permissive user. Here is how to test the exclusion's…
Proving a Mild Traumatic Brain Injury When the Scans Read Normal
The defense will call it soft, subjective, and disproven by a clean head CT. Here is how to build a mild traumatic brain injury case that s…
Beating the Empty-Chair Defense in Auto Cases
The empty-chair defense assigns fault to an absent nonparty and shrinks recovery. It fails against counsel who treat it as an affirmative f…
Cutting the MedPay and PIP Reimbursement Demand
First-party medical coverage sits at the center of the second fight in every auto file: how much of the settlement the client actually keep…
Apportioning Fault in the Chain-Reaction Collision
In multi-vehicle pile-ups, proving the order of impacts decides who pays and how much. A working guide to sequence evidence, several-liabil…
Freight Broker Liability Peaks at $604M as Auto PI Bar Tracks Key 2026 Shifts
A Dallas County jury returned a $604M verdict against freight broker C.H. Robinson on July 23, 2026, the first major award under the post-M…
The Rear-End Presumption and the Rebuttals That Actually Land
The rear-end presumption is rebuttable, not conclusive. Defense counsel have a settled menu of ways to chip at it, and the data record is w…