Webinar Replay #100: Steps to Take Before and After a Casualty Event

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Steve Kessler: Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining our INFINITI Fast Forward webinar series. We’re very happy to say today is the 100th webinar in this series, so Mark and I have been doing these for quite a while now.

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Steve Kessler: Thank you all for joining us. My name is Steve Kessler, and I’m going to host the program today.

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Steve Kessler: Our topic today, I think, is…

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Steve Kessler: is absolutely critical in the trucking industry. There’s an old saying in trucking, it’s not if you’re going to be sued, it’s when.

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Steve Kessler: So with that understanding, it becomes imperative for trucking companies to…

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Steve Kessler: be as prepared as they possibly can for that eventual lawsuit that’s going to come, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

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Steve Kessler: Bulletproofing your business, what to do before, during, and after an accident occurs.

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Steve Kessler: So, we’re very excited to have Mr. Setliff join us again, and a couple of housekeeping items before we move on here a little bit. Everybody that’s joined us is muted, so we can’t hear you, but if you would like to communicate.

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Steve Kessler: with us, you can use the little chat feature, which is a button down the bottom of your screen, or the Q&A box if you want to pose a question. Either one of those is fine, or we can see those here on our side.

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Steve Kessler: So, why don’t y’all jump in the chat, tell us who you are, what company you’re with, and where you’re from, so we know what’s out there.

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Steve Kessler: And while you all are doing that, let me introduce Mark Rhea. As I said earlier, Mark has joined us on many, many of our webinars. He’s an industry veteran, worked at a high level in trucking for over 35 years, and does a lot of consulting work.

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Steve Kessler: Not only with us, but with some other companies and organizations around the country.

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Steve Kessler: So, without delay, let me introduce our speaker today, Mr. Steve Settliff.

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Steve Kessler: Steve is consistently recognized as one of America’s best lawyers.

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Steve Kessler: Mr. Setliff represents clients in complex litigation at the trial and appellate level in state and federal courts across the United States.

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Steve Kessler: His multifaceted trial practice includes representation of clients across a broad array of industries with focus on transportation companies, including trucking companies and railroads in claims of traumatic injury by employees and non-employees.

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Steve Kessler: His trucking practice includes the representation of trucking companies, their insurers, and their drivers in a wide variety of claims, including catastrophic personal injury, property damage, and toxic cleanup.

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Steve Kessler: Steve also handles catastrophic workers’ compensation claims.

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Steve Kessler: Negotiating, drafting, and enforcement of commercial agreements, including brokerage and independent contractor agreements, construction matters, traffic citations, including felony charges, and employment claims under the Surface Transportation Assistance Act.

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Steve Kessler: His practice covers the gamut of trucking litigation from first-scene accident investigation to effectively and efficiently trying cases to verdict.

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Steve Kessler: So, without further delay, Steve, I’ll let you take it away, sir.

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Stephen Setliff: Thank you very much, Mr. Kessler, I appreciate it, and I appreciate folks coming on, to join the conversation. Before you guys, logged on, we were having, commiserating as three miserable Dallas Cowboys fans, the beloved franchise, and what the hell is going on at the Star in Frisco? So, it’s a welcome distraction.

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Stephen Setliff: to talk about truck accidents, as we segue from that. I wanted to try to give you guys some context. If you’ve ever heard me speak before, or know anything about me, you know I’m a little quirky, and I always find in the things that I do outside of work things that remind me of work, and I just recently got back from a trip

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Stephen Setliff: to Portugal, of all places, a place that I was very interested in going to for a variety of historical reasons. I can tell you it’s a wonderful country, lovely people.

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Stephen Setliff: They drink wine like we drink water. That was not always a good thing over the period that I was there, but we had one hell of a time. For those who don’t know much about the history of Portugal, I want to share something with you, because I think it kind of relates to what it is that we’re talking about here today. Portugal, as everybody probably knows, is a neighbor of Spain on the Iberian Peninsula and borders

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Stephen Setliff: the Atlantic Ocean on one side, at least.

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Stephen Setliff: In about 700 AD, they were invaded by the Moors, the folks who had come up from Africa and took over pretty much the entirety of the Iberian Peninsula.

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Stephen Setliff: And the invasion was… happened in an immensely successful and immensely quick way, because the people who were resident in Portugal at that time were utterly and completely unprepared for the warfare tactics, for the strategies that the Moorish armies used. Their castles were overwhelmed very easily.

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Stephen Setliff: Their defensive systems weren’t things that were geared toward kind of sophisticated warfare tactics that the Moorish folks brought. And because of that, the entire country was subjugated quickly and then had to endure something like 400 to 500 years of Moorish rule until such time as what we know now as the Crusades.

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Stephen Setliff: The Crusaders kept that and swept down from Northern Europe, and eventually drove the Moors out after multi-years, many, many years of battle. I was standing at a castle, somewhere outside of Lisbon, thinking about that whole story, and funnily enough, thinking about this presentation.

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Stephen Setliff: Because it will… I always find parallels in history, and particularly military history, to some of the things that we do here.

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Stephen Setliff: The reason that it was so painful for the people, for the natives, native people of Portugal, is because they weren’t prepared. They didn’t understand the type of things that were going to be brought to bear against them, and they weren’t ready to fight.

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Stephen Setliff: And because they weren’t ready to fight, they had to endure very draconian consequences for a long, long time, including, candidly, having no rule whatsoever in their own country for hundreds and hundreds of years.

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Stephen Setliff: In a lot of ways, guys, that’s us. That’s what I see today relative to the trucking industry. We do have a level of sophistication in a lot of places where we at least understand that there is a threat out there. But one of the things, and the reason that I think that plaintiff’s lawyers are so successful in coming after trucking companies is that we don’t appreciate, at the granular level, we don’t

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Stephen Setliff: appreciate at the tactics level, we may understand overall strategy, but we don’t appreciate at the tactics level what’s going to be brought to bear against us when one of these accidents occurs. And that’s for a variety of reasons. You can sit through all the webinars and all the seminars, all the presentations that guys like me offer, and you can get an idea of what’s going to happen, but unless you have experienced it.

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Stephen Setliff: or have somebody that’s going to do what I’m hopefully going to do today, explain it to you in a granular detail, you can’t really be prepared for what it is that you’re going to see. And the bad guy’s prey on that.

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Stephen Setliff: You’re in the business of identifying loads of freight that need to be moved from one place to another, and figuring out how you’re going to do it, who your driver’s going to be, and what route they’re going to take, and what’s the most efficient way to do it, and how do you save fuel, do it, and how do you maximize profit, and hopefully, how do you make a little money at the end of the day. You probably are not focused daily on the things that go into anticipating

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Stephen Setliff: a claim, anticipating a lawsuit that’s going to come at you if and when you have an incident that occurs. And that’s what the bad guy’s prey upon. As a matter of fact, when you think about the environment that we are in now.

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Stephen Setliff: I’ve got this whole slideshow here for you guys, and we can talk about some of this stuff as we move around, but there are really some things that I’ll talk about outside of this slideshow. When you think about the environment that we’re in right now, there really are 3 things that are contributing to what we see going on in the world of motor carrier litigation right now.

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Stephen Setliff: The first thing that we’re seeing is that the plaintiff’s bar

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Stephen Setliff: has gotten very, very good, or at least the top end of the plane as far when it comes to trucking accidents, have gotten very, very good, very, very sophisticated on what is involved in our business. They understand the federal motor carrier regulations, they understand how trucks operate, they understand hours of service wall, they know the questions to ask, they know where the bodies are buried, they know where the things

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Stephen Setliff: that are incidental to us operating a trucking company. They know the things to go for and to ask for, and they know the ways to create leverage in these cases.

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Stephen Setliff: The other thing that’s incidental to that is it’s not just that they understand our business, it’s that the type of lawyer who now practices motor carrier litigation has changed over the years. When I was in law school, and I came out of law school, back when, I guess, America had a king as opposed to a president that long ago.

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Stephen Setliff: The people that went to work for plaintiffs’ law firms, for the TV law firms, weren’t always the folks who were at the top of their class. They were often folks who, quite candidly, couldn’t get jobs at big, blue-blood, silk-stocking law firms, like the place where I started, where the money was better, the working conditions were better, and you had the ability to tout yourself as a big firm lawyer.

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Stephen Setliff: That’s changed, and that’s changed in large part because the kind of money that’s being generated by plaintiff’s law firms in trucking litigation now is mind-boggling.

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Stephen Setliff: So, you got better lawyers who understand our business better, and who are also the recipients of what is almost a complete absence of any meaningful restraint when it comes to the type of advertising that those lawyers can do.

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Stephen Setliff: Play this little game with yourself the next time you fly into any city, or maybe just wherever you live.

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Stephen Setliff: Count from the time you land at an airport to wherever it is that you’re going, the number of lawyer billboards that you pass on the way into town.

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Stephen Setliff: You aren’t going to pass any billboards for settle of law or any defense firms. What you’re going to pass is a series of billboards for lawyers who are all touting themselves as being experts in one type of casualty litigation or another. And I will bet you, if you fly into any…

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Stephen Setliff: even mid-sized metropolitan area, you’re going to pass at least one or more billboards that’s calculated to lead you to believe that the lawyer who’s doing that advertising is, in fact, some type of trucking lawyer expert. They love the

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Stephen Setliff: put up billboards that had pictures of big trucks on them. Here, outside the Capitol area in Richmond, there’s a billboard of a truck slamming into the side of a car.

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Stephen Setliff: the years where there was some meaningful restraint by bar associations, state bar associations on that type of advertising are gone. So, they use… that is, the bad guys use that advertising to get their message out far and wide. And understand what you are looking at when you see that advertisement, because that’s not just those lawyers using advertising to suggest, hey, remember me.

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Stephen Setliff: call me if you get involved in an accident. They will often use graphic depictions of accidents, of catastrophic events, specifically to implant into the mind, not just subliminally, but overtly into the mind of prospective jurors, the theme that they want to convey in these trucking accident cases. And that theme is that we are dangerous.

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Stephen Setliff: That theme is that we’re not to be trusted. That theme is that we operate 80,000-pound vehicles at speed that can cause catastrophic damage

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Stephen Setliff: Anytime there’s any type of incident.

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Stephen Setliff: So that’s the first thing that’s going on that’s driving a lot of the results that we’re seeing. What’s the second thing that’s going on? The second thing that’s going on that’s driving is the juries, and the jury pool that we see across the United States.

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Stephen Setliff: I try to very carefully word how I say this, because I don’t want people to think that I’m critical of the teaching profession, because I’m not. I think it’s an impossible job that I wouldn’t want to have to try to do myself.

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Stephen Setliff: But we increasingly see, as trial lawyers, when I do voir dire of jurors, particularly in urban areas across the United States.

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Stephen Setliff: People who cannot read.

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Stephen Setliff: Or people who cannot add and subtract. Or people who come into a jury box with substantially prejudiced ideas about anything that has anything to do with a company or a corporate entity.

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Stephen Setliff: It’s amazing to me. You know, one of my favorite questions that I ask on voir dire when I’m talking about prospective jurors is, or talking to prospective jurors, is, where do you get your news? What’s the source of news that you get? I almost never get Fox News, or One America, or Newsmax. What I get consistently is CNN,

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Stephen Setliff: God forbid, MSNBC, or Yahoo, or the internet, or just tried a case here just a couple months ago down in Asheville, North Carolina, where a good number of the folks in the jury pool said, I don’t follow the news. Maybe that’s good, maybe that’s bad, but that would suggest to me that we’re dealing with citizens who may not necessarily be informed. And, again, talking about people where, particularly in

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Stephen Setliff: Major metropolitan areas or urban areas.

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Stephen Setliff: Don’t always have the ability to read, understand, or care. You always need to remember, whenever you’re talking about jurors, that you’re talking typically about 7 to 12 people, depending on the jurisdiction, of people who were not smart enough to figure out how to get out of jury duty. That’s what we start with every time we walk in to try one of these cases. That’s who the plaintiff’s lawyers are going to deal with

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Stephen Setliff: when they bring their case… bring their case forward. In addition to sometimes missing what I think are the predicate skills to be able to analyze and assess evidence that’s provided, I think we also deal with jurors who largely

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Stephen Setliff: are angry, and to use, perhaps, a pejorative term, are pissed off about something. America as a nation right now is as volatile and as opinionated and is as divided as any time that certainly I can remember during the course of my life. You can bet that almost whatever the issue is, with a couple of exceptions… here is a great example.

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Stephen Setliff: And without revealing too much of my political strife. There are people who are complaining right now that the capital of the United States, Washington, D.C, is in fact safer than it was a month ago. They complain that the way that that result was effectuated. Whether you’d like that or not, it is amazing to me that there are people that would actually go on television

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Stephen Setliff: complain about that result. Whatever your political position is, I guarantee you that there’s going to be somebody on the other side, and that causes people to be angry. It causes people to feel disenfranchised.

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Stephen Setliff: Try this little experiment the next time if you don’t think that what I’m telling you is true. The next time you walk into wherever your favorite coffee shop is, whether that’s a Starbucks, or maybe it’s Wawa, or Sheets, or Buc-ee’s, or whatever it is, just step back.

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Stephen Setliff: and look at the people in the store around you and look to see if you can see anyone who’s smiling. If you see somebody who’s smiling, your first reaction’s probably going to be, this some bitch is getting ready to shoot the place up. You won’t be thinking that there’s somebody who’s there who’s in a good mood.

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Stephen Setliff: These are the jurors that we start with, and almost invariably, wherever I try cases, whether it’s in rural areas, or whether it’s in metropolitan areas, whether it’s in the northern part of the United States, the far western part of the United States.

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Stephen Setliff: I know that we are going to, in any trucking case, be starting behind the eight ball with respect to jurors’ preconceived notions of us and how we otherwise run our business.

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Stephen Setliff: The third thing that’s contributing to what I see as the bad results across the United States, candidly, is us. It may not be you specifically.

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Stephen Setliff: But it’s the folks in the trucking industry who don’t pay attention to the rules, who still try to, after all these years, cut corners, who don’t do the things that we as good, conscientious operators are trying to do.

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Stephen Setliff: Case in point.

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Stephen Setliff: how much…

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Stephen Setliff: bad publicity has come out of that accident in the state of Florida with respect to that driver who could not speak the King’s English, and ends up trying to make an illegal U-turn at a restricted cross-through on the interstate where he was traveling, ended up killing 3 people.

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Stephen Setliff: all over the popular media. You know, California licensed him with CDL. Governor Newsom blames President Trump. President Trump blames Governor Newsom. Everybody admits it’s a problem. Governor DeSantis sends the United States Marshals out. They perp-walk him on TV, off the airplane, across the runway.

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Stephen Setliff: That leaves… ordinary people watching that on the news get a very unfavorable impression of folks in the trucking industry.

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Stephen Setliff: not paying attention to the English proficiency requirements, not understanding the environment that we operate in in general, those are the kind of things that hurt us, and it hurts all of us.

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Stephen Setliff: And so, what I’m going to try to do today is I’m going to try to do a couple things. I’m going to try to tell you right up front what it is that the bad guys are going to try to do to you.

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Stephen Setliff: And I’m going to start by giving you what I consider to be just a snippet of what you should expect to hear in closing argument of a trucking case. This is what the bad guys will typically want to be able to say if they are in a bad truck accident, or even a not-bad truck accident. This is what they want to say at the end. They want to say.

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Stephen Setliff: Ladies and gentlemen, the jury, you have been with us all week, and you have heard the evidence in this case, and you have seen my client, you’ve had an opportunity to listen to her testify as best she can from the witness stand. She’s not as mentally coherent as she was prior to the time that this truck hit her, but who would be after getting struck in the rear?

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Stephen Setliff: by an 80,000-pound truck at 35 miles an hour, when she’s causing her to hit her head on the steering wheel in front of her. She’s done the best she can do. She has embraced and understands now what her life is going to be on a go-forward basis, which is a series of doctor’s appointments, one after another, to try to deal with her very substantial orthopedic

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Stephen Setliff: injuries. She’s undergone a couple of surgeries already on her back.

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Stephen Setliff: She has problems with her thinking and cognition. She’s seeing a neuropsychiatrist and a neuropsychologist, as well as a physical medicine doctor, to try to get her life back to the point where she can do even the simplest things, including taking care of her checkbook and running the family budget.

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Stephen Setliff: She’ll never be the wife to her husband that she used to be.

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Stephen Setliff: You heard him testify from the witness stand that he has to really keep his eyes on her all the time now to make sure that even the simplest things that she used to be able to do, whether it was starting the washing machine, or washing dishes, or just running the vacuum cleaner, that she does that correctly, and that she does it without hurting herself.

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Stephen Setliff: That’s the life that they have now. She won’t be able to play with her children the way she used to. She used to enjoy taking them back and forth to school, and getting out on the ground, and rolling around with them, and playing and roughhousing.

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Stephen Setliff: That’s not going to be part of her life. What’s going to be part of her life on a go-forward basis is now a series of doctor’s appointments.

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Stephen Setliff: Every week, every month, at least for the next 10 to 15 years to try to deal with both her physical injuries and her cognitive issues.

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Stephen Setliff: She’s already got $800,000 in medical bills, and you heard her life care planner come in here and say she’s going to need at least $2 million worth of treatment over the remainder of her life. That’s what caused her.

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Stephen Setliff: And I want you to think about those injuries in the context of the happening of this accident.

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Stephen Setliff: You heard the evidence about the truck driver and how he wasn’t paying attention to what it was that he was doing prior to the time this accident happened, and you need to consider that as you are trying to reach a verdict as to how much you’re going to give my client. But what you really need to consider, and what you really need to think about, is this company. And you need to think about the way this company made the decisions

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Stephen Setliff: That it did relative to putting this driver behind the wheel of that truck.

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Stephen Setliff: Think about the hiring process. We talked a lot in this case about the hiring process.

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Stephen Setliff: Did you see any indication that this company did the things that you would expect a company to do before putting a driver behind the wheel of an 80,000-pound truck? Did you see anything in their file which indicated that they checked the references that this driver provided? Did you see any indication, did you see any written documents that this company actually talked to any of his prior employers?

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Stephen Setliff: Did you see any indication that this company did anything to follow up on any of the prior move-in violations and citations that this driver had before they deployed him in this 80,000-pound truck?

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Stephen Setliff: And think about the evidence that you heard after this driver was hired.

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Stephen Setliff: Did you hear the evidence that he’d had two moving violations and one other accident prior to the time my client was injured? Did you hear that the company did anything to address any of that? Did you hear anything to suggest that they specifically provided him with remedial training, or that they did things to try to monitor his ongoing behavior to make sure that something like this wouldn’t happen?

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Stephen Setliff: Did you hear anything like that?

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Stephen Setliff: And did you pay attention to what it is that they called their training program, which is really an occasion for them to get together once a year around a fire pit and eat fried chicken and drink sweet tea? Did you hear anything to suggest that the training program was dynamic, that it dealt with actual issues that truck drivers faced, that talked about the places that he was going to be required to work

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Stephen Setliff: or the equipment he was going to be required to use. Did you hear any of that?

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Stephen Setliff: What you heard instead was that this company had a plug-and-play safety training program that you could buy off the internet for $89. That’s what they did. And did you hear anything that would suggest that they did anything to monitor how their equipment was inspected, maintained, and deployed? They didn’t care what it looked like, all they cared about was keeping it rolling.

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Stephen Setliff: So what you’ve got to decide, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is whether or not you are going to tolerate that kind of company operating where you live, on the roads where your husbands and wives and children and parents are otherwise driving on a daily basis. So, you’ve got a choice to make.

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Stephen Setliff: The choice you can make is that you can send a message to this company about their behavior. And given the numbers that I’ve already told you, you could return a verdict for $20 million, and maybe, maybe, this company will hear you. And maybe, maybe, this company will change the way it does things.

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Stephen Setliff: Or, if you want to make sure that you’re doing all you can do to make our roads where we live and work as safe as possible, then you can send a message, you can return a verdict that every trucking company that operates here will hear. And if you want to do that, then you need to return a verdict for $100 million.

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Stephen Setliff: That’s what they say.

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Stephen Setliff: That’s how they do it. That’s how they tee it up, and that’s how they go out of their way to portray us as dangerous.

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Stephen Setliff: So, what are the things that you just heard in that? And as I’ll go through the slides here, I will tell you what you’ll see, relative to all of this is that we’re providing fertile background for these guys. Number of truck accidents going up, how these guys value claims going up, to ridiculous amounts.

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Stephen Setliff: That story that I just told you, man, it works.

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Stephen Setliff: It works wherever you are, too. It works whether you’re in places that vote consistently red, like the great state of Tennessee, where you can see a million-dollar verdict awarded by a Shelbyville jury. It works in the great state of Georgia, where you can see a traumatic brain injury case, injuries to the arm, a verdict for $16 million, almost $17 million.

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Stephen Setliff: And it works in the Great Free State of Florida, where you can see, with multiple injuries, the head and neck, as well as some other psychiatric and cognitive issues, averted for almost $142 million.

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Stephen Setliff: That’s a catastrophic result, man. And what you see in a cutting across all of these type of cases, when you look at everything that’s going on, is that the awards that are being returned by juries across the United States now.

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Stephen Setliff: Average award, average, a mean award is almost $28 million. That is an existential event for everybody not named, not named Amazon or Walmart. So you need to be paying attention to it, and you need to understand the game plan. So, what is the game plan?

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Stephen Setliff: Here are the four things they’re going to come after. Every. Single. Time. You would think, in the environment that we live in, that the happening of the accident would, in fact, be the most substantial thing that you need to pay attention to. I’m here to tell you the facts, incidents that happened in the accident

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Stephen Setliff: Or maybe 50 to 60% of the ballgame. It used to be back in the days when I first started defending trucking companies, 85, 90, 95% of the ballgame. Did we do something wrong? Was the plaintiff contributorily negligent? Was there something else that contributed to the happening of the accident? The facts are still important, but guys, the facts am not the ballgame anymore. Now there are 4 things that are going to get looked at, and looked

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Stephen Setliff: looked at closely, and so you need to be looking at them. I’m telling you now, you need to do an introspective review of these four things to make sure that when you are attacked on them, you are as in good shape as you can possibly be. Number one, the hiring process.

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Stephen Setliff: I tell folks all the time, the hiring process, the hiring process of, in and of itself, is the single greatest existential threat to any trucking company.

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Stephen Setliff: Who you hire.

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Stephen Setliff: The person you hire, that person’s qualifications, that person’s background, that person’s prior employment.

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Stephen Setliff: how they look to you, how they sound to you, what kind of feel you get when you’re hiring them. And I’m aware of all the human resources and all the Title VII stuff that goes into all that, but you need to understand that the person that you’re putting behind the wheel of that truck is the greatest threat to your business than anything else that is going on right now. So, and understand that that process is going to be

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Stephen Setliff: attacked.

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Stephen Setliff: In any case, by a plaintiff’s lawyer who knows what the hell they’re doing. As a matter of fact, in cases that I get now, when I get a claim or a lawsuit, and a plaintiff’s lawyer does not include a negligent hiring and retention claim, I figure I’m dealing with an idiot, because this is the place where they can really put heat and fire into a case. So, what do I mean?

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Stephen Setliff: Well, it’s going to start with things like, who’s in charge of your hiring process? Who’s the ultimate decision maker? What is that person’s training and background in making those types of decisions?

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Stephen Setliff: And don’t tell me, as you are answering those kinds of questions, well, you know, Joe’s done our hiring for 20 years, he’s got 20 years’ experience doing it. Experience does not necessarily equal qualifications. If you don’t believe me, look in Washington, D.C. There are guys there who’ve been in Congress for 30 years. How do you think some of them guys are doing right now?

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Stephen Setliff: So, think… understand how… what’s going to happen. It’s going to be the attack on who makes your hiring decisions. Then they’re going to look at your application. What does your application look like? Why does your application look like it looks? Why is what’s included in the applications included? Why didn’t you include other things in your application? Has your application ever changed? If it’s changed, why has it changed? Were there times when there were things that were included

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Stephen Setliff: Included on your application that are no longer included on your application.

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Stephen Setliff: The most prevalent question I get relative to this is the plaint’s lawyer saying, what is the standard

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Stephen Setliff: that you employ relative to making decisions on whether or not to hire somebody. If I went around to however many participants who are on this call right now and said to you, articulate for me your hiring standard.

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Stephen Setliff: What is it? Can you do it? If you can’t do it, that’s a problem. If your answer to the question is, well, Great West said they were okay, or BitCo said they were okay, or Liberty Mutual, or GEICO, or Progressive, or whoever your insurer is said they were okay, that’s not the right answer. You can’t delegate to somebody else the responsibility for making a decision

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Stephen Setliff: about who it is that you hire, and whether or not they’re appropriate. You, the company, has to be able to do that. You also need to understand that you’re going to get attacked on the extent to which you documented whatever you did in the hiring process.

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Stephen Setliff: One of my favorite stories on this is a good buddy of mine who runs a big tank truck company here on the East Coast.

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Stephen Setliff: They had an employee get involved in an accident just a few years ago, and I was asked to come in and defend the case. On the employee’s employment application, it was indicated that as a prior employer.

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Stephen Setliff: he had worked for the Virginia Department of Corrections as a barber, and he had. But because we had not, the company had not actually made phone calls to confirm that, they missed the little fact that he had worked as a Department of Corrections as a barber while he was an inmate.

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Stephen Setliff: for a felony that he had not otherwise disclosed. Think about the stupidity of this guy. This guy actually discloses on his application that he worked as a barber for the DOC, but does not disclose the felony conviction.

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Stephen Setliff: Somehow, all that got by us, and this guy gets deployed, he’s out driving a truck, and gets involved in an accident.

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Stephen Setliff: So, it’s what your application looks like, and what have you done to document what you did in the hiring and in the retention, in the hiring process? Who did you call? Because I will tell you, jurors don’t believe anything that somebody says that they did without any backup documentation. So having documentation that efforts were made to look into prior employment, to try to talk to people, even if they weren’t

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Stephen Setliff: won’t tell you anything about it to demonstrate that you made the effort to try to reach out and figure out what the incidents of prior employment were. Also, reach out to try to figure out what the story was with respect to any prior incidents. Make phone calls, document it, try to gather all the information that you can, incidental to the hiring process. Having that in your file, and making sure

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Stephen Setliff: That you are doing the things that you need to do to be able to withstand the attack that will invariably come on the hiring process.

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Stephen Setliff: The things that they’re going to look at specifically are going to be… they’re going to ask you questions about the driver’s experience, what you did to nail it down, what you did to figure out the backstory on suspensions, revocations, and accident. Did you do anything to try to gather information about previous work history?

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Stephen Setliff: Work habits and performance, and most importantly, what you did to try to figure out anything about any prior criminal history.

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Stephen Setliff: The second thing they’re going to come after is your retention process, and they’re going to start with a question like this in your deposition.

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Stephen Setliff: Tell me the standard that you embrace relative to making decisions about whether or not to retain an employee after any type of adverse event occurs. What they really want to know is, what is your standard for how much you will tolerate based on an employee’s less than favorable behavior? Whether it’s a moving violation, some type of incident that occurs outside of work, or whether it’s an

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Stephen Setliff: Accident, or whether it’s anything else.

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Stephen Setliff: So, again, same thing. If we went around to every participant on this call, could you articulate what your standard for retention is? And you’ll get asked, if you can articulate it, how did you derive that standard? Has that standard ever changed? If it’s changed, why has it changed? Who’s responsible for enforcing that standard? What are their qualifications for doing so?

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Stephen Setliff: Because what they want to say, again, in the perfect world for them is, you hired a guy you never should have hired, and then after you hired that guy.

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Stephen Setliff: He had enough bad things that happened while he was in your employee that you should have been on notice that this guy is dangerous and or likely to cause the problems that ultimately resulted in the incident that they have ended up suing us about.

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Stephen Setliff: What’s next? They’re going to attack your training. The third thing they’re going to attack is your training, and they’re going to really go after training hard, because almost everybody who’s employed probably operates in an environment where there is some kind of training.

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Stephen Setliff: And what they want to go after is, first, tell me what training you provided. Tell me how you made the decision that that’s the kind of training that you were going to offer. Has your training ever changed over the years? Who’s in charge of your training? Why is that person in charge of your training? Why is what’s included? Is it what’s included? Why didn’t you talk about

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Stephen Setliff: this, what you’re experiencing training directly from the FMCSA, from the CDL manual, all those kind of things that they’re going to… are the kind of things that they’re going to go after. So you need to think about what your own training looks like, and to configure your program such that you’re in a position to be able to meet those challenges.

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Stephen Setliff: I say the same thing all the time about training.

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Stephen Setliff: Training is one of those things, I think many of these things in the world, you can figure out what your own list is, but training is one of those things where more is better. More is better. Let me give you an example.

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Stephen Setliff: If you’re one of those folks who has an annual safety meeting, and we get involved in an accident, and let’s say Steve is your safety director, and Steve says, yeah, we… or Steve’s our driver, Steve’s been employed with us for 7 years, and in 7 years, Steve has been to 7… hell, let’s say 6 annual safety meetings.

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Stephen Setliff: That’s okay, it’s better than nothing, assuming that the safety meeting actually had some content and some meat to it. But wouldn’t it be better to say that we have

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Stephen Setliff: all hands-on-deck safety meetings at least twice a year, or maybe quarterly. And in addition to having those meetings twice a year, or quarterly, or maybe even monthly, we also provide rules of the day. We also have blasts that we send out. We also have things that we send to the Qualcomm or other electronic devices in our truck, so that I can say, instead of Steve having been working with us for 7 years and been the 6th Annual Safety

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Stephen Setliff: meetings, I can say, in the 7 years that Steve’s been with us, he’s had 234 different safety touches, safety experiences, where we have talked to Steve about something that’s specific to whatever’s going to, what the job that we’re asking to do.

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Stephen Setliff: It doesn’t mean we got to literally sit down and talk to Steve, but some of that can be safety meetings, some of that can be bulletins.

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Stephen Setliff: Some of that can be rules of the day, some of that can be anything. More is better when it comes to safety, and I would encourage you

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Stephen Setliff: In the strongest terms, to think about different ways that you can continue to put safety messages out there.

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Stephen Setliff: The fourth thing that these guys are going to come after is they’re going to want to come after you to say that your equipment is poorly maintained. They’re going to want to know how it is anytime that you have a problem with any of your equipment. How was that reported? What’s the format for that being reported? What are the documents incidental to any, reporting or problems with the equipment? Who’s responsible for triaging those documents? Who’s responsible for the repairs?

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Stephen Setliff: how is it that we know that a piece of equipment, once the problem’s been reported with it, that that equipment is kept off the road or out of service until the problem is fixed? What are the documents that are relative to that? And what are our routine? What is the frequency with which we are inspecting and maintaining our equipment? And again, more is better on that. In addition to having a system in place that not only deals with

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Stephen Setliff: complaints and problems as they arrive… as they arise, but also having a system in place that deals specifically with how we are going to routinely inspect and maintain. That includes everything from our daily pre-trip inspections, our post-trip inspections, to whatever scheduled maintenance is. Think about what that looks like. Think about what the story that I’ve got to tell is.

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Stephen Setliff: something broke, and it broke from our perspective, unexpectedly. How are we going to demonstrate that it was unexpected? Well, we had a daily pre-trip, we had a daily post-trip. This was our route… this was our… this was our program and our protocol for the frequency with which we were going to inspect and maintain. It never showed up in any of those inspections, and, you know, we’ve been doing that, on this piece of equipment for X number of years.

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Stephen Setliff: we’ve looked at that particular piece of equipment, that particular problem area, 87 times in 6 years, and never did we have any indication that there was any problem with it, and here is how we document it.

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Stephen Setliff: If you’re one of those folks that only looks at it and fixes it when there’s a problem, then that’s going to glow, and you’re going to come under substantial attack for that. So, knowing that that’s the game plan, and again, I’ve talked about some of this, but I want to reiterate some of it.

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Stephen Setliff: Man, as far as your, as your hiring, document, document, document. Document the things that you did to make sure, or to exercise… because let me tell you straight up, as a trial lawyer, as somebody that defends companies.

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Stephen Setliff: A lot of what I do is at least give the impression, not always substantively, but at least give the impression that we behaved in a reasonable manner. The only way to beat their bad company story is to be able to tell a story that we are a good company, that we try to do things the right way. Look, we hired this guy, maybe we hired this guy, and he went out here and he screwed up. He did something that

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Stephen Setliff: that he wasn’t supposed to do. But we tried to do the right things. We tried to make sure that he was a good guy to have hired. We checked on his background. We hired the documents, looked at things that we did. We tried to call the people that he worked for previously. We investigated any prior incidents that he had, we talked to people on the phone, and again, here are the documents. Give me something that I can put in my hand and stand in front

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Stephen Setliff: of a jury and say, see, look, this is what we tried to do. That’s how you beat at least that part of the story. Similarly, with training, you heard me say a second ago, more is better. But it’s not just more is better, it actually goes to content as well.

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Stephen Setliff: And by content, I mean make your training dynamic. Your training should address the job that you’re asking your guys to do.

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Stephen Setliff: in the places that you’re asking them to do it, with the equipment that you’re asking them to do it with. And those also should be things that I can document. And if we’re having problems with overspeed, if we’re having problems with following too closely, if we’re having problems with unstable load, then let’s talk about that during our training. Again, it doesn’t mean

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Stephen Setliff: that we’re not going to be in a position where we have an accident that may have involved one of those things, but it’s nice, again, to put something in my hand that I can stand in front of a jury and say, look, we talked about this 4 or 5 times. It doesn’t mean that we weren’t necessarily responsible for causing the accident that we’ve been sued over, but what it lets me do is paint the story that we are a good company, and that we try

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Stephen Setliff: to do the right thing, and that is so important. Other thing to mention.

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Stephen Setliff: I don’t know how you’re going to select whoever it is that does your training, but make sure that whoever does your training

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Stephen Setliff: is trained on how to train. This sounds almost redundant, but don’t just roll out, you know, former state trooper, we’re going to make them a safety director, and we’re going to consider them as capable and suitable for being able to train drug drivers.

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Stephen Setliff: I can’t tell you the number of depositions I’ve sat through, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with former troopers or former law enforcement serving as safety professionals. As a matter of fact, they have a running start on the familiarity with the regulations, and that gives them a leg up over folks who otherwise may not have that experience. But that does not per se, mean that they are capable of actually training

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Stephen Setliff: and conveying information. So, get those folks some online, in-person training at least once a year, continually to update them and their skills on once a year. How to convey the information that they want to convey, how to help them understand what information needs to be conveyed, how to help them understand the need to continue to make their training dynamic so that they can be

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Stephen Setliff: the best position to convey the information, to hopefully prevent accidents, and even if not to prevent accidents, so that we can put the best space on our training program as possible.

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Stephen Setliff: There’s a whole slew of things that I usually suggest to people, and by the way, Steve, I’m happy, however we do this, I hate to think about folks having to try to take notes, especially as fast as I talk sometimes, but if anybody wants a copy of this presentation, send me an email, I’ll send the presentation to you so you don’t have to write your hand off.

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Stephen Setliff: You probably wish I’d told you that 30 slides ago, but I just remembered it now. In any event, these are some of the things that I usually suggest that people may want to think about.

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Stephen Setliff: Because, again, I think these things not only serve to help cut down on the frequency and severity of accidents, they’re also things that sound good for me to be able to say in the event I’ve got to defend our training program.

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Stephen Setliff: Same thing, some of these things as well, obviously using GPS, electronic data systems, maybe even considering speed governors and things like that. I’ll also like to put in here, under the training part of it.

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Stephen Setliff: is have a plan. Have a plan for what you’re going to do in the event that you have an incident. Sounds pretty simple, right? And I bet everybody’s shaking their heads, saying, okay, got a plan. Do you have a checklist?

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Stephen Setliff: Do you have a comprehensive checklist of exactly what it is that you’re going to do in the event that you have an accident? You should. Do you know what the decision tree is going to be, the call tree is going to be in the event that you have an incident? Do you know what order that you’re going to do things?

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Stephen Setliff: You should. You should be able to defend that plan, because that plan is something, again, you’re sitting in a deposition, you’re going to get asked about it. Did you have a plan for how you’re going to deal with incidents? Did you have a plan for how you’re going to deal with evidence retention? Did you have a plan for how you’re going to deal with your drivers? Did you have a plan for how you’re going to deal with your equipment? Those are the kind of things that you need to ask, or that you’ll be asked, I should say.

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Stephen Setliff: If you need a plan, if you need an outline of what a checklist looked like.

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Stephen Setliff: I think my information appears at both the beginning and the end of this presentation. Send me an email, I’ll send you a checklist, free, and you can have it and look at it. It’ll be a good starting point for you to put together a plan.

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Stephen Setliff: Dealing with an accident after it occurs is not the place for on-the-job training. You need somebody who has been trained up and who understands exactly what it is that’s involved.

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Stephen Setliff: One of the things that I’m happy to do for people, anybody that has any interest, I’m happy to talk to management personnel or operations personnel to explain to them

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Stephen Setliff: why things need to happen in a certain order, and the way that they otherwise should go out. For example.

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Stephen Setliff: I find myself frequently having to deal with cases where we’ll get a request for production of documents about emails that were generated relative to the happening of the accident. And sometimes, even with some of my bigger clients who don’t understand how this stuff works sometimes, you’ll see emails that get traded back and forth immediately subsequent to the happening of an accident, where Mark writes to Steve and says.

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Stephen Setliff: I knew we never should have hired that Sutliff guy. He was a dumbass. It was only a matter of time before something like this happens, or Steve will write back to Mark and say.

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Stephen Setliff: What’s he done this time? I’ve had both of those type of emails in the last 6 months, actually for a pretty substantial carrier that I represent.

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Stephen Setliff: Having a plan and training your guys of what not to do, as well as what to do after the happening of an accident, is a big deal. We’ve got to be on our front foot and understand that

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Stephen Setliff: We can’t control… by the time an accident’s happened, we can’t control the predicate facts. But we need to understand how to control the things that we can do not to make it worse. So let’s not go out and start sending a bunch of emails that have opinion, or comment, or even preliminary conclusions about what may have happened.

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Stephen Setliff: without a full investigation of the accident. That’s part of your plan.

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Stephen Setliff: And understanding how to do that. If you need help, or you want some further discussion with respect to how to get your management safety personnel trained up relative to that, send me an email, give me a call. I’m happy to set up a time and walk you through some of the bigger things that you need to avoid. Part of your plan, in my humble opinion, should be to call your lawyer as soon as possible.

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Stephen Setliff: It’s not part of the Holy Trinity, but I would say in the world we live in, your lawyer probably ought to be fourth on the list after the good Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, because other than those three entities, your lawyer can be the only person that can save you. Why do I make such a big deal out of that? Well.

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Stephen Setliff: Lots of companies will go out after the happening of an accident and start their investigation.

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Stephen Setliff: Some people even have these, like, self-critical analysis things that they do, or root cause analysis that they do, where they really try to dig down to figure out what it is caused the accident, ostensibly in the name of safety and to prevent accidents from happening on a go-forward basis. And they’ll do things like start sending emails internally, or maybe even bring a driver back.

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Stephen Setliff: to the shop, after the happen of an accident, or even send the supervisor to wherever the driver is to take a statement from that driver. Don’t do it.

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Stephen Setliff: Don’t do it.

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Stephen Setliff: Just don’t do it. Unless you’ve called your lawyer.

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Stephen Setliff: Before you do any of it. If you do any of that, if you engage in any type of substantive investigation before you have talked to your lawyer, then I want you to envision

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Stephen Setliff: Taking whatever investigation you’ve done, whatever notes you’ve prepared, whatever emails you’ve done, whatever forms you’ve filled out, and packaging it up.

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Stephen Setliff: and sending it straight to the desk of Morgan & Morgan. Because that’s probably what’s going to happen with all that.

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Stephen Setliff: Because that stuff, that sounds like you probably did in the ordinary course of business. Even if you may have anticipated litigation, there’s a substantial chance that any of those documents, any of those photographs, any of those notes, any of those statements end up in the hands of the bad guy, unless you have talked to your lawyer first.

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Stephen Setliff: In the world we live in, in trucking litigation, you should have, on speed dial, somebody that you can text, you can call, you can email, who’s going to answer the phone, who is going to say to you.

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Stephen Setliff: You tell them what happened, and then they’re going to say to you, okay, I want you to investigate this accident consistent with my instructions reported in the matter and on the schedule as outlined. Please do this, specifically anticipating litigation, as we think there may be a claim that follows. If you get that text.

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Stephen Setliff: Or that email, or have that conversation with your lawyer, then any investigation that follows will be substantially, if not entirely, privileged.

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Stephen Setliff: And now, that statement that you might take, the pictures that you might take, the things that you may do, are things that can… we can justifiably say were done at the direction of your lawyer and are protected by some privilege. And in English, what that means is we may not have to, probably won’t have to surrender any of that to the bad guys on the other side.

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Stephen Setliff: Not doing that.

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Stephen Setliff: leads to all kinds of problems. As a matter of fact, I will tell you that the two

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Stephen Setliff: Three biggest problems that I see, other than, you know, the happening of an accident, the training, the hiring, all that, are, number one, people who don’t understand the importance of keeping their mouths shut in electronic communications, subsequent to the happening of an accident, who end up sending emails internally before a lawyer has been engaged that make us look bad. Number two, companies that engage in investigations subsequent to the

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Stephen Setliff: happen of an accident that are not done at the direction of their attorney, that develops information that’s less than favorable to us for whatever reason, and I’ll explain that in a second. And three, drivers who don’t know what to do on the side of the road.

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Stephen Setliff: So what do I mean about the companies that engage in investigation?

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Stephen Setliff: Taking statements from drivers that are not done at the direction of your attorney is just not a smart thing to do.

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Stephen Setliff: Because you’re talking with, you know, so Mark gets involved in the accident, Mark gets called back to the shop, some supervisor looming over him and says, okay, write out for me exactly what it is that happened. And so Mark writes out a rendition of the happening of the accident. Mark’s probably worried about keeping his job, Mark wants to make the boss happy, Mark’s got a wife and kids at home, and he needs support, he don’t want to lose his job. Who knows what the hell Mark’s going to write?

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Stephen Setliff: Mark certainly has incentive in certain circumstances, maybe, to be less than candid than he should be. Just don’t do that.

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Stephen Setliff: Don’t do that until you’ve got your lawyer involved. And actually, don’t do that even when a lawyer is involved, until you’ve had a chance to look at the electronic data, whether there’s an ECM download, or whether there’s some kind of video. It is much better, in my opinion, and the way I take statements from drivers, is to say, alright, here’s the video, this is what it shows, does this look pretty much consistent with

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Stephen Setliff: what your recollection is, as opposed to the old, the dumb question, which is, tell me what happened. Because if you start with the tell me what happened, God only knows what it is that you’re going to get. In my world, I want the driver’s statement, the electronic data, and the video to line up

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Stephen Setliff: From the first time that guy opens… our driver opens his mouth about anything.

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Stephen Setliff: You heard me say there were 3 things that killed us. The internal emails, the inadvisable taking of statements before lawyers involved. The third thing is not having your drivers trained on how to react at the site of a happening of an accident.

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Stephen Setliff: Same kind of thing. Driver gets pulled out of the truck, and a trooper comes over, as troopers will want to do, and says, so tell me what happened here. And the driver starts

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Stephen Setliff: spewing off whatever. Again, and I don’t mean to suggest that a driver would necessarily lie in that circumstance, they just may be confused. I don’t know how many of you have been in accidents, I’ve been in a couple. It’s hard to always piece together, and remember, how fast were you going, which lane were you in, where’d the other vehicle come from, what were the stopping distances, what were the speeds? It’s a lot to try to piece together, particularly if you’re worried about somebody being hurt.

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Stephen Setliff: And or your job.

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Stephen Setliff: Statements that drivers make to law enforcement on the side of the road, such as the habit of an accident, that are incorrect or incomplete for any reason, will be something that they will nail us to the cross with for the entirety of a case.

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Stephen Setliff: So what I usually tell folks is to train your drivers on how to interact with law enforcement on the side of the road.

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Stephen Setliff: What a driver should say on the side of the road to a trooper who is asking questions is, Officer, I’d be happy to talk to you about what it is that happened. I’d like an opportunity to get my thoughts together. Can we meet at the office or wherever tomorrow morning at 9 o’clock?

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Stephen Setliff: That’s not disrespectful. That’s entirely consistent with that driver’s constitutional rights. You still have a right in the United States not to give evidence against yourself or to incriminate yourself, and it provides that driver with a little breathing room. Maybe the driver gets a ticket. Maybe the officer writes a ticket. Okay.

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Stephen Setliff: Ask yourself, would you rather be dealing with a reckless driving ticket or a $100 million lawsuit? It’s a pretty easy calculation in my world.

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Stephen Setliff: After the driver, if appropriately trained, makes that comment, then he comes back to the office, and then, hopefully, in consultation with safety

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Stephen Setliff: person, whoever your insurance professional is, and your lawyer, you look at whatever the information is. You look at the videotape, you look at the ECM data, you look at the GPS data, you talk to the driver, get a sense of what the driver’s gotta say, and then, and only then, make a determination about whether that driver is ever going to make a statement to the police. And I can tell you, particularly in cases where I think

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Stephen Setliff: That the chances of a claim are likely.

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Stephen Setliff: i.e, anything where there’s any type of EMS or rescue personnel involved, or any time we get sighted, I very rarely let my driver make any statement to law enforcement. It almost never helps, and almost invariably becomes something that we have to try to live with and explain away, not just during dependency of any traffic charge, but also during the pendency of any civil litigation.

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Stephen Setliff: Train them.

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Stephen Setliff: One of the things I usually suggest to people, relative to that is you ought to… that same lawyer that you’re going to be proactive with and call after the time an accident happens, that’s probably also the guy that you ought to come have talk to your drivers. I probably talk to… my wife complains about it all the time, because I’m off somewhere else to talk to drivers, but you should… having a lawyer come in

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Stephen Setliff: And explain to drivers the way this game is played and the way the system works is a big deal.

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Stephen Setliff: You may think as safety professionals and human resources professionals that you’re suitably conveying that message, but that sometimes just having somebody who’s in the courtroom and see how these things get played out, talking to your drivers on a very, very baseline level can be extraordinarily helpful. And I would encourage you, as part of your training program, to get that done.

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Stephen Setliff: I’m running a little short on time, so I’m going to move through some of this a little quickly. I’m a big believer in getting someone to the scene of the happen of an accident as soon as you can, and as a consumer of an insurance product, I would suggest to you that if I’m on the phone talking to my insurance company, I’m going to ask whether or not we’re sending accident recon

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Stephen Setliff: An independent adjuster and attorney. Those are the… those are the trinity that you want to think about getting to the scene of an accident, certainly any type of substantial accident. I’d also suggest to you that you think about today.

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Stephen Setliff: Anywhere where you have drivers running routes, if they get involved in an accident, what it is, where it is that you would send them for a drug test, you do not want to be in a situation where a driver gets involved in an accident somewhere in the eastern part of Montana, and you’ve never thought about it, and now we can’t get them a drug test, and they need a drug test, and it doesn’t happen. A failure to get a drug test in these cases almost always is a complicating factor.

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Stephen Setliff: that the bad guys will use to inflame a jury. I’ll also tell you that something that happened of an accident, it’s very, very likely you’re going to get a letter from the bad guys on the other side telling you to retain all sorts and manner of documents.

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Stephen Setliff: If you have not engaged a lawyer at that point, you sure as hell should do so then. That letter needs to be responded to, and you need to understand why that letter’s being sent. That letter’s not being sent in the hopes that you’re actually going to retain any of those documents. That letter’s being sent by the bad guys in the hopes that you won’t retain any of those documents, or that you won’t retain all of those documents. So that needs to be responded to.

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Stephen Setliff: With, your lawyer writing back saying, your request is entirely overbroad, you need to narrow it, and oh, by the way, here are the 80 things that you need to do to make sure that your plaintiff has retained the suitable documents.

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Stephen Setliff: I won’t talk much about a handbook other than to say you sure as hell better have one in this day and age, and you need to make sure that you’re living by it. Your handbook needs to be the perfect marriage between operations, safety, and legal.

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Stephen Setliff: And again, like with the safety checklist, if you need a template of what a handbook, a starting point for what a handbook should look like, send me an email, call me, I’ll be glad to send you one.

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Stephen Setliff: Lots of ways that those things can protect you, and you need to make sure that they’re kept up to date, and that any update is documented with respect to whoever it is is being issued the handbook.

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Stephen Setliff: Obviously, equipment maintenance is important.

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Stephen Setliff: The last thing I want to mention to you is your public persona.

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Stephen Setliff: Google yourself. Google your company. Google your chief operating officer. Google your safety director.

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Stephen Setliff: Google your, chief executive officer. Google the person in front who does your training. See what comes up.

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Stephen Setliff: See what it looks like, and understand that juries, while they’re not supposed to, are going to do the same damn thing once we get into trial. So, curating the public persona of those people and your company is a big deal. Be aggressive with that. There are things that you can do that will portray the company in a very favorable light.

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Stephen Setliff: Write a $100 check to the local Little League, write a $100 check to the American Heart Association, and for goodness sakes, enter every single safety contest that you can enter, and make sure that if and to the extent you’re recognized for any safety award, that you have that listed.

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Stephen Setliff: That’s a pretty quick finish to what’s otherwise, hopefully, a helpful presentation for you folks. If there’s anything that I can tell you, there’s anything I can do to help you now or any other time, all you gotta do is ask. Glad to do it.

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Steve Kessler: Fantastic, Steve. Excellent, information. We’ve had a whole lot of requests for.

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Steve Kessler: copies of your slides and the checklist and other things that you mentioned, so we’ve got that all recorded here on this side, and Steve, I’ll make sure I get that to you so you can provide those materials.

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Steve Kessler: Just to remind everybody also that, as a company, we are all about, training, and one of the things that Steve has done is put together a package of videos. There are 25 videos all together.

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Steve Kessler: 15 of those would be geared toward the company, and there’s discussion about the big four things that Steve talked about today, in addition to some other information about your handbook, and drug and alcohol testing, and

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Steve Kessler: relationships with your attorney. Then there are also 10 videos designed for you to present to your drivers to help them understand what they need to do at the scene of an accident, or not do, I should say.

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Steve Kessler: Things like accident evidence and moving your vehicle after an accident, so there’s a whole series of videos designed to help you train, and I think if

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Steve Kessler: If anything, Steve made a very strong point about the need to make sure that everyone is trained, whether that’s your driver, or your recruiters, or other folks inside your company.

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Steve Kessler: It’s important to make sure that you do this. So, it’s called the Ultimate Defense. It’s a premium video package, and if you’d like some more information about that, let us know.

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Steve Kessler: Also, I’ve put up on the poll here, if you’re a NATMI,

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Steve Kessler: Certified Director of Safety, then you can receive a couple of recertification points, for the program.

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Steve Kessler: If anybody has any questions, we can wait a couple of minutes to see if there are, but, if not,

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Steve Kessler: Steve, thank you very much. Fantastic information. Steve’s package of videos, The Ultimate Defense, will get you a long way into being proactively prepared for one of these lawsuits to come in.

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Steve Kessler: So, any closing remarks, from you, Mark?

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Mark Rhea: Yeah, you know, it’s a breath of fresh air to have Steve on our side of the fence, if you will, on this litigation issue, and I’d ask everybody to send a thank you right now to Steve for

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Mark Rhea: Defending the commercial vehicle industry, and being on our side of the fence, if you will, because, the plaintiff’s attorneys are not going away, and clearly,

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Mark Rhea: you know, the learning management system where you can control your training content, you can document your training content, can certainly help Steve and our other defense attorneys defend us, not if, but when.

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Mark Rhea: You have, that nasty lawsuit you got. So, thank you, Steve, for defending the commercial vehicle industry, being on our side of the fence, as I like to say.

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Stephen Setliff: It’s been the pleasure of my life, honestly. The people I get to meet are great, I love it. So, thank you for.

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Steve Kessler: Very good.

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Steve Kessler: Well, Steve, thank you all very much. Thanks to everybody out there that joined us today. I think it was a seriously good bit of information for all of us to take back and make sure that we’re ready to go if and when that lawsuit comes our way. So, Steve, thank you much, sir.

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Stephen Setliff: Right.

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Steve Kessler: And thanks to everybody that joined us and look forward to some messages from us about upcoming webinar events. Thank you all for coming today and have a great rest of the week and weekend. Thank you all very much.