Don’t Neglect The Legal ROI Of GPS

Transportation attorney Clay Porter told attendees of CCJ’s Spring Symposium in Tuscaloosa, Ala., on Wednesday, June 6. “Trucking companies should stop hauling freight and spend more time fighting lawsuits – you’d be a lot more profitable.” …. Read the full eTrucker article on trucking legal risks here.

I’ve extracted and made a few comments on some of Attorney Porter’s points. They make good reading if you have vehicles on the road … company owned, employee owned, common carrier or not for hire … you still face some tremendous liabilities as soon as an employee turns a wheel in aid of your business.

These are some of the more common tactics Porter has seen used recently by plaintiff’s attorneys trying to win large damage claims against companies with vehicles involved in accidence.

“Log speeding.” Bad logs can result in incorrect times, where strict mathematical calculations of miles traveled during a particular period might result in an incorrect conclusion of overly excessive speed…

You’ve seen me mention time and time again how prevalent inaccurate or “swindle sheet” Hours Of Service (HOS) logs are used in the trucking business. One consequence that will show up for sure is if the driver shows departure from a point at a certain hour but then has a second log that shows he departed much later in order to “buy” some extra driving hours. If the log at the time of the accident shows the truck had to average say, 100 mph (and yes, this is common) then how is the company’s lawyer going to convince a jury that the driver was driving safely? With million-dollar judgements common a $500 GPS logging the truck’s true hours and speed would look like a pretty good investment “after the fact”.

Carriers “permit” violations of the hours-of-service regulations if they fail to have management systems in place that effectively prevent such violations. “There is an actual accounting cost to some of these safety issues,” Porter said. “The alternative is to start moving away from these problems.” …

Again, I’ve commented on this issue often. I’ve been working with GPS for years, sold systems for years, and have yet to see a trucking company who didn’t have a problem in this area. You don’t even need a tragic accident to throw yourself into the Federal sop pot with this issue. If a driver cheats and gets caught s/he gets fined and possibly loses his or her Commercial Driver’s Licence *CDL), but the employee gets nailed too … there are a lot of Federal and Sate laws with verbiage that goes something like “…management shall not suffer or permit such practices … “. In today’s world you have to be responsible for things you can’t monitor properly unless you measure remotely. Don’t think you are wasting your time reading this if you aren’t operating over the road trucks, either. The rules for commercial vehicles which stay close to home can be extremely complex … even if your driver’s don’t have to carry a log book … and if I can find these rules you better believe the lawyer who is out to sure you is going to be able to find them too.

Speed management. Companies should have systems in place to control speeding…

This is a real no-brainier. Speed kills, so reducing speeds will save lives and other, less serious accidents. Also, speed costs significant money in excess fuel costs, tire wear and other vehicle maintenance issues. Even if there were no Hours Of Service rules and you never had to worry about getting sued a proper GPS tracking system will pay for itself in speed-related savings alone. I have never yet seen a fleet that did not show measurable decreases in fleet-wide average speeds after installing GPS tracking. And you all know by now what my old friend Dr. Drucker used to say:

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure”.