Send a spoliation letter and evidence-preservation demand immediately - preferably within days, not weeks, of the crash. In Connecticut, the basic lawsuit deadline is usually 2 years from the injury date under Conn. Gen. Stat. § 52-584, but key trucking evidence can disappear long before that.

The rule in plain English: do not settle a commercial-truck crash before the driver's electronic logging data, dispatch records, onboard data, and maintenance records are preserved and reviewed. Those records can show fatigue, hours-of-service violations, speeding, brake problems, or a heat-related tire failure during summer highway travel on I-95 near Norwalk. Once you settle, you usually give up the right to dig deeper.

This matters even more in a Connecticut truck case because the insurance picture is different. A regular Connecticut vehicle may carry only 25/50/25 minimum coverage, but an interstate trucking company often has at least $750,000 in liability coverage under FMCSA rules, sometimes more depending on the load. The driver, the motor carrier, and sometimes a broker may all point fingers at each other. The broker is not automatically liable just for arranging the load, but the carrier and driver often are central targets.

Example: a pregnant woman is rear-ended by a tractor-trailer after tourist traffic stacks up on I-95 by Exit 14 in Norwalk. The truck insurer quickly offers money for an ER visit. She also needed fetal monitoring, follow-up OB checks, and missed work because doctors were watching for placental complications. If she takes the offer first, she may never learn the driver had exceeded FMCSA hours limits or that the carrier destroyed ELD data after getting no preservation demand.

Smarter path: demand the logs first, including ELD data, black-box/ECM data, dashcam video, inspection reports, driver qualification file, dispatch texts, and trailer maintenance records. That is usually the better move before talking settlement numbers.