Trucking companies send investigators to the scene within hours. You need someone who does the same.

Two kinds of commercial vehicles dominate Los Angeles streets. The first is the delivery van: Amazon-branded vans, box trucks, and step vans that run every residential block from Glendale to Hollywood, often on tight schedules with drivers watching a handheld device. The second is the drayage truck: the container tractor-trailers that shuttle between the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach and the rail yards and warehouses inland, mostly on the 710 and the 110 and then out along the 60, the 10, and the 5. The Port of Los Angeles alone handled 10.2 million containers in 2025 and, with Long Beach, moves roughly 31 percent of the nation’s container trade. Every one of those boxes leaves the port on a truck or a train.

Who is the defendant when the driver is a contractor

Amazon does not employ most of the drivers in Amazon vans. Its Delivery Service Partner program contracts with independent companies that hire the drivers, and Amazon describes the DSPs as separate businesses. Drayage drivers are often owner-operators or leased to a motor carrier, and the tractor, the chassis, and the container may each belong to a different company. Under California’s respondeat superior rule, the driver’s employer is responsible for a crash the driver causes on the job, so the DSP or the motor carrier is the first defendant. Whether the company at the top of the chain can also be held responsible depends on the facts: how much control it retained over routes, schedules, and vehicles (Hooker v. Department of Transportation (2002)), whether it negligently selected or kept a contractor with a bad safety record, and whether the arrangement is really an employment relationship in disguise. The Privette line of cases limits some of these claims, so the evidence about control has to be gathered early and deliberately: the delivery app data, the route sheets, the contract, and the safety scorecards.

Federal hours-of-service rules

Drivers of commercial motor vehicles in interstate commerce are limited by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s hours-of-service rules: no more than 11 hours of driving after 10 consecutive hours off duty, all driving within a 14-hour window, a 30-minute break after 8 cumulative hours of driving, and 60 or 70 hours on duty in 7 or 8 days. Port drayage tractors are squarely covered. Many delivery vans are lighter than the 10,001-pound weight rating that brings a vehicle under the federal rules, in which case the driver’s hours are governed by the company’s own policies and California labor law rather than the FMCSA, and the electronic logging device that would prove fatigue may not exist. That changes what we ask for: telematics from the van, the delivery app’s timestamps, and the driver’s schedule instead of a logbook.

What we do in the first week

• Identify every company in the chain from the door of the van, the DOT number on the tractor, and the container and chassis markings, and put each on notice to preserve evidence.
• Demand the electronic logs, telematics, dash-cam footage, dispatch records, and the driver’s qualification and drug-testing files before they are overwritten.
• Photograph and preserve the vehicles before repair, and retain a reconstruction expert for serious injuries.
• Locate the applicable insurance: the carrier’s liability policy, the DSP’s policy, any excess or umbrella coverage, and your own underinsured motorist coverage.

If a Metro bus, a city truck, or a Caltrans road condition was involved instead, a government claim must be presented within six months; see our government claims guide.