Company liable for trucker’s ‘negligent hiring’

June 27, 2008

Roanoke jury has decided a trucking company was negligent in hiring an inexperienced driver to haul a “hot load.”

The verdict last month on liability may be based on new law in the big-dollar, big-rig field of tractor-trailer litigation.

In a decision in Jones v. C.H. Robinson Worldwide Inc., U.S. District Judge Glen E. Conrad said that a motor carrier broker could be sued for “negligent hiring of an independent contractor,” despite the broker’s efforts to insulate itself through contract language.

No Virginia case has applied the negligent hiring theory in the context of a broker’s selection of a carrier, Conrad said.

The case arose from a 2004 wreck in Wythe County.

On the night of Sept. 10, 2004, West Virginia trucker Winford Dallas Jones was traveling southbound on I-81 in a tractor-trailer owned by his employer.

Kristin Arciszewski, who got her long-haul license two months earlier, was traveling in the northbound lane driving a tractor-trailer owned by AKJ Enterprises Inc., a Georgia trucking company.  Her load of cable reels was “hot” because it had to get there in a hurry.

Just before the accident, Arciszewski had been observed abruptly reentering the highway from an exit ramp, without signaling. As she approached Jones’ truck, she crossed the median into his lane and struck him head-on. Arciszewski died at the scene and Jones suffered a concussion and multiple fractures in his right arm and left leg.

Jones filed a personal injury suit against Arciszewski’s estate, AKJ and its owners, and C.H. Robinson Worldwide Inc., a Minnesota motor carrier broker with offices in Virginia and a contract with AKJ.  Jones settled his claim against AKJ for $756,231, and only sued Worldwide.

Eyewitness accounts established Arciszewski’s negligence. A police report stated she was a new driver for the company, and “inexperience might have also been a contributing factor.”

In his opinion, Conrad said that regardless of whether Worldwide was acting as a “third party logistics company or solely as a freight broker” on this particular load, it had not exercised enough control over AKJ to become an employer liable under a theory of respondeat superior.

Worldwide argued that a 1988 Virginia Supreme Court case that recognized a claim for negligent hiring of an independent contractor did not apply to Jones because the earlier case involved hiring a contractor for disposal of ultrahazardous waste. But Conrad said driving a tractor-trailer on a public highway clearly involved a similar risk of physical harm.

The parties fought over what duty of inquiry Worldwide had to ferret out Arciszewski’s faults as a driver.

Given expert testimony from the plaintiff on the online availability of trucking safety data and Worldwide’s “active interjection of itself into the relationship between shipper and carrier,” the plaintiff could show the broker had a duty to investigate AKJ’s fitness prior to hiring it for the cable load, the judge said in his pretrial opinion.

Because of conflicts over the import of certain Web site safety warnings on the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration site and of testimony from Worldwide’s own export, Conrad said the case could go to a jury.

After the three-day liability phase of the trial, the jury returned a verdict against Worldwide.

After the trial, Worldwide argued that without evidence as to what caused the truck to cross the median, there was no basis to conclude that “some defect or trait” Worldwide failed to discover caused the accident.

Written by Deborah Elkins  |  Filed Under Employment 

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