Before the lawsuit: Trucking deposition preparation

Thomas Wasson

Fri, August 14, 2026 at 6:06 PM GMT+3 5 min read

Fleet safety directors spend years building compliance programs that nobody ever asks them to defend out loud, and when someone finally does, it is a plaintiff's attorney with a court reporter in the room. Trucksafe Consulting is selling the rehearsal.

The DOT compliance consultancy will hold its fifth annual Fleet Compliance Bootcamp Sept. 16-17, 2026, at the Crowne Plaza Indianapolis-Downtown-Union Station, and this year's program adds a half-day Live Deposition Simulation and Rule 30(b)(6) Preparation Seminar on Sept. 18.

Trucking deposition preparation usually begins after a lawsuit is filed, which is also the point at which the record stops being fixable. Attendees will watch a realistic deposition of a fleet safety director in a serious highway-accident case. Plaintiff and defense attorneys will demonstrate the questioning strategies, document issues and credibility challenges they use in live cases. A panel discussion afterward will examine how testimony and company records affect liability exposure and settlement value.

"Today, a compliance failure rarely stays confined to an enforcement proceeding," said Brandon Wiseman, president and founder of Trucksafe Consulting. "After a serious accident, attorneys will scrutinize years of driver files, maintenance records, safety data, policies, emails and management decisions."

The exposure is retroactive, and it reaches documents nobody wrote expecting an audience.

The Traps That Aren't Intuitive

Corporate representatives walk into those depositions ready to talk about the compliance program, and then the damage comes from the shape of the questioning.

"The manner in which the plaintiff's attorneys are asking the questions, the things that they're really digging into, a lot of that isn't all that intuitive," Wiseman said in an interview with FreightWaves. "And so if you're not prepared for that, if you don't take the time to understand their games that they play and the things that they try and hang you on, then you can really find yourself in a bad place in those types of depositions."

Trucking Deposition Preparation Before the Real Thing

The half-day exercise seats a plaintiff's attorney, a defense attorney and a safety director around an invented fact pattern and lets the questioning run.

"We thought it would be interesting to spend a half day of just kind of simulating those with a plaintiff's attorney, a defense attorney, sitting there, a safety director, kind of going through a fact pattern for a made-up case and seeing where those traps are and how best to navigate them," Wiseman said.

Settlement value is where documentation quality stops being an abstraction and becomes a number. Research the American Transportation Research Institute released in December 2025 found that settlements came in below verdicts once awards reached $5 million or more. Below $1 million, verdicts came in under settlements. The largest half of awards, the ones that do the real damage, grew at an average of 5.7% a year across the six years of cases studied.

Same Pitfalls, New Packaging

Wiseman founded Trucksafe five years ago alongside Childress Law, the transportation firm where he practices, and the gap he saw was informational. Fleet safety professionals, risk advisors and insurance people had almost nothing to work from on DOT regulations, or on the risk that thin compliance creates.

The bootcamp came out of that, a 2½-day format built to run against the grain of the conference circuit. Two full days cover driver qualification, hours-of-service management, drug and alcohol testing, fleet maintenance, driver-facing policies, CSA scores, DOT enforcement and audit preparedness, and insurance and litigation exposure.

That list has barely moved in five years. What changed is not the list but what the plaintiff's bar can do with it.

"Safety ratings, CSA scores, all of that type of stuff, but it's just, you know, as more and more of these high-profile accidents happen and the plaintiff's bar gets more well attuned to leveraging these data points to end up with these multimillion-dollar verdicts. That's what's changed," Wiseman said. "Same stuff, just kind of a different packaging of it."

The volume behind that shift is not small: ATRI counted an estimated 12,817 state truck-tractor tort cases in 2022 alone. Its earlier nuclear verdict work logged 26 awards above $1 million in the first five years of data covering 2006 through 2019, and nearly 300 in the last five.

Brokers Are Next in Line

Motor carriers absorbed the pressure first, and brokers and shippers now sit inside the same exposure. The Supreme Court made that explicit on May 14. It ruled unanimously in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC that state negligent-hiring claims against brokers survive federal preemption under the safety exception to the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act.

Some brokers already attend the bootcamp, and Trucksafe recently released an online course built for them on reading the safety data available on the carriers they hire. The broker's version of the problem is the carrier's in reverse: learning which records a carrier would prefer nobody read back to it. The practical consequence is that a broker's carrier-vetting file now sits in the same discovery pile as the carrier's driver qualification records.

"It seems like a natural extension to build some of that into our boot camp for future years, if folks would be interested in it," Wiseman said.

Turning the Ship Around

Trucking deposition preparation takes up a half day of the 2½-day program. The rest of it aims at keeping a safety director out of that chair to begin with. Registration and program details are at trucksafebootcamp.com.

"Our whole goal is just to give them practical tips in all of those areas I mentioned, driver qualification, hours of service. The areas that, you know, perennially get fleets in trouble," Wiseman said. "We just want to give them a ton of practical tips of, hey, here's what the best in the business are doing to mitigate their risk in these areas, things that they can take back with them, implement back at their fleets, and then hopefully turn the ship around if they've been struggling in those areas."

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