Trucking Company Attorney in New York City

A motor carrier is a business that operates under two sets of rules at once: ordinary commercial law, and a federal regulatory regime that reaches into how the company hires, leases, insures, and documents nearly everything it does. The trucking companies that get into serious trouble are usually not the ones that had an accident. They are the ones whose paperwork could not survive the discovery that followed.

The Law Offices of Albert Goodwin represents motor carriers, fleet owners, and owner-operators in New York City on the business and regulatory side of the industry: entity structure, authority, leasing, contracts, insurance disputes, compliance enforcement, and commercial litigation.

Operating Authority and Registration

Interstate motor carriers of property must register with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and maintain the minimum financial responsibility set by 49 C.F.R. Part 387, generally $750,000 for general freight and higher amounts for certain hazardous materials. Authority is not transferable simply because a business changed hands. Carriers that reorganize, merge, or sell frequently discover after closing that the DOT number, the safety rating, the insurance filings, and the customer contracts do not move together, and that operating on the seller's authority creates uninsured exposure.

Common issues we handle include reinstating revoked authority after an insurance filing lapse, correcting registration after an entity change, responding to a determination that a purported successor is the alter ego of a carrier with a poor safety record, and the reverse situation, a legitimate buyer accused of chameleon carrier conduct.

Owner-Operator Leases and the Federal Truth-in-Leasing Rules

Carriers that use owner-operators must comply with the federal leasing regulations at 49 C.F.R. Part 376. The lease must be in writing, must be signed, must specify the compensation, must give the carrier exclusive possession and control for the duration, must address who pays for what, and must state how escrow funds are held, used, accounted for, and returned. Chargeback items must be identified with enough specificity that the owner-operator can determine how the amount was computed.

These are not cosmetic requirements. Owner-operators may sue for violations, and escrow and chargeback claims are often brought as class actions covering an entire fleet over several years. A carrier with a form lease that was never updated, deductions that appear nowhere in the lease, or escrow accounts that were never reconciled at termination is carrying an aggregate liability far larger than the individual amounts suggest. Reviewing the lease, the settlement statements, and the escrow practice together is the only way to assess it.

Leasing compliance also interacts with classification. A lease that satisfies Part 376 does not automatically make the driver an independent contractor under New York law. See driver classification and the Fair Play Act.

Insurance Disputes and Coverage Gaps

Motor carrier insurance disputes tend to follow predictable patterns:

• Unscheduled equipment. A tractor or trailer added to the fleet but never reported, involved in a loss.
• Unlisted or unqualified drivers. Coverage denied because the driver did not meet the policy's driver criteria endorsement, often for age, experience, or motor vehicle record.
• Cargo policy exclusions. Unattended vehicle theft, refrigeration breakdown without a temperature recorder, and excluded commodity classes such as electronics, alcohol, or pharmaceuticals.
• Non-trucking liability, commonly called bobtail coverage, and the dispute over whether the unit was in the business of the motor carrier at the moment of loss.
• Late notice and the insurer's claim of prejudice.
• Reservation of rights and the duty to defend, which in New York is broader than the duty to indemnify and is measured against the allegations of the complaint.

The MCS-90 endorsement is frequently misunderstood on both sides. It is a surety-like obligation protecting the public, not coverage for the carrier, and an insurer that pays under it may seek reimbursement from the carrier. Understanding what the endorsement does and does not do changes settlement strategy in a large claim.

Safety Enforcement, Audits, and CSA Data

New entrant safety audits, compliance reviews, and roadside inspection data drive a carrier's scores in the FMCSA Safety Measurement System. Those scores affect insurance pricing, broker vetting decisions, and, after an accident, the plaintiff's negligent hiring theory against everyone in the chain. Carriers have a right to challenge inspection and crash data through the DataQs process, and a proposed unsatisfactory safety rating can be challenged through a petition for administrative review. Carriers facing an out-of-service order or a proposed civil penalty have limited time to respond, and responding well requires assembling the underlying records rather than arguing about the conclusion.

We also counsel carriers on the documentation that accident litigation will demand: driver qualification files, hours of service records and ELD data, maintenance and inspection records, drug and alcohol testing files including Clearinghouse queries, and the retention periods that apply to each. Deleting or overwriting these records after a serious accident, even inadvertently through routine data purging, produces spoliation exposure that is often worse than the underlying claim.

Entity Structure and Asset Protection for Fleets

Plaintiffs in trucking cases look past the operating company. Structures that separate equipment ownership, real property, and operations can serve legitimate purposes, but they must be respected in practice: separate books, separate accounts, arm's length leases between the entities, and adequate capitalization and insurance at the operating level. Structures that exist only on paper invite alter ego and veil piercing claims, and a carrier that has been undercapitalized deliberately to defeat creditors is in a worse position than one that never separated anything.

See our pages on piercing the corporate veil, asset protection, and fleet operators.

New York City Operating Realities

Carriers operating in the five boroughs deal with a layer of local regulation that does not exist elsewhere: truck route restrictions and the resulting summonses, weight and dimension limits on parkways and bridges, overweight and oversize permitting, idling limits, and the commercial waste and trade waste rules that apply to certain hauling operations. Persistent violations generate both direct penalties and evidence usable against the carrier in civil litigation. Businesses running box trucks, sprinters, and delivery vans face parking and loading zone enforcement volumes that materially affect operating costs and are worth managing systematically rather than one ticket at a time.

Contract and Payment Disputes

The commercial disputes carriers bring to us most often involve unpaid freight charges and accessorials, detention and layover billing that a shipper or broker refuses, deductions taken unilaterally for cargo claims, chargebacks after a service failure, lease and equipment financing defaults, fuel card and factoring disputes, and terminal or yard lease problems. Each has a different limitations period and a different practical leverage point. See collecting freight charges, breach of contract, and commercial loan and equipment default.

Employment Issues Specific to Carriers

Beyond classification, carriers face wage claims over unpaid detention and waiting time, per diem and pay-by-the-mile structures that do not satisfy minimum wage in every workweek, deductions from driver pay that New York Labor Law § 193 does not permit, and disputes over whether an exemption applies. The federal Motor Carrier Act exemption can remove certain employees from federal overtime requirements, but New York wage and hour law provides its own protections and its own remedies, and the interaction surprises carriers that assumed a single federal answer settled the question. See unpaid overtime and wage payment claims.

You can contact us by phone at 212-233-1233 or by email at [email protected].