Trucking Company Liability After a Truck Accident in Colorado

Vicarious Liability: When the Company Answers for Its Driver

 Colorado Lets You Pursue the Company’s Own Negligence Too

For years, trucking companies in Colorado used a pleading tactic to shield their own conduct: admit the driver was an employee, accept vicarious liability on paper, and argue that the admission barred any claim about the company’s hiring, training, or supervision practices. The Colorado Supreme Court endorsed that rule in 2017.

The Colorado legislature reversed it. Under C.R.S. § 13-21-111.5(1.5), when an employer acknowledges vicarious liability for its employee’s negligence, the injured person’s direct negligence claims against the employer are not barred, and the plaintiff may pursue those claims, and the discovery that comes with them, alongside the respondeat superior claim.^[1] The statute applies to civil actions commenced on or after September 7, 2021, and it does not allow recovering damages twice for the same injury.

The practical effect is significant. Direct negligence claims, including negligent hiring, training, supervision, retention, and entrustment, open the company’s own conduct to discovery: its hiring files, training programs, safety policies, dispatch pressure, and maintenance history. Under the old rule, an admission could keep all of that out of the case. Under current Colorado law, it cannot.

Negligent Hiring

Federal law requires motor carriers to qualify their drivers before putting them behind the wheel. Under the driver qualification rules, carriers must verify a valid commercial driver’s license, obtain and review the driver’s driving record, maintain a driver qualification file, and confirm medical certification.^[2]

A negligent hiring claim asks whether the company put an unfit driver on the road despite what it knew or should have known. A carrier that hires a driver with a history of preventable crashes, serious moving violations, or failed drug tests, or that skips the background checks the regulations require, has made a business decision that foreseeably endangered everyone sharing the road with its trucks.

Negligent Training

Qualifying a driver on paper is not the same as preparing one for the job. Training claims focus on what the company taught, or failed to teach, about the specific demands of the work: mountain grade braking, chain law compliance, cargo securement, winter operations, and fatigue management. In Colorado, where the I-70 corridor punishes inadequate training in ways flat-country routes do not, a carrier that sends an inexperienced driver over the mountain passes without grade-specific training invites exactly the crashes those lessons prevent.

Training records, or their absence, are discoverable in a direct negligence claim. A thin training file speaks for itself.

Negligent Supervision

Carriers are responsible for monitoring the drivers they employ. Federal hours-of-service rules cap driving time, and electronic logging devices give companies direct visibility into whether their drivers comply.^[3] A carrier that sees violations and looks the other way, or worse, builds delivery schedules that cannot be met legally, is supervising negligently.

Supervision claims often reveal the difference between a company’s written safety policy and its actual practice. Dispatch records, driver communications, and ELD audit trails show whether safety rules were enforced or merely printed. The patterns repeat across these cases: delivery schedules that assume illegal driving time, logs edited after the fact, and warnings ignored until a crash forces the question. Fatigue violations rarely happen without the company’s knowledge.

Negligent Maintenance

Federal law requires carriers to systematically inspect, repair, and maintain every vehicle they operate, and to keep records proving they did.^[4] Brake failure on a mountain grade, a tire blowout at highway speed, or steering or coupling failures are rarely acts of fate. They are usually the end of a paper trail: skipped inspections, deferred repairs, or out-of-service violations that were never corrected.

Maintenance liability can also extend beyond the carrier to an outside maintenance contractor, which is one reason identifying every responsible company early matters. The paper trail usually survives even when the part that failed does not.