Distracted driving in San Antonio is a major problem. Everywhere you go, you see people texting and driving or distracted in other ways. This is the cause of many car crashes in San Antonio. We oftentimes find out that distracted driving was a cause of a crash after we request phone records and take depositions.

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Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis.

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After doing this for as long as I have, I've seen enough cases now where I can tell the other driver was distracted who caused the crash. In San Antonio, just driving around the roadways, you can see drivers looking at their phones, playing with whatever's in their lap, messing with their coffee or some other nonsense that's making them not pay attention to the roadways. Distracted driving is one of the biggest causes of crashes in San Antonio and the rest of the United States. Everybody has a phone. Everybody has a smartphone and far too few people put it down when they drive.

It's hard to prove these cases because nobody wants to admit they were texting and driving or looking at their phone. However, sometimes at the scene, I have clients who say they saw them coming in their rearview or from their left and they could see that the person was looking at something in their lap or their hand. Distracted driving is one of the largest causes of crashes in the city. At our law firm, we do a couple of things to make sure that we protect our clients against distracted driving. One of the things is we always get the phone records of the defendant driver. That will let us know if they were on their phone right about the time of the crash. Whether texting or receiving a text or on a phone call, we can see that.

Sometimes now, people have cameras in their cars. The rise of GoPros and these other types of cameras in the vehicles allow us to sometimes actually see what was going on. Also, we're able to sometimes find witnesses. More than 50% of the time, distracted driving is related to a smartphone, texting and driving, or some other use of a phone that causes distraction. We currently have two cases in which the other driver said they were playing with their coffee when the crash occurred and one lady got covered in coffee. People trying to eat while drive or check directions while drive all of these things lead to distracted driving accidents.

At any given time, our firm has a dozen or so cases that are definitely attributable to a distracted driver. Distracted driving is one of the scourges on our roads in San Antonio, something we take very seriously and something we continue to investigate on every single car crash case or other crash that comes into our office.

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