On this week’s episode of Taking the Hire Road, DriverReach founder and CEO Jeremy Reymer welcomed Steve Bryan, CEO of Bluewire LLC. The two discussed the ever-rising threat nuclear verdicts pose to the industry and how to defend against them.
Bluewire builds AI-powered software for trucking companies to alert them of exposure points that could be used against them. Through data analysis, motor carriers can take action to mitigate vulnerabilities to protect their reputation.
Bluewire aims to protect motor carriers not from penalties of negligence, but from egregious “nuclear verdicts” that have significantly raised legal penalties against the trucking industry in recent years.
Despite the products and solutions on the market today geared toward safer driver recruiting, onboarding, training, compliance and risk management — which Bryan said most carriers adopt beyond compliance — he said that plaintiff attorneys go to extra lengths to paint motor carriers in a bad light.
“There’s no nuclear verdict ever, not one, that arose from the facts of a specific crash; a specific crash in particular only opens the door to go in and find vulnerabilities and paint you as a bad operator or motor carrier,” Bryan said. “What we tell you is these are the vulnerabilities that can affect your reputation and this is what the plaintiffs go after.”
Bryan detailed Bluewire’s ongoing advancements in text mining, which involves the analysis of large volumes of textual and written material from websites, policy manuals, etc.
“One of the places that really exposes carriers is in the chatter that takes place between the dispatcher and the driver. ‘I don’t care how many hours you’ve got left. You get that load delivered.’ Imagine that on a PowerPoint at a trial — you’d be toast,” Bryan said.
Bluewire is also conducting text mining at the driver recruiting level, Bryan said, explaining that there’s a lot of opportunity to clean up language in job postings to introduce safety as an enticing perk for joining a motor carrier, as opposed to monetary benefits in particular.
“Are you running PSP reports on all your drivers’ background checks? What do you do with criminal [reports]? All these things are attack vectors that if you don’t have really good answers to them, that’s where the plaintiff will get you at trials or in depositions; they’ll murder you because you don’t have good answers to these things.”
Click for more FreightWaves content by Jack Glenn.
More from Taking the Hire Road:
TuSimple’s take on drivers in autonomous trucking world