Amazon Delivery Driver Accident Lawyer

If you have been involved in an accident caused by an Amazon delivery van or truck, you may wonder if you can sue Amazon for your injuries. In most cases, you won’t be able to sue Amazon directly. But our Amazon accident lawyers are not focused on who pays you.  Just that you get a good settlement.  You will get compensation from the delivery contractor who Amazon requires to carry a great deal of insurance. So that is our accident attorneys' singular focus. 

Why can't you sue Amazon for an accident?  Most of the white Amazon delivery vans you see out on the road today are not owned by Amazon and the driver is not an Amazon employee. Rather, the delivery driver is usually an independent contractor that works for Amazon Delivery Partner Services (a division within Amazon Logistics). This means that the defendant in an accident claim would not be Amazon, but rather the delivery contractor such as ABC Delivery, LLC. Most delivery contractors for Amazon are small, local businesses. In many cases notwithstanding the Amazon logo on the van, the contractor may just be one person and a single van.

Because the drivers are independent contractors, Amazon can avoid any direct liability for accidents caused by the driver. The responsible party in the accident is going to be the contractor, not Amazon. Just because Amazon is not directly liable for accidents, it does NOT mean that the accident victims cannot get financial compensation. Amazon requires all its delivery contractors to carry a certain minimum amount of liability insurance to cover any damage or injuries they may cause in an accident.

All independent contractors who deliver for Amazon are required to have something called Amazon Flex Insurance coverage. Amazon Flex Insurance provides delivery contractors with auto liability coverage of $1 million. This covers damages and injuries caused to 3rd parties with limits of up to $1,000,000 per accident. This is very similar to the amount of liability coverage that most trucking companies carry. So if you get hit and injured by an Amazon driver, there should be at least $1 million in insurance coverage for you to collect.

One catch, however, is that Amazon Flex Insurance and its $1 million in liability coverage only applies if the accident occurs when the contractor is “on the clock.” If the accident occurs after the driver has completed his or her deliveries for that day and is on their way home or back to their office, the accident is not covered by Flex Insurance.

The $1 million in liability coverage under the Amazon Flex Insurance for contract drivers is more than enough to cover damages for 95% of auto accident cases. Even auto accident cases resulting in major injuries, such as fractured legs, rarely have a settlement value greater than $600,000. But in a small percentage of major auto accident cases, damages can easily exceed $1 million.

So what happens in these cases when the $1 million in coverage is exhausted? Can Amazon be held legally liable for damages in these situations? So far the answer seems to be no but no one has pushed this issue (that our lawyers know of, anyway).  Legally, companies like Amazon are fully liable for the negligent acts of their employees, but not under the law for the actions of independent contractors. There are several ways to get around this and hold Amazon liable, but none of them are very easy.

The first way to go after Amazon directly would be to argue that Amazon had so much control over the contractor that the court should treat them as an employee for liability purposes.  Our lawyers have settled a case leveraging this very issue but not against Amazon.  

Although it may seem like Amazon has absolute control over its contract drivers, the reality is different. Among other things, subcontractors can hire and fire their drivers freely and without any input from Amazon. This alone is probably enough to undercut any legal arguments based on control.

The other way to potentially go after Amazon directly is with a claim based on negligent hiring or negligent supervision. We see these types of claims a lot in truck accident cases. The plaintiff has to show that Amazon’s decision to hire the contractor in question was somehow inappropriate or negligent. Here is a quick, oversimplified example of how this type of claim against Amazon might work.

What Example Amazon Lawsuit Fact Pattern

Let’s say John Doe from Baltimore wants to work as a delivery driver for Amazon. He makes all the investments to buy the delivery van and goes through the sign-up process and gets hired by Amazon Delivery Partner Services as an independent contractor. But it turns out John is an alcoholic with 2 prior drunk driving convictions. After 6 months of working as an Amazon contractor, 2 customers have made complaints about John’s driving. John then gets drunk and hits a 4-year-old while making a delivery for Amazon. In this situation, the plaintiff could sue Amazon for negligent hiring and/or supervision. The theory would be that Amazon failed to properly screen John and should never have hired him in light of his prior DUIs.

So far there have not been any reported cases in which a plaintiff has successfully held Amazon directly liable under either of these theories. Based on information gathered by the New York Times, Amazon has been named as a direct defendant in a total of 45 auto accident cases involving one of its contract drivers. In most of those cases, Amazon was dismissed from the case. The rest resulted in confidential settlements that may or may not have involved a payment from Amazon.