The attorney

About Attorney Sgt. Andrew Pike Piekalkiewicz

Most people who read this page have just had the worst week of their life and are trying to decide who to trust with it. That is a fair thing to want proof about. So here is who we are, what our attorney did in uniform, and how that shows up in the way a commercial truck case gets built.

Special Forces, and thirty years in Texas courtrooms

Andrew Piekalkiewicz served in U.S. Army Special Forces, the Green Berets, and deployed to Afghanistan in combat. He goes by Sgt. Pike, and it is the name this practice carries.

He earned his Juris Doctor from the University of Texas School of Law in 1993 and was admitted to the State Bar of Texas that same year, a membership he has held ever since. He has spent more than thirty years trying Texas injury cases.

Soldier and trial lawyer is an unusual pairing on one resume. It is also the reason a wreck involving a loaded commercial rig gets handled here like a problem to be reconstructed rather than a file to be processed.

What the discipline actually changes about a truck case

The military background is not decoration on a website. Three habits run through both halves of that resume, and every one of them shows up in the opening weeks of a trucking file.

Evidence is treated as perishable

A commercial truck generates records that a passenger car never produces: engine and braking data, electronic logs of the driver's hours, dispatch messages, driver qualification files, inspection and repair history. Federal trucking regulations require carriers to hold on to some of that material, but only for limited stretches of time, and certain onboard data overwrites itself within days. So the first move is a written demand that everything be preserved. A record that is already gone cannot be argued back into existence, no matter how strong the argument would have been.

Every driver reports to somebody

In the Army you learn to read a chain of command, and a motor carrier has one. Somebody hired that driver and either checked his history or did not. Somebody built the schedule he was running against. Somebody signed the last brake inspection. Somebody decided how the load was secured and who would haul it. Following those lines is often how a case stops being one tired man's mistake at three in the morning and starts being a company's decision made months earlier in an office.

Pressure is a condition, not an emergency

Trucking companies do not wait for a grieving family to be ready. Their adjusters and investigators can be working the crash before the highway reopens, and their first phone call to you will sound friendly and reasonable. Staying steady while the other side moves quickly is not a personality trait worth bragging about. It is simply the job, and it is the part of the job that soldiering and trial work have in common.

Credentials

• University of Texas School of Law, Juris Doctor, 1993
• State Bar of Texas member since 1993
• Green Beret, U.S. Army Special Forces
• Deployed to Afghanistan, Operation Enduring Freedom
• More than 30 years trying Texas injury cases

What our firm has recovered for Texas clients

Over those decades, our firm has recovered more than $750 million for injured people and grieving families across 10,000+ cases. We want to be exact about what that total is and what it is not. It is a statewide figure earned over a long career. It is not an Abilene number, it is not a prediction, and no lawyer who respects you will price your claim off a web page. If you would rather see individual trucking matters with the county each one came from, they are laid out on our settlements and verdicts page.

Where the firm sits, and how Big Country cases get worked

We should say this plainly, since plenty of firms would rather not. There is no Abilene office. Our firm operates from Houston and handles cases throughout Texas, and Big Country matters are worked the way we work every case that begins outside Harris County: we travel to the client. That can mean a hospital bedside in Abilene, a shop office in Sweetwater, a relative's front porch in Snyder, or a long phone call at whatever hour you are able to talk. When a stretch of road needs to be walked, we walk it. When records sit with an agency, we go get them.

The case review costs nothing and stays confidential. If we take the case, we take it on contingency, which means no fee unless the firm wins, and the conversation is free either way.