Category: Liability & Fault

When a truck collides with a car, the aftermath can be devastating, physically, emotionally, and financially. Medical bills start piling up, work becomes impossible, and life suddenly feels like it’s standing still. If you’ve been injured in a truck crash in Chicago, one of the first questions you probably have is: “Who can I actually sue?” It’s a fair question, and an important one. Truck accidents are rarely simple, they often involve multiple responsible parties. Figuring out who’s truly at fault takes experience, investigation, and a deep understanding of both Illinois law and federal trucking regulations.

Most car accidents involve one driver, one insurer, and a fairly direct question of fault. A commercial truck crash almost never works that way. Below are the parties that most often carry legal responsibility, and what actually has to be true before each one can be sued.

1. The Truck Driver

In many cases, the most obvious responsible party is the truck driver. If the driver’s actions caused the crash, they can be held directly liable: speeding, distracted driving, fatigue, or driving under the influence of alcohol, drugs, or even a prescription medication that impairs reaction time.

Truck drivers have a duty of care to operate their vehicles safely. When they violate that duty, they can and should be held accountable. But in most cases, they’re not the only ones to blame, and often not the party with the deepest pocket or the clearest paper trail of negligence.

2. The Trucking Company (Employer)

Even if a driver made a mistake, the trucking company they work for is often equally or even more responsible. Under the legal principle of respondeat superior, an employer can be held liable for its employee’s actions if the crash happened while the driver was performing work duties. That scope-of-employment question matters: a driver hauling a load on his assigned route is squarely inside it, while a driver who took a personal detour hours off his route raises a harder argument the carrier’s insurer will absolutely make.

Trucking companies can also be directly, independently negligent, separate from anything the driver did wrong. Hiring an unqualified or unlicensed driver. Failing to train drivers properly. Pressuring drivers to meet unrealistic delivery deadlines, or encouraging them to skip rest breaks and falsify logbooks. Neglecting truck maintenance and safety inspections. Ignoring known safety violations the carrier’s own FMCSA compliance history already flagged.

Many companies cut corners to save time or money. When they do, innocent people pay the price.

3. The Truck’s Owner or Leasing Company

Not every trucking company owns the trucks it uses. A truck or trailer is often leased from another company or an individual owner-operator. Here the law gets counterintuitive: the federal Graves Amendment, 49 U.S.C. § 30106, generally shields a vehicle’s owner or lessor from liability based purely on ownership. Simply owning the truck someone else crashed does not make the owner liable on its own.

What the Graves Amendment does not shield is the owner’s own negligence. If the owner knew about worn-out tires or brakes, faulty lighting, or a defective coupling device between the truck and trailer and put the vehicle on the road anyway, that is a separate, independent claim against the owner for failing to maintain a vehicle it knew was unsafe, not a claim based on ownership alone.

4. The Cargo Loading or Shipping Company

Improperly loaded or secured cargo is a common cause of truck accidents. When cargo shifts suddenly, it can cause a truck to jackknife, roll over, or lose control entirely.

The company responsible for loading the trailer has to follow strict federal cargo securement standards under 49 CFR Part 393, covering weight distribution, securing straps and locks, balancing loads between axles, and staying under legal weight limits. If they fail to do so and a crash occurs, they can be held liable for their negligence, and that liability is separate from whatever the driver or carrier did or didn’t do.

5. The Truck or Parts Manufacturer

Some crashes happen not because of driver error, but because of a mechanical failure. When a truck’s brakes, tires, steering system, or another component fails due to a defective part, the manufacturer of that part may be legally responsible under product liability law.

Product liability applies when a product is unsafe because of a design flaw, a manufacturing defect, or a failure to warn. A tire blowout traced back to a manufacturing defect, a brake system that fails under normal conditions, a coupling mechanism that separates unexpectedly, these are cases where the negligence never touched the driver’s hands at all. These claims also run on a longer investigative timeline than most on this list, since they typically require an engineering expert to examine the failed part itself before it gets scrapped or repaired, which is why preserving the physical wreckage matters as much as preserving digital records.

6. The Maintenance or Repair Contractor

Truck maintenance is critical, and it’s often outsourced to a third-party shop rather than handled in-house. If a mechanic or maintenance company fails to repair a known issue, installs the wrong parts, or skips a required safety check, they can be held liable when that failure contributes to a crash.

A neglected brake inspection. Tires that don’t match the vehicle’s load rating. An oil or fluid leak nobody flagged. A steering issue a competent inspection would have caught. Each of these can become the actual root cause once an attorney pulls the shop’s own service records.

7. The Freight Broker or Logistics Company

A freight broker connects shipping companies with trucking carriers without owning trucks or employing drivers itself, which is exactly why brokers used to be treated as largely off-limits. Federal trucking preemption law made courts reluctant to hold a broker responsible for a carrier’s negligence.

That changed with Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, where the Supreme Court held in May of 2026 that a broker’s negligent hiring claim can proceed in court and is not preempted by federal law. A broker that hands a load to a carrier with a poor safety rating, without checking, can now be pursued directly for that failure. A lawyer unfamiliar with this ruling may assume a broker is untouchable when it no longer is, and that assumption can quietly cost a victim an entire source of recovery.

8. Government Entities or Road Maintenance Agencies

Sometimes the cause of a truck crash isn’t a person or a company. It’s the road itself. Poor road design, missing guardrails, inadequate drainage, obstructed signage, or a pothole IDOT or the city knew about and never fixed, any of these can shift responsibility onto a government entity or its contractor.

These claims move on a much shorter clock than the others on this list. The Local Governmental and Governmental Employees Tort Immunity Act, 745 ILCS 10/8-101, cuts the filing deadline to one year instead of the standard two. There is no separate pre-suit notice to serve; the old notice section was repealed in 1986. The one-year deadline is to actually file suit. Miss it, and an otherwise valid claim against a government entity disappears regardless of how clear the road defect was. A city-owned snowplow, a Chicago Transit Authority vehicle, or an IDOT maintenance truck all fall under this shorter deadline the same way a public roadway defect would, so if the truck itself, not just the road, was government-owned, that one-year clock applies to the whole claim, not just the pavement.

A Worked Example: How Fault Splits Across Three Defendants

Say a semi rear-ends a car on I-90 during evening rush hour. The investigation turns up three separate problems. The driver was texting in the moments before impact. The carrier’s own ELD records show he was five hours past his federal hours-of-service limit and dispatch knew it. The freight broker had placed the load with this carrier despite a documented history of hours-of-service violations, without checking that history first.

A jury could reasonably split fault three ways: 40 percent to the driver for the distraction, 45 percent to the carrier for scheduling a fatigued driver, and 15 percent to the broker for negligent selection. None of those three defendants individually crosses the 50 percent mark that would bar a claim against them under 735 ILCS 5/2-1116, but together they account for the entire crash.

Here is why naming all three matters beyond fairness. If the driver’s personal auto policy caps out at $50,000, and the case is worth $2,000,000 in medical costs and lost income, that policy alone does not come close to covering it. The carrier’s federally mandated $750,000 minimum, plus whatever the broker’s own liability coverage adds, is what actually makes the victim whole. Suing only the easiest defendant to identify, the driver, would leave the vast majority of the claim’s value uncollected.

Why Multiple Defendants Usually Means Multiple Insurance Policies

Each party above tends to carry its own, separate layer of coverage, and that separation is a large part of why identifying every liable party matters so much in a truck case. The carrier’s primary commercial policy is only the starting point.

Above that primary layer often sits an excess or umbrella policy that only activates once the primary limit is exhausted. If the driver leases his own truck as an owner-operator, his personal or independent commercial policy can form a separate layer entirely, one an inexperienced attorney may not even know to request. The broker, if one was involved, typically carries its own contingent liability coverage, distinct from the carrier’s policy and negotiated under a completely separate contract. The shipper or cargo loader, if named, brings yet another policy into the mix.

A general personal injury lawyer accustomed to a single insurer on a routine car accident is not equipped to sort out which of these policies applies to which defendant, in what order, or to catch a carrier’s adjuster trying to push a claim onto whichever layer pays out the least. Untangling that stack, not just proving fault, is often what separates a settlement that covers a lifetime of care from one that runs out halfway through it.

How an Experienced Truck Accident Lawyer Finds Every Liable Party

Truck accidents are complex because liability is rarely clear-cut, and most of the parties above never show up in a police report. Finding them takes deliberate investigative work, not a single records request.

An attorney pulls the driver’s Electronic Logging Device data and the truck’s Event Data Recorder before either gets overwritten on the carrier’s routine retention schedule, sometimes as short as six months. The carrier’s Driver Qualification File shows whether the company hired and trained the driver properly in the first place. FMCSA’s public compliance database shows whether this carrier had a pattern of violations serious enough that a broker or shipper should have known better than to use them. Dispatch communications, text messages, and call logs between the driver and the company often reveal exactly what pressure was applied to keep a truck moving past a safe stopping point. And the paper trail connecting the load, from shipper to broker to carrier to owner-operator, shows exactly who agreed to what, and who cut which corner.

By uncovering every negligent act and every responsible party, a lawyer can pursue compensation from all liable entities, not just the one whose name is on the police report.

Filing Deadlines Vary by Defendant, Not Just by Case

Most of the defendants on this list, the driver, the carrier, the manufacturer, the broker, fall under Illinois’s standard personal injury statute of limitations, 735 ILCS 5/13-202: two years from the date of the crash to file suit. That deadline does not move just because there are multiple defendants, and it does not pause while an attorney is still investigating which parties belong in the case.

Two situations change that timeline. A government entity, as covered above, shortens it to one year. And if the injured person is a minor, Illinois tolls the standard two-year clock until they turn 18, which extends the filing window for the injury claim itself, though it does nothing to preserve time-sensitive evidence like ELD data, which still needs a preservation letter sent within days of the crash regardless of the victim’s age.

Quick Answers

Can I sue more than one party from this list at the same time?
Yes, and in a serious truck crash that’s usually exactly what happens. Illinois allows a single lawsuit to name multiple defendants, and the jury then allocates fault among them under the state’s comparative negligence rule at 735 ILCS 5/2-1116.

What if the truck owner says they just leased the truck to someone else?
That fact alone, under the Graves Amendment, may genuinely limit an ownership-based claim. It does not eliminate a claim based on the owner’s own negligence, such as leasing out a truck the owner knew had a maintenance problem.

Does it matter which party has insurance if several are at fault?
It matters a great deal in practice. Naming every liable party, not just the easiest one to identify, is often what determines whether a judgment can actually be collected, since some parties in a trucking chain carry far more coverage than others.

What if the trucking company has since gone out of business?
That doesn’t necessarily end the case. The carrier’s insurance policy typically survives even if the company itself dissolves, and under the MCS-90 endorsement required by 49 CFR Part 387, coverage can still respond to a valid judgment in many circumstances.

Do I have to figure out who’s liable before I file a claim?
No. Identifying every liable party is investigative work an attorney does after taking the case, not something a victim is expected to sort out from the scene of a crash. What matters early on is preserving evidence and getting medical care, not naming defendants correctly on day one.

Finding Accountability in the Chaos

After a truck crash, it’s easy to feel lost. But you’re not powerless, and you don’t have to face this alone. Holding the right people accountable is about more than just money, it’s about justice, safety, and closure.

At our firm, we’ve helped countless Chicago families rebuild after devastating truck crashes. We know where to look, what questions to ask, and how to hold negligent drivers and corporations accountable. Because when lives are changed forever by a truck accident, accountability is the first step toward healing. Every additional party we identify is one more chance at making a family whole again, and that is worth the extra weeks of investigation it sometimes takes.

Attorney Advertising. This page provides general information about Illinois law and is not legal advice. Reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Deadlines and outcomes depend on the specific facts of your case, speak to a licensed Illinois attorney about your situation.

Most people assume liability after a truck accident is simple, the driver was driving, so the driver is at fault. It’s rarely that clean. Behind most semi-trucks sits a network of companies, contractors, and insurers, and more than one of them can share the blame.

Getting this right changes the outcome. Here’s how liability actually gets sorted out under Illinois law.

Start With the Driver, But Don’t Stop There

The first question is always about the person behind the wheel. Distracted? Fatigued? Speeding? Under the influence?

A driver can be held liable for violating traffic laws, ignoring FMCSA Hours of Service rest requirements, driving impaired, or using a phone while driving, prohibited under 625 ILCS 5/12-610.2. But in most cases the driver works for someone else. That’s where liability expands, not ends. See What To Do After a Truck Accident in Chicago for how early evidence connects to this question.

The Trucking Company Is Often the Real Target

Hiring. Training. Maintenance schedules. Dispatch pressure. All of it sits with the carrier, and all of it affects road safety.

A trucking company can be held liable for hiring or retaining unqualified drivers, failing to maintain its fleet, pushing schedules that cause fatigue, ignoring DOT/FMCSA safety standards, or neglecting cargo weight and securement rules. This is vicarious liability, an employer answering for its employee’s actions.

Companies frequently try to dodge this by labeling a driver an independent contractor instead of an employee. That label doesn’t always hold up once dispatch records, pay structures, and internal contracts get pulled. Once the employment relationship is established, the company’s commercial insurance, usually far larger than any individual driver’s policy, comes into play. More on how that gets pursued in The Truck Accident Claim Process.

Mechanical Failure: Manufacturer and Maintenance Liability

Not every crash starts with human error. Brake failure, tire blowouts, and defective steering systems cause real wrecks on I-90 and Lake Shore Drive every year.

When mechanical failure is the cause, liability can shift to the manufacturer for a defective part or design, the maintenance provider for negligent inspection or repair, or the parts supplier if a faulty component made it into the vehicle. Worn brake pads that should have been replaced at the last service interval, for instance, are exactly the kind of maintenance failure that shows up in service logs once they’re pulled and reviewed. That’s why requesting maintenance and inspection records is one of the first steps in any case involving equipment failure.

Cargo Loaders and Shipping Companies

Improperly loaded freight causes trailer imbalance, rollovers, cargo spills, and loss of control on turns, more often than most people assume.

If a separate shipping or logistics company handled the loading, liability can extend to them under federal cargo securement regulations (49 CFR sections 393.100-136). A single shipment often passes through the carrier, a freight broker, and a warehouse loader, and any of them can carry partial responsibility. Sorting that out usually takes accident reconstruction and forensic review to pinpoint where the failure started. See The Truck Accident Claim Process for how that evidence fits into a claim timeline.

When the Road Itself Is a Factor

Sometimes it isn’t the truck. Poor road design, missing signage, unrepaired potholes, or malfunctioning traffic signals can put a city or state agency partially on the hook.

Claims against government entities move on a much tighter clock than standard injury claims, and which clock applies depends on the entity. A city, county or CTA vehicle falls under 745 ILCS 10/8-101(a): one year to file suit, with no separate pre-suit notice required. A State vehicle, such as an IDOT truck, goes to the Illinois Court of Claims instead, where notice is generally due within one year under 705 ILCS 505/22-1 unless suit is filed inside that year. Waiting to investigate whether a government agency’s negligence played a role is one of the more costly delays a truck accident victim can make.

Shared Fault and Comparative Negligence

Illinois follows modified comparative fault (735 ILCS 5/2-1116). Under 50% at fault, you still recover, reduced by your percentage. At 50% or more, you recover nothing.

Say total damages come to $200,000 and a victim is found 20% at fault. The recovery becomes $160,000, not zero. This is exactly why insurers push hard to inflate a victim’s share of blame, every percentage point they add directly reduces what they owe. Dashcam footage, witness statements, and reconstruction reports are what push back against that.

A Realistic Example

A box truck merges without checking its blind spot and sideswipes a sedan on the Kennedy Expressway. The truck is owned by a regional delivery company, but the driver behind the wheel had been leased to that company by a separate staffing agency for the day.

Untangling who employed the driver, the delivery company that controlled the route and schedule, or the staffing agency that issued the paycheck, becomes its own investigation. Illinois courts look past the paperwork to who actually directed the work: who set the route, who could fire the driver on the spot, who owned the truck. In this case, dispatch records showed the delivery company controlled every aspect of the shift, which made it the liable employer despite the staffing agency’s name on the pay stub.

That kind of layered employment relationship is common in trucking, temp drivers, leased trucks, subcontracted routes, and it’s exactly why the first liability question in any case is never as simple as looking at who signed the paycheck.

Freight Brokers Can Now Be Held Liable Too

A 2026 Illinois Supreme Court ruling in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II LLC opened a new avenue that didn’t exist a few years ago: freight brokers, the companies that connect shippers with carriers but don’t own trucks themselves, can be held liable for negligently selecting an unsafe carrier.

Before that ruling, brokers argued federal law preempted any state negligent-hiring claim against them. Illinois courts rejected that argument, at least for claims based on how the broker vetted the carrier’s safety record before booking the load. If a broker matched a shipper with a carrier that had a documented history of FMCSA violations, that broker’s own liability insurance can become part of the recovery.

Owner-Operators Complicate the Employee Question

Roughly a third of commercial trucks on Illinois highways are driven by owner-operators, drivers who own their own rig but lease it to a carrier under that carrier’s operating authority. Federal leasing regulations (49 CFR 376.12 and 390.5) generally make the carrier responsible for the leased truck’s operation regardless of who technically owns it, specifically to prevent carriers from using ownership structure to dodge liability.

That doesn’t mean the owner-operator is automatically off the hook. If the owner-operator skipped required maintenance on equipment they personally owned, that negligence can still attach directly to them, separate from whatever liability flows to the carrier through the lease. Both angles usually get investigated in parallel rather than one replacing the other.

When Punitive Damages Enter the Picture

Most truck accident cases settle on compensatory damages alone, medical bills, lost wages, pain and suffering. Illinois allows punitive damages in a narrower set of cases involving willful and wanton conduct, not ordinary negligence.

Falsified driver logs to hide hours-of-service violations. A carrier that kept a driver on the road after multiple documented safety complaints. Deliberately ignoring a known mechanical defect to avoid downtime. These fact patterns move a case from simple carelessness into something closer to conscious disregard for safety, and Illinois courts treat that difference as meaningful when punitive damages are on the table.

How an Attorney Investigates a Multi-Party Case

Building a liability case against several parties starts with requests that have to go out fast: preservation letters to the carrier, the broker if one was involved, and any maintenance contractor named in service records. ELD data and dashcam footage can be gone within weeks if nobody asks for it in writing.

From there, the investigation typically runs in parallel tracks. One track pulls the driver’s qualification file, employment history, and any prior safety violations on record with FMCSA. Another pulls maintenance and inspection logs going back months, sometimes years, looking for a pattern rather than a single missed service. A third looks at the load itself, who packed it, who inspected the securement, whether the bill of lading matches what was actually on the trailer.

None of these tracks move especially fast on their own. Records requests get delayed, companies claim documents were routine and discarded, insurers slow-walk cooperation until a formal demand or lawsuit forces the issue. That’s normal, and it’s also why starting the investigation in the first weeks after a crash, rather than months later once memories and paper trails have faded, tends to produce a much stronger case than waiting to see how the injuries play out before deciding who to pursue.

Following the Insurance Money

Multiple policies typically apply to a single truck accident claim. Illinois requires commercial vehicles to carry higher liability limits than passenger cars, often ranging from $750,000 up toward $5 million depending on cargo type, particularly hazardous materials.

A thorough investigation maps every layer: the driver’s personal policy, the carrier’s commercial policy, any umbrella or excess coverage, cargo insurance if freight was damaged, and sometimes broker or shipper coverage on top of that. Missing a layer means leaving compensation on the table. See How Is Compensation Determined After a Semi-Truck Wreck for how these layers factor into settlement value.

The Evidence That Actually Proves Liability

Electronic logging device and black box data. Driver qualification files. Maintenance logs. Cargo manifests. GPS and cell phone records. Witness statements. Dashcam footage.

None of it proves anything on its own. Together, it reconstructs a timeline that shows what actually happened, not just who was holding the wheel when it did.

Prior Safety Violations as Evidence of a Pattern

A single speeding ticket doesn’t prove much on its own. A pattern does. FMCSA maintains a public Safety Measurement System score for every registered carrier, tracking hours-of-service violations, vehicle maintenance citations, and crash history over a rolling 24-month window.

Pulling a carrier’s safety history before litigation starts often reveals whether a crash was a one-off mistake or the predictable result of a company running drivers past legal limits or skipping inspections for months at a time. That history becomes especially important in a negligent hiring or negligent retention claim, where the question isn’t just what the driver did on the day of the crash but what the company knew, or should have known, before putting that driver back on the road.

Courts weigh this kind of pattern evidence heavily, both for establishing liability and for the punitive damages question when conduct crosses from careless into reckless.

Filing Against Multiple Defendants in Cook County

Once liability investigation identifies more than one responsible party, the lawsuit itself typically names all of them jointly, the driver, the carrier, and any broker, maintenance contractor, or cargo loader whose negligence contributed to the crash. Illinois allows joint and several liability in many personal injury contexts, meaning each defendant can be held responsible for the full judgment, not just their proportional share, though the specifics depend on how fault gets allocated at trial.

Cook County’s Law Division handles the bulk of these multi-defendant truck cases, and out-of-state carriers frequently try to remove the case to federal court under diversity jurisdiction once multiple parties from different states are involved. That doesn’t change the underlying Illinois law that applies, but it does change the procedural rules, discovery deadlines, and sometimes the jury pool.

None of this happens automatically. A plaintiff’s attorney has to make the strategic call on who to name, when to file, and whether removal to federal court helps or hurts the case, decisions that get made well before a jury ever hears the facts.

How Multiple Liable Parties Change Settlement Value

A case against one driver caps out at that driver’s insurance limits. A case that correctly identifies the carrier, a maintenance contractor, and a cargo loader as jointly liable opens up multiple policies at once, which is often the difference between a settlement that covers a fraction of the damages and one that covers all of them. This is the main reason liability investigation happens before, not after, settlement talks begin.

Holding Every Liable Party Accountable

Once liability across multiple parties is clear, the next step is filing against all of them, not just the most obvious one. That can mean a multi-defendant lawsuit, coordinated negotiations with several insurers at once, and trial preparation if any of them deny fault. The goal isn’t just proving liability; it’s making sure every negligent party actually contributes to the recovery.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can more than one party be liable for the same truck accident?

Yes, and it’s common. Driver, carrier, maintenance provider, and cargo loader can all carry a share of fault in the same crash.

What if the trucking company says the driver was an independent contractor?

That label gets tested, not accepted automatically. Pay structure, dispatch control, and equipment ownership often tell a different story than the paperwork does.

How is fault determined when the evidence is disputed?

Through a combination of physical evidence, electronic data (ELD, black box, dashcam), witness accounts, and often accident reconstruction analysis when the dispute is significant.

Does it matter if I was partly at fault?

Under Illinois’s modified comparative fault rule, you can still recover as long as you’re not more than 50% at fault, with your award reduced proportionally.

How long do I have to identify a government entity’s role in the crash?

Much less time than a standard claim. One year to file against a local public entity under 745 ILCS 10/8-101(a); a State claim goes to the Court of Claims with its own one-year notice rule. Investigate this possibility early.

Why does insurance coverage layering matter so much in truck cases?

Because commercial trucking claims routinely exceed what a single policy can cover. Identifying every applicable policy is often what makes full compensation possible instead of a capped, partial recovery.

Can a carrier’s FMCSA safety score really be used against them in court?

Yes, though it usually comes in through the underlying violation records rather than the summary score itself. A documented pattern of hours-of-service or maintenance violations in the two years before a crash can support a negligent hiring or retention claim against the carrier, especially when the same violation type recurs across multiple inspections rather than showing up once. Isolated incidents carry less weight; recurring ones start to look like a policy of looking the other way.

Can I sue the company that arranged the shipment even if they don’t own any trucks?

Sometimes. Following the 2026 Illinois Supreme Court ruling, freight brokers can face liability for negligently selecting a carrier with a poor safety record, separate from the carrier’s own liability for the crash itself.

What if the truck was leased to the carrier by its actual owner?

Federal leasing rules generally place responsibility on the carrier operating under its own authority, regardless of who owns the truck, though the owner-operator can still carry separate liability for maintenance failures on equipment they controlled.

What happens if two companies both point fingers at each other?

That’s common, and it’s exactly the kind of dispute a lawsuit resolves through discovery rather than negotiation. Naming both as defendants preserves the claim against whichever one the evidence ultimately points to, rather than gambling on picking the right party upfront.

Liability in a truck accident case isn’t guesswork, it’s built from logbooks, contracts, and maintenance records, cross-checked against what actually happened on the road. The parties responsible rarely announce themselves; someone has to go find them. Call (312) 346-4262 for a free case review.

Attorney Advertising. This page provides general information about Illinois law and is not legal advice. Reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Deadlines and outcomes depend on the specific facts of your case — speak to a licensed Illinois attorney about your situation. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome; every case is decided on its own facts.