Trial Lawyer View Podcast
David W. Craig
David W. Craig | Managing Partner | Craig Kelley & Faultless LLC
Although many lawyers claim to be trial lawyers, it has often been years since they have seen the inside of a courtroom. David is a gifted and accomplished trial lawyer who regularly goes to court to fight for his clients. David is proud of his trial results and would be happy to discuss these results with you and compare his past cases to facts of your case. Read David’s press release, where he was featured in the Newest Edition of The Best Lawyer in America.
David Craig’s Specialty
Throughout his career, David has focused on handling cases against commercial vehicles including: semi tractor trailers, flat bed trucks, garbage trucks, wreckers, dump trucks, concrete trucks, and buses. He has written and lectured in Indiana as well as nationally on how to handle cases against dangerous trucking companies. These cases require specialized knowledge, skill, and the resources to hire the best experts from all over the nation. Call or contact David Craig today to find out how he can help you with your trucking accident lawsuit.
Recognized as an Indiana Super Lawyer
Throughout his career and as a principal among his team of accident attorneys in Indianapolis, David Craig has handled cases against trucking and other commercial vehicle companies in Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Missouri, and Kansas. He has favorably resolved thousands of injury and Indiana wrongful death cases. And, though most cases he handles settle without the need to go to trial, David is an experienced trial lawyer who welcomes the opportunity to face insurance or trucking companies in court when they refuse to be reasonable.
For the past several years David has been named among the Top 100 Trial Lawyers in Indiana by the National Trial Lawyers Association.
David W. Craig has been selected as an Indiana Super Lawyer each year since 2011. A highly regarded trial attorney, David Craig is recognized as a 2021 Indiana Super Lawyer in the practice area of general personal injury, representing plaintiffs.
Dedicated to the Indiana Community
Like his partners, David is very grateful for his firm’s success and strongly believes that he has an obligation to give back to the communities in which it practices. He has personally championed the cause of bike safety for children, giving away over ten thousand free bike helmets throughout central and southern Indiana. And he is a tireless advocate against distracted driving, offering demonstrations, using a state-of-the-art simulation machine the firm owns, to teach teens and others on the dangers of texting and driving, drinking and driving, and distracted driving.
While being active within the Indiana community, David is an Academy of Truck Accident Attorneys, Board member, on the Trial Lawyers Board of Regents, and received the Litigator Awards for Truck Accidents, for 2014 and 2015.
David Craig was selected for inclusion in The Best Lawyers in America® 2026 edition, an honor given to attorneys who are highly regarded by their peers for professional excellence and dedication to the practice of law.
These awards are based purely on the size of the results he obtained for his clients relating to trucking cases.
David enjoys working with kids. He coached and served on the Board of Directors of Lawrence Township Boys Basketball League for over ten years.
David Craig on the two mistakes that quietly cost truck cases their value
David Craig is the managing partner at Craig Kelley & Faultless and one of fewer than a hundred lawyers in the country board certified in truck accident law. His view is that trucking cases rarely get undervalued at mediation. They get undervalued in the first week.
Commercial vehicle litigation is its own ecosystem, with different rules, different evidence and a defence side built to fight. Two mistakes come up more than any others, and both happen early.
Treating a truck case like a large car crash
The fastest way to cap an outcome is to assume the story starts and ends with the driver and the carrier’s policy. A lawyer runs an early limits check, sees a $750,000 or million dollar policy, and every strategic decision after that quietly aims at closing inside that ceiling.
In serious trucking cases the responsibility is usually spread across a chain of decisions. The crash is the negligent act, and the cause often sits upstream of it. A better question than how much coverage the carrier holds is who had a hand in creating the risk that made the crash likely.
That means looking at the carrier’s safety culture, at hiring, training and supervision, at dispatch pressure and routing, at maintenance practices and the vendors involved, at brokers, shippers and contractors, and at construction zone planning where it applies. David gets hired every year on cases where someone was killed or badly hurt in a work zone, and the responsible party turns out to be the contractor who built the zone rather than the trucking company.
Failing to preserve the evidence straight away
The second mistake cannot be undone. Logs get deleted, data gets overwritten, vehicles get repaired and scenes change. A lawyer who waits is not simply late, they are permanently missing the material that would have decided fault.
David has watched lawyers skip a $15,000 or $20,000 investigation because the case looked clear, and lose the client’s chance to win as a result. His own firm runs a rapid response team that goes out as soon as he is hired. Sometimes the investigation shows there is no case and he absorbs the cost, which he treats as an acceptable trade, because losing money and losing evidence are not the same kind of loss.
These are operational failures more than legal ones
Neither mistake is about intelligence or effort. Both are about whether the firm has systems that make early decisions automatic. If tasks sit on desks and nobody owns the first 72 hours, the window closes and the defence gains the leverage.
David rebuilt his own firm around that problem after a year in which he had the best team and the best cases he had ever had, and made less money than ever. Everyone was busy, and they were not always working on the right file at the right time.
What he built instead
The firm now runs separate pre-litigation, litigation and trial divisions, each with its own attorney and its own key performance indicators. A senior paralegal moved off files to manage the other paralegals and monitor whether cases are actually moving, a change his lawyers initially resisted because it took a strong producer out of an income-generating seat.
The trial division exists for a specific reason. In many firms a case that fails to settle at mediation drifts to the back burner, because it will not turn into money for a long time. At Craig Kelley & Faultless it goes straight to a different group whose only job is to get it ready and try it, so the case heats up rather than cools down. That punishes the defence for not settling.
Financial strength changes how you negotiate
David hired a fractional CFO before he could really afford one, because he needed audited financial statements and a proper banking relationship. The bank will now fund any size of case he takes, so he never has to weigh a client’s interests against payroll.
He has tried cases with a quarter of a million dollars invested in them. His point is that a firm which can afford to fight has options, and a lawyer who cannot sleep because payroll is uncertain will struggle to keep the focus where it belongs.
That is also why he sees the jury as the great equalizer. Not because every case should be tried, but because every case should be built as though it could be.
We get into all of this on the episode. Watch it on YouTube, or listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
