Vigillo Founder Steve Bryan's New Tech Company Measures Carrier Reputations
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A new data service aims to help motor carriers improve and maintain their reputations as safe operators before they ever have to face a plaintiff attorney’s wrath in a courtroom.
Steve Bryan, the former CEO of Vigillo, and partners are behind the new data service Bluewire.
With multimillion-dollar “nuclear” jury verdicts in trucking accidents on the rise, Bryan said his company will combine advanced and complex technology systems to measure and manage reputation to help motor carriers before an accident ever happens.
“The reputation of the trucking industry is under assault,” Bryan said at a news conference May 11 to publicly launch Bluewire. “Aggressive and sophisticated plaintiff firms who solicit injured clients, at times funding the action with private equity, seek enormous, emotion-driven jury verdicts in truck-involved crashes, and serve largely to enrich themselves and their investors.”
Bluewire is based in Government Camp, Ore.
“We’ve seen and heard a lot over the last couple of years in terms of nuclear jury verdicts and plaintiff attorney reptile theory,” said Bluewire’s chief legal officer, Douglas Marcello of the Carlisle, Pa.-based law firm Marcello & Kivisto. “We started going back and looking at it and wondered what are the key elements driving the plaintiffs? The common denominator seems to be a trucking company’s reputation — not in the high school sense, but in terms of the reputation derived from their Compliance, Safety, Accountability scores, electronic logging device reports, or driver hiring practices.”
The reptile theory is a tactic used by plaintiff attorneys to turn attention away from the accident, and focus instead on a carrier’s safety practices and policies — even when the carrier is in compliance with federal regulations. That tactic, attorneys and litigation experts say, can often result in angering juries, encouraging them to return a much larger jury verdict to punish trucking companies.
The goal of Bluewire is to repair reputations through artificial intelligence text-reading technology as opposed to relying on human labor or manpower, Marcello said.
Bluewire also plans to refer trucking companies to experts in fields ranging from Department of Transportation safety experts to accident reconstruction experts to help repair a carrier’s damaged reputation.
Bryan established himself as an expert on safety data after founding Vigillo, the data company he sold to SambaSafety in 2017. “When I left Samba last fall, I started talking to people and bouncing ideas; it just started snowballing,” Bryan told Transport Topics. “There’s lots of people out there with good services and good products that nobody’s suggesting we can’t keep promoting all the good safety technologies, software and services. But when you put all of this good stuff together, what hit us between the eyes as we started digging in, is that the reputation of a motor carrier, that’s what the plaintiffs attack.”
“They get the juries all fired up on the emotion of their belief that this is a company that doesn’t care, and that’s where the big hammer comes down,” he added.
When it is up and running this summer, Bluewire said it will deliver an online subscription service analyzing the elements that compromise a company’s reputation. Bluewire’s so-called “White Hat Recommendation Engine” will monitor the safety systems, data silos and insurance claims that exist throughout the trucking and related insurance industries. Identifying the “attack vectors” and resulting reputational exposure used by plaintiffs, motor carriers will then be benchmarked against the industry using the “Bluewire Reputational Index,” and recommendations offered based on actionable data, the company said.
Bluewire founders Bryan, Peter Rowe, Robert Boyich and Marcello have decades of experience parsing and analyzing trucking industry data, recruiting and managing drivers, and providing legal defense in crash-related claims as active participants in the industry for more than 30 years, according to a company statement.
You might wonder why the name Bluewire?
“The Bluewire name comes from a concept in every action movie ever made,” Bryan said. “The hero, of course, disarms the bomb by cutting the blue wires.”
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