The Tricky Business of Liability in Amazon Delivery Vehicle Accidents

When a collision involves an Amazon delivery vehicle, you usually know it. The company isn’t shy about branding the trucks and vans that deliver its packages. As a result, many accident victims and their families, attempting to pursue legal action against an Amazon-branded vehicle, are surprised to discover that the e-commerce giant doesn’t own the vehicle at all, making it much tougher to sue the company.

Amazon has devised a somewhat unique way of attempting to evade legal consequences in motor vehicle accidents. It’s called the Delivery Service Partner (DSP) program, and Amazon uses it to deliver over ten million packages per day through what it deems to be ‘independent contractors’. The DSP program has likely helped Amazon avoid lawsuits, but in recent years, the company has come under increasing scrutiny, and the case law surrounding Amazon vehicle accidents continues to evolve. In this article, we take a deep dive into the complex world of liability in Amazon delivery vehicle accidents.

Need to Know:

• Most vehicles associated with Amazon are driven by contract workers who are not directly employed by the company.
• Although Amazon maintains that the companies that make up its “Delivery Service Partner” program are ‘independent’ businesses which it contracts for delivery work, the relationship between Amazon and these companies differs from a typical business partnership in many ways.
• If you were injured by a DSP driver or other Amazon contractor, Amazon will try to pass responsibility to the contractor, but there are still ways to hold Amazon responsible.

In This Article:

• How Amazon Deliveries Are Structured – And What This Means Legally
• Inside Amazon’s Strategy: The Making of Its Delivery Service Partners
• Amazon’s Hidden Hand: Control Over DSP Drivers Despite Non-Employer Status
• Legal Paths to Hold Amazon Accountable for DSP Crashes

How Amazon Deliveries Are Structured – And What This Means Legally

In the United States, the legal doctrine of respondeat superior holds an employer accountable for the negligent actions of an employee, as long as those actions fall within the scope of his or her employment. This means that if Amazon employed its drivers directly, the company would likely be held liable for any motor vehicle accidents caused by their drivers.

Instead, Amazon handles the majority of its deliveries—from freight deliveries between warehouses to the “last mile” trips which deliver packages to your door—by relying on a network of contractors. These contractors include:

• Amazon Flex drivers: individuals whose relationship with Amazon is much like that of rideshare drivers with Uber and Lyft or delivery drivers with DoorDash and Grubhub. These solo “delivery partners” download a smartphone app which alerts them to nearby delivery opportunities, allowing them to schedule “blocks” of time to deliver packages on an as-needed basis. They drive their own vehicles, maintain their own insurance, and—while many opt to wear Amazon-branded vests—have some freedom to choose how they dress during a delivery. Amazon Relay is a similar program used by freight, rather than delivery, drivers.
• Amazon Hub Delivery partners: existing small businesses—such as dry cleaners, coffee shops and corner grocery stores—which contract with Amazon to make a certain number of local deliveries per day. The program is largely meant to serve rural communities, which may be less accessible to Flex drivers and Delivery Service Partners.
• Delivery Service Partners (DSPs): companies that are not owned by Amazon, but that exclusively handle Amazon deliveries. Delivery Service Partners work under very intense Amazon specifications in order to maintain their contracts with the company. These specifications include wearing Amazon-branded uniforms and driving Amazon-branded delivery vehicles, which are leased to them by third-party companies. Amazon Freight Partners are similar businesses that move cargo rather than deliver packages directly to customers.

Drivers directly employed by Amazon do exist, although they are few and far between. Many are hired on a seasonal basis—for example, during the holiday rush, when Amazon may have more deliveries than its contractors can handle—and are let go after weeks or months of work.

It is important to retain an experienced personal injury attorney early to help determine which of these groups was involved in your accident, as the answer will impact the way your case plays out. For example, if the driver of the delivery vehicle that hit you was directly employed by Amazon, you may have a straightforward negligence case against the company. However, it is far more likely that you encountered a Delivery Service Partner or other Amazon contractor. Navigating these situations requires more nuanced legal strategies.

First, it’s crucial to grasp the true relationship between Amazon and the companies they contract for delivery work, as this understanding informs the legal strategies an attorney can use to include Amazon as a defendant.

Inside Amazon’s Strategy: The Making of Its Delivery Service Partners

Many companies, large and small, contract with outside partners that provide them with services their businesses need, such as deliveries. As such, Amazon’s connection to its DSPs may seem like a typical business partnership. To understand the true nature of the relationship, you need to understand how a DSP is founded.

Amazon does not search for existing delivery companies with which to forge Delivery Service Partner contracts. Instead, the company provides conditions under which would-be Amazon contractors may start their own LLC businesses, designed for the special purpose of contracting with Amazon as DSPs.

These LLCs are required to have generic names (i.e. “Highway Logistics”) with no reference to Amazon, helping to foster the illusion that they are independent delivery companies. The truth is that every Delivery Service Partner is founded in careful adherence to guidelines which Amazon provides. Yet these contracting companies exist as LLCs before they are officially christened as DSPs, lending the appearance of a partnership to what, in many ways, more closely resembles the relationship between franchisor and franchisee.

Amazon’s role in guiding every detail of how a DSP is founded—from determining its payroll systems, insurance coverage, and hiring policies, to assigning it to a third-party company from which it can lease its branded vehicles—is a strong selling point for entrepreneurs without extensive logistics experience, offering them a route to reliable business that requires little decision-making. And Amazon’s influence on DSPs doesn’t stop at dictating how they’re founded: once a DSP is created, Amazon begins to exercise tight control, not only of the DSP itself, but of each individual driver.

Amazon’s Hidden Hand: Control Over DSP Drivers Despite Non-Employer Status

Some of the requirements that Amazon has for its DSP drivers—such as maintaining certain personal grooming standards—look a lot like the expectations you might find in a straightforward employer/employee relationship. Others go far beyond that.

Although DSP operators may reassign routes between employees as they see fit, it’s Amazon that not only assigns an initial route to each driver, but also determines the exact form those routes should take. Because the routes are calculated by algorithm to theoretically accomplish the most deliveries possible in the least amount of time, a driver is not permitted to deviate from an assigned route—even if he or she knows a shortcut.

If the driver does decide to stray from the path, Amazon will know. Every time a DSP employee climbs into the driver’s seat of an Amazon-branded delivery van, that driver enters what may be the most tightly-surveilled workspace that modern technology is capable of creating.

Amazon’s delivery vehicles are outfitted, inside and out, with an elaborate camera system that not only tracks the movement of the vehicle, but also reportedly uses AI technology to monitor drivers for unsafe behavior and report “incidents” directly back to Amazon. The technology apparently collects information on driving speed, braking and turning, and seatbelt compliance. It even has been said to track the movement of a driver’s eyes to determine whether he or she is paying attention to the road. The data is used to create a safety “score” for each driver which shifts in real time. 

Because the technology used to detect infractions is far from perfect, many DSP drivers report being penalized for unsafe moments that are fully outside of their control (for instance, being cut off by another vehicle in traffic), for behavior that is completely neutral (scratching an itch—a driver who touches his or her face may be incorrectly flagged for using a phone while driving), and even for safe, responsible driving practices (you have to take your eyes off the road in order to check blind spots and side mirrors).

DSP drivers are under intense pressure to deliver packages within a tight time frame dictated by Amazon and—at the same time—maintain a good driving safety score. Not only can the score affect outcomes such as whether the driver receives a bonus, but Amazon can force a DSP to dismiss an individual driver, despite not claiming to be the employer.

Worse, bad scores from multiple drivers can affect a DSP’s standing with Amazon. Because DSPs are founded for the purpose of complying with Amazon, they generally have no life beyond the company: if Amazon dissolves its contract with the DSP, it has essentially dissolved the DSP as well.

Legal Paths to Hold Amazon Accountable for DSP Crashes

As you can see, Delivery Service Partners are not “partners” of Amazon as we typically understand the word—independent companies operating in a business agreement with another company. They exist only because of Amazon, their functions and employees are governed by Amazon, and Amazon is the only business with which they contract.

Nevertheless, if you are in an accident involving an Amazon DSP driver or similar Amazon contractor, such as an Amazon Freight Partner, Amazon may claim not to be responsible, placing full responsibility—that is, liability—with the driver’s employer. DSP vehicles are required to carry $1,000,000 in accident insurance, and that’s the largest possible compensation you can expect if your lawsuit is solely against the Delivery Service Partner.

However, since the DSP program was first implemented in 2018, it has come under increasing scrutiny from attorneys who believe that Amazon should be held accountable in accidents that involve DSP drivers.

The case law around accidents that involve Amazon contracting “partners” is still evolving and is likely to take different forms depending on the laws of the state where the accident occurred. However, the path to holding Amazon liable for a DSP accident is likely to take one of two routes, and these routes may overlap.

Route 1: Alleging an Agency Relationship

The term “agency relationship” describes a type of relationship in which one party—the “agent”—acts on behalf of another party, the “principal.” In an agency relationship, a principal can be held responsible for the actions of its agent within the scope of the relationship, since the agent is acting on the principal’s behalf. There is no need for the agent to be directly employed by the principal for an agency relationship to apply.

In a case which resolved in 2023, a South Carolina court held Amazon responsible for an accident caused by a DSP driver that turned directly into the path of a motorcyclist who had the right of way. The motorcyclist’s legal team enumerated the many controls that Amazon had over the DSP, such as hiring and firing power, which Amazon failed to exercise responsibly when it retained the driver despite over 90 counts of distracted driving. By using these controls to argue for what one handling attorney described as a “textbook” agency relationship, they successfully resolved the case against Amazon for $44,600,000.

Route 2: Highlighting Surveillance That Directly Caused the Accident

As you can probably imagine, the intense pressure that Amazon places on its DSP drivers, particularly in its direct interactions with them—by, for instance, using AI software to respond to supposed infractions and altering their driving safety scores in real time—can itself be a cause of accidents. If your attorney has reason to believe that Amazon’s monitoring of the driver led directly to your accident, he or she may not even need to allege an agency relationship in order to hold Amazon responsible.

Regardless of what direction your case takes, you will need to hire an attorney with extensive personal injury experience, a willingness to investigate as soon as possible, and the trial skills needed to embrace—and, if necessary, shape—this rapidly-evolving area of personal injury law.

 The attorneys at Block O’Toole & Murphy have a deep interest in holding Amazon, and all companies who should bear responsibility, to account for the damage they cause. Our firm has handled a number of cases that have set legal precedents in New York State, and many of our complex injury cases have resolved for seven to eight-figure settlements.

If you or a loved one was injured by a vehicle associated with Amazon, the attorneys at Block O’Toole & Murphy want to hear from you. Our experienced trial lawyers serve New York and New Jersey. Contact the attorneys at Block O’Toole & Murphy to receive a free legal consultation by calling 212-736-5300, or by filling out our online contact form.