The rules that decide a claim.

Two years from the day the cause of action accrues, which for most injuries is the day it happened. That is the deadline to file suit in court, not the deadline to notify an insurer or to start a claim. File late and the case is dismissed regardless of how clear the liability was.

Three situations change that date and they are the ones worth checking rather than assuming. A wrongful death claim runs two years from the date of death, which is a different date from the injury when someone survives for a period. For a person injured as a minor, the period is generally tolled during minority, so it typically begins at eighteen. And a claim against a governmental unit is the trap: the Texas Tort Claims Act requires formal written notice, and many cities set that period by charter at six months or less, which can bar a claim long before the two years are up.

The practical deadline is much earlier than the legal one in every case. Surveillance video overwrites in days. Commercial truck data is retained for months. Vehicles get repaired or sold. The date that actually decides most claims is the one by which the evidence still exists.

Texas uses proportionate responsibility, often called modified comparative fault. A jury assigns each party a percentage of the blame. Your recovery is reduced by your percentage, and if your share is greater than 50%, you recover nothing at all. That is the 51% bar.

The arithmetic is simple and the consequences are not. On a $100,000 claim, being found 20% at fault costs you $20,000. Being found 51% at fault costs you everything. There is no gradual decline at the threshold, so the difference between 50% and 51% is the whole case.

This is why the other side's adjuster calls early and asks conversational questions about your speed, what you were looking at, and whether you could have avoided it. Those answers turn into percentage arguments later. It is also why people talk themselves out of valid claims: an honest person's estimate of their own fault is routinely higher than a jury's.

Economic damages are the documented out-of-pocket losses: medical expenses already incurred, the cost of care still needed, lost wages, and lost future earning capacity where an injury changes what you can do for a living. These are proven with records and are the backbone of a claim.

Non-economic damages cover physical pain, mental anguish, physical impairment, and disfigurement. There is no receipt for any of it, so it is proven through the medical record, through how the injury changed daily life, and through testimony. It is also the category insurers argue hardest.

Exemplary damages, which most people call punitive, are available only where the conduct rises to fraud, malice, or gross negligence. They are capped by statute and they are uncommon. Any early promise of punitive damages should be treated with suspicion.

Texas also caps non-economic damages in health care liability claims specifically. Those caps do not apply to ordinary car, truck, or premises claims, and the distinction gets blurred often enough to be worth stating plainly.

A claim is worth what can actually be collected, and in practice that means what insurance can be reached. A catastrophic injury caused by a driver carrying state minimum coverage does not become a large recovery just because the injury is severe.

Texas requires drivers to carry only 30/60/25: $30,000 for one person's injuries, $60,000 total per accident, and $25,000 for property damage. A single hospital admission clears $30,000 comfortably. When it does, the question stops being what the injury is worth and becomes where else coverage exists.

The usual answers are your own uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage, which most drivers have and few realize they can claim on; a second at-fault party; or an employer, if the at-fault driver was working at the time. Commercial cases are different in scale: a for-hire interstate carrier hauling ordinary freight must carry at least $750,000 under federal rules, and hazardous cargo requires up to $5 million.

Finding every layer of coverage is usually worth more to the outcome than winning any single argument about liability.

The settlement figure and the amount that reaches you are different numbers, and the gap surprises almost everyone. Hospitals can assert liens against a personal injury recovery. Health insurers frequently hold subrogation rights to be reimbursed for what they paid on your behalf. Government programs have their own recovery rights.

Those claims are negotiable, and reducing them is quiet work that happens after liability is settled. On a moderate claim, the reduction achieved on the medical side is often worth more to the client than the final few thousand dollars argued over with the insurer.

Attorney fees in injury cases are contingent, meaning a percentage of the recovery with nothing owed if there is none. Case expenses are usually advanced and then repaid out of the settlement, which is a separate line from the fee. Both should be written into the agreement you sign, and that section is worth reading closely rather than accepting as standard.