Industrial Accidents

Third-Party Claims.

Workers' comp may bar a suit against your employer, but not against everyone else on the site.

If workers' compensation covers your employer, it can bar a suit against that employer. It does nothing to protect everyone else whose negligence put you in the hospital.

Industrial sites are crowded with companies. A single job can involve the plant operator, a general contractor, a dozen subcontractors, staffing agencies, equipment manufacturers, and the property owner. When your own employer carries workers' compensation, that system may be your only remedy against the employer, but it leaves untouched your right to sue any of those other companies whose negligence caused the injury.

This matters because a third-party claim recovers what workers' compensation does not: the full measure of pain, disfigurement, lost earning capacity, and the future the injury took. The work is in the untangling, identifying every company on the site, mapping who controlled what, and finding the negligence that actually caused the harm. It is often where the real recovery in an industrial case is found.

When the company is the owner of the plant or the site, and it is not your employer, a Texas statute sets a higher bar first: read Chapter 95.

From The Night Docket

On cause and responsibility:

One Word: Serious Violation →

Serious violation: the word on the OSHA citation after a worker is hurt sounds like a verdict, and it is not. The statute defines it by what could have happened and by what the employer knew or should have known, not by what did happen; the citation runs on its own clock, six months to issue and fifteen working days to contest; the penalty number says as much about the size and history of the company as about the hazard; and the statute itself says it neither enlarges nor diminishes anyone’s rights in a civil case. What the word means, how a citation is issued, priced and fought, why the number can shrink without the hazard shrinking, what the citation is and is not in a Texas injury case against a subscriber, a nonsubscriber or a third party, and the file a family should ask for before it is gone.

Dispatch: Hours Later →

A plant fire puts a column of smoke over a town, and the people who breathe it are sorted, without knowing it, by chemistry. Some gases announce themselves the instant they are breathed. Others say almost nothing, and those are the ones that put a person who walked away feeling fine into an emergency room that night. What the federal medical guidelines say, gas by gas, about which ones burn at once and which ones wait hours to fill the lungs, the process-safety duty a plant owes when it holds dangerous chemicals in quantity, why comp is a floor and not a ceiling for the worker, what the family next door has to ask, and why the record made early is the case.

Statutory Employer →

When a plant buys its contractors’ comp coverage it can claim the employer’s shield, and the case moves to the third parties who were on the site.

Competent Person →

Every trench needs someone who can see a cave-in coming and has the power to stop the work. What that person enforces, and why the case turns on who held the power.

Proximate Cause →

Connecting a company's negligence to the injury it caused.

Custom →

Industry practice, and how it frames what a company should have done.

Common Questions

What is a third-party claim in a work injury case?

It is a claim against a company other than your employer, such as a contractor, manufacturer, or property owner, whose negligence caused your injury. It can proceed even when workers' compensation covers your employer.

Why bring a third-party claim if I have workers' comp?

Because workers' compensation pays limited benefits and does not cover the full harm. A third-party claim against a negligent non-employer can recover pain, disfigurement, lost earning capacity, and other damages comp does not.

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