Practice Areas
Serious Injury.
The cases other firms turn away. Catastrophic, permanent, life-altering. That is the practice.
Before you call
The situations I hear about most, answered honestly: which are cases I take, which are not, and where to go either way. Read it first → Or see where else to go.
Some injuries do not heal. They redraw the rest of a life, and the cases that follow take years, resources, and a lawyer who means to try them.
A catastrophic injury case is not measured only by what has happened. It is measured by what the injury will cost across a lifetime: the surgeries still to come, the care that will be needed, the career that ended, the future that changed shape. Proving that future is its own discipline, built on medicine, life-care planning, and economics, and it is what separates a settlement that runs out from one that lasts.
The two-year clock
Texas generally gives you two years from the date of the injury to file suit. It sounds like plenty of time, and it is not. Evidence fades, records are lost, and the sooner the case is being built by someone who knows what to preserve, the stronger it stays.
Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code Section 16.003 sets a two-year limitations period for personal injury and for wrongful death. Some circumstances shorten the practical deadline, so the earliest possible date is the one to work from.
Comparative fault
Texas reduces a recovery by the injured person's share of fault and bars it entirely if that share exceeds fifty percent. This is why the defense works so hard to move blame onto the injured, and why a serious case is built from the start to meet and defeat that effort.
Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code Section 33.001 bars recovery when your percentage of responsibility is greater than fifty percent, and reduces it by your share below that line.
When an injury becomes a death
When a person does not survive, Texas law provides two paths. A wrongful death claim belongs to the surviving spouse, children, and parents for their own losses. A survival claim belongs to the estate for what the person themselves endured before death. Together they hold a wrongdoer to account for the whole of what was taken.
Serious injury cases I handle
Traumatic Brain Injury
An injury that can change a person without showing on a scan, and how the case proves what the imaging misses.
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Spinal Cord & Paralysis
Injuries that redraw a life, and the lifetime of care a case has to account for.
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Severe Burn Injuries
Among the most painful injuries there are, with a long and costly road of treatment.
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Wrongful Death
When an injury takes a life, the claims that belong to the family and to the estate.
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Premises Liability
When a property owner's neglect, or a lack of security, turns a place into a hazard.
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Product Liability
When a defective product is the cause, the maker and the sellers can answer for the harm.
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Ranch and Rural Injuries
Ranches, leases, and rural land: the owner, the lessees, the power line, and the court the case belongs in.
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From The Night Docket
The science and the craft of these cases, from my writing desk:
Dispatch: Something in the Road →
There is a sentence a driver says after striking a person on a bicycle from behind at night and driving on: I thought I hit something in the road. It may be an honest sentence. On a dark road a rider ahead is a narrow shape moving the same way, what closes the gap is only the difference between two speeds, and low beams reach a couple of hundred feet. But when a collision is reasonably likely to have hurt someone, Texas does not let a driver be the judge of what he struck: the statute says to stop, to return, and to determine whether a person is involved. The rider’s lamp, his place in the lane and the driver’s speed bear on how the fault is divided. They do not decide whether the case begins.
Dispatch: The Drop-Off →
A single-vehicle rollover reads like a story with one character, the driver who left the road. But the tire left the lane somewhere, and when it tried to come back it met the edge of the pavement. The Federal Highway Administration says exposed vertical pavement edges can make a vehicle unstable and keep it from returning safely, and that rural crashes involving edge drop-offs are two to four times more likely to be fatal. Overcorrected is where the crash report stops. The case starts there, with three questions: the driver’s reaction, the belt, and the road’s own edge, which the Texas Supreme Court has measured in inches.
Dispatch: The Crossing →
A vehicle and a train meet at a rural crossing, and the train always has the right of way, because a loaded freight at highway speed needs something like a mile to stop. So the case is never about the right of way. It is about the crossing itself, and a federal rule decides which questions a jury ever gets to hear. The claim that the train was going too fast is barred when the train was inside the speed set for its class of track; the claim that there should have been gates and lights is barred when federal money installed the devices that are there. What stays open is the claim that the railroad broke the federal standard of care or its own rule, and, where federal money did not install the devices, the Texas duty to give extra warning at a crossing so dangerous that a careful driver cannot use it without one; the driver’s own duty to stop divides the fault rather than ending it. The numbers, the two Supreme Court cases, the statute that keeps the door open, the Texas Supreme Court’s 2024 word on the extra-hazardous crossing, and the records that decide these cases.
The Body: Unprotected →
What a vehicle does to a person on a bicycle. In 2024, 1,075 bicyclists were killed in crashes with motor vehicles, the third-highest count ever recorded and 73 percent above the 2010 low; the federal count, which is broader, puts the toll at 1,103 killed and about 52,887 injured. Eight in ten died in cities, six in ten away from any intersection, more than half in the dark, and the deaths peak between six and nine in the evening. Pickups, SUVs and vans, the federal light-truck class, were the vehicle most often involved, and in nearly nine of ten of those crashes the rider was struck by the front of the vehicle. In most deaths the worst injuries are to the head. Why a rider sits higher than a person on foot and lands harder, what Texas law gives a bicycle and asks of it, the lamps the code requires after dark, how a rider’s own mistake divides a recovery rather than ending it, and what the record of such a crash contains.
The Fifth Circuit: Canales v. Walmart Texas →
A shopper slipped on water on the way to the restroom in a store, sued, and lost on summary judgment because she could not show how long the water had been on the floor. The Fifth Circuit affirmed: seventy-five minutes of security video that showed no change to the floor proved nothing about when the water arrived, employees walking past proved nothing without duration, another shopper slipping eight minutes earlier was too short a time, and dirty footprints are not evidence of time at all. Why it matters: in Texas a store answers for a spill only if it knew or should have known, should have known is a clock, the shopper has to start it, and the store holds the recordings and the logs that could.
The Body: On Foot →
On foot: a person struck by a vehicle has no crumple zone, no belt and no steel, and what happens to the body is decided by three things the person did not choose: how fast the vehicle was going, how tall and blunt its front end was, and whether it was dark. The speed curve from the crash data, why a car is more likely to throw an adult onto the hood while a tall pickup or SUV is twice as likely to knock the person down and run over them, the share of these deaths that happen in the dark and away from intersections, and the Texas law that puts due care on the driver even when the person was not in a crosswalk.
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.
The Fifth Circuit: Liberty Mutual v. North Tarrant →
A 130-vehicle pileup on I-35W in Fort Worth in February 2021 produced dozens of lawsuits, among them suits against the companies that had rebuilt that stretch of highway years earlier. Their insurer defended under a reservation of rights, then asked a federal court to declare that it owed no defense, and the Fifth Circuit agreed: under the eight-corners rule the duty to defend is decided from the policy and the petition alone, and the petitions alleged a failure to prepare for the winter weather and to maintain the road, work the construction companies had no part in, so the rebuilt segment was merely the place the crash happened. Why it matters to the people hurt: the defendant’s insurance is usually the recovery, and the petition is what the insurer reads.
Dispatch: The Operator →
The first question after a crash is almost never the one people ask first. They ask what went wrong. The law asks who was in charge. The Safety Board has named the company that operated the jet that left Austin on Sunday, and the coverage of its first briefing reported that the agency described the flight as a Part 135 operation, the rules for carrying people for hire. What operational control means in the regulation’s own words, the two sets of federal rules and the duties the stricter one adds, who the certificate holder is, and why the law looks first to whoever held the authority to start, run and end the flight: responsibility follows control, not title.
One Word: Repose →
Repose: limitations asks when the clock started on you; repose asks when it ran out on the thing, and it does not care what you knew. Texas gives a product fifteen years from the day the defendant sold it, with a written-warranty exception, a latent-disease exception, and a carve-out for aircraft, where a federal statute of repose gives general aviation manufacturers eighteen years from delivery, restarts the clock on a replaced part, and lists its own four exceptions. What the two statutes say, why a dead claim against the maker turns the case toward the operator, the owner and the shop, and the dates a family has to find first.
The Fifth Circuit: DuFour v. BP →
A shoreline cleanup worker after the Deepwater Horizon spill said almost three years of crude oil and dispersant made his asthma worse. The Fifth Circuit affirmed the exclusion of both of his causation experts and the summary judgment that followed: a toxic-exposure plaintiff must prove general and specific causation through reliable expert evidence, a study of a different condition in a different population does not carry his case, and a treating doctor who never wrote a causation opinion is not a causation witness. A dissent would have let a factfinder weigh the linear relationship the study found. What the decision asks of every refinery, plant and spill case: the dose, the study that matches, and the expert who says so in writing.
Dispatch: Mayday →
A mayday call is a plea for help, and in a courtroom it becomes something else: proof of what the people aboard knew, and when. A business jet that left Austin on Sunday with nine people aboard reported light ice and moderate turbulence at 35,000 feet, asked to climb, and minutes later radioed a mayday, a descent rate of 20,000 feet a minute and an overspeed; all nine died when it struck the ground beside a Florida road, and the NTSB is investigating with no cause given. What ice does to a wing and what overspeed means in the FAA’s own words, the arithmetic of the fall, and the Texas law that splits a death into the family’s claim and the person’s own: the survival claim pays for the conscious pain and the fear before death, and the Texas Supreme Court has said the proof must show the person actually knew, not merely that there was time to know. The recording is that proof.
One Word: Conscious →
Conscious: the word in the jury charge that decides what a death is worth to the person who died is not pain. It is conscious. The survival claim pays for what the person actually felt before death, the fear in anticipation of the injury and the pain after it, and the Texas Supreme Court has held that time to know is not proof of knowing. What the estate recovers, the proof Evans demands, the open question about a split second, and how the record of the last minutes is built: recorders, radio, witnesses, the medical examiner and the expert who will say more likely than not.
The Body: Ice on the Wing →
Ice on the wing: a wing makes lift by keeping the air attached to it, and ice is the one thing that can take that away without the pilot seeing it happen. What clear ice is and why big supercooled drops make it, why a thin rough layer can cost a wing nearly a third of its maximum lift and moves the stall to a lower angle and a higher speed, why the tail collects ice faster than the wing and cannot be seen from the cockpit, what certification does and does not promise, the other edge of the band where a jet runs out of speed margin, the arithmetic of a descent measured in tens of thousands of feet a minute, and what the record of a flight holds, all in the FAA’s own words. Never a cause.
Dispatch: A Hand in It →
The Passenger was about the person with no hand in the crash. Most people who get hurt are not passengers; most of the time the injured person did something too, and the other side treats that as the end of the case. In Texas it is not. A person on foot who crosses against the signal has broken a rule, and the driver still owes the due care the Transportation Code spells out. The jury puts a percentage on each of them, the hurt person’s recovery is reduced by their own share rather than erased, and the claim ends only when that share is greater than fifty percent. The companion to The Passenger, read from the other seat.
Dispatch: No Crumple Zone →
Most crashes have a shape the law reads at a glance, a car and a person outside it, or two cars with one better protected than the other. A motorcycle meeting a person on foot has no such shape: neither one has anything around them. What the federal injury study found riders break most, what the impact-speed curve says about a body struck in the road, and why Texas does not name a victim in advance but divides the fault, owes the pedestrian due care, asks the pedestrian to yield away from a crosswalk, and lets either injured person bring a claim.
Dispatch: Lift, Not Hold →
A floor jack is built to lift a car, not to hold it up, and the device built to hold it, the jack stand, is where the law begins, not the person who was underneath. On the West Side of San Antonio a man in his thirties died when the floor jack under the car he was working on gave out. What the manual for an ordinary floor jack warns, what the federal occupational safety rule requires the instant the load is up, the jack stands that were themselves recalled in 2020, and the questions Texas products law asks before anyone blames the man under the car.
One Word: Smoke Alarm →
The one thing in a rented home that Texas law requires to work on the first day and then allows to go silent. What a landlord must install and where, the test the statute requires at move-in and the notice it requires after, what the tenant answers for, the guest who can sue when it was not done, and why the federal fire tests make the alarm the whole case in a modern house.
The Body: Flashover →
Fire does not spread through a room. For most of its life it stays in the thing that is burning and the room only gets hot; then, in a second or two, everything in the room is burning at once. The gas layer at the ceiling, why a modern living room reaches that second in under five minutes, the fire that waits behind a closed door, what a smoke alarm buys and which kind, and what each number does in a Texas courtroom.
Dispatch: Five Minutes →
A house fire used to give a family about seventeen minutes. It now gives them about three, and the difference is mostly the furniture. One person died and another was carried out of a San Antonio house fire after midnight Friday. What flashover is, what the federal tests say a smoke alarm buys and which kind, what Texas law makes a landlord install and test, and what a fire case asks once the smoke clears.
Dispatch: Summer 2028 →
A road that kills ten people on foot in a year is a pattern with an address. This week the state put a date on the fix for Westheimer Road, enhanced crosswalks at 23 intersections by summer 2028. What the federal highway agency says paint and light are worth, what the law asks of every driver on that road tonight, and what a family can and cannot ask of the road itself.
One Word: Consent to Settle →
Your own insurance company gets a say before you release the driver who hurt you, and the clause that gives it that say can cost you your underinsured motorist claim. What the clause says, the Texas Supreme Court case that limits it to an insurer that was actually prejudiced, why the UIM claim is a second case, and the one letter that keeps the fight about your injuries.
Dispatch: The One Door →
When the vehicle that hurt someone belonged to a government, the way into a Texas courtroom is not the usual one: there is one door, the Tort Claims Act, and it opens only for an injury that arises from the use of the vehicle, only on its own clock, only up to a cap, and only against the government itself. What operation or use means, whose employee the driver was, the six-month notice, the caps, and the election that bars the driver.
One Word: Responsible Third Party →
The defendant who says it was not me, it was him, has a procedure for saying so, and it changes the arithmetic of the case. Who can be named, how the designation is made and struck, what the empty chair does to what the defendants pay, the unknown driver named as John Doe, why a phantom car cuts the injured person twice, and the deadline that decides whether the share the jury hands out is a share anyone pays.
One Word: Inquest →
Before any lawsuit, the law has already opened a file on a death, and the family is entitled to what it finds. Which deaths a justice of the peace must investigate, when a medical examiner takes over, who orders the autopsy, what the record holds and who can read it, how a family in Harris County gets the report, and what a death certificate proves in court.
Dispatch: The Roof and the Tank →
A car that rolls once and comes to rest can leave the people inside alive; a car that rolls and then crushes down on them, or burns before they can get out, is a different event. The roof-strength and fuel-system standards, what meeting a federal standard does in a Texas courtroom, whose claim carries the driver’s share, and why the wreck itself is the evidence.
Dispatch: The Blackout →
Sometimes the crash that looks like one driver’s plain mistake is a stroke, a seizure or a faint that took the driver before the car ever left its lane, and Texas law does not ask only what the driver did; it asks whether he could have seen it coming. The loss-of-consciousness defense, the word it turns on, why the record and not the account decides it, and who still pays when no one was at fault.
Dispatch: The Precaution →
Within hours of a rider’s death on a roller coaster, the operator closed the similar rides at its other parks. The public read it as a confession; Texas evidence law reads it as something else. The rule on subsequent remedial measures, the four things a later fix cannot prove, the doors that still let it in, and why the records that decide a ride case are the ones made before.
Dispatch: I Never Saw Them →
A driver who stops after a crash in the dark almost always says the same thing, and Texas law does not ask whether he saw the person; it asks whether he was driving so that he could. The speed-for-conditions duty, the due care owed to a person on foot, the arithmetic of headlights at sixty, how a pedestrian’s own mistake divides a recovery rather than ending it, and why the proof is physical.
Dispatch: The Wide Turn →
A trailer turning right does not stay in its lane; its rear wheels cut inside the path the cab takes, so the space beside a turning truck is about to be filled. Offtracking by the federal measure, the open side of a trailer, the right-turn and signal rules Texas writes, the side-guard gap federal law has not closed, and how the fault is divided.
One Word: Render Aid →
A driver in a crash that hurts someone owes four things before anything else: stop, return, find out whether anyone needs help, and stay. What the statute requires, what leaving costs, why the rule is written for the injured person, and how the civil case goes on when the driver is never found.
Dispatch: The Perimeter →
A crash does not end when the cars stop. A red light run at Hillcroft and Richmond, a police perimeter that other cars then crashed into, a sergeant hit on foot, and a Buick that left its lane on the Grand Parkway and burned at the end of a median. The edge line, the scene as a hazard, the three duties Texas writes for the driver who comes up on it, and who answers.
The Fifth Circuit: Allemond v. Talos →
A welder on a platform off Louisiana lost a fingertip to the moving conductor pipe he was hired to brace, after seven warnings that morning. No unreasonable risk under Louisiana’s risk-utility test, no proof of what a safer method would cost, and an operational-control argument forfeited because it was never made in the district court.
The Body: Ride-Down →
A crash is a stop, and what matters to the body is how much distance the stop is spread over: a belted person slows with the car across feet of crumpling metal, an unbelted person over inches of dashboard, at several times the force. The arithmetic, the belt, the air bag, and the two questions Texas law asks in order.
Dispatch: The Siren →
The federal study of sirens concluded that relying on them to warn drivers in traffic is not justified, and the intersection is where emergency vehicles meet traffic. What Texas asks of the emergency driver, the emergency exception to the Tort Claims Act, the recklessness bar, and the 2022 rule that a department’s own policy is not a law.
The Body: The Quiet Gas →
Carbon monoxide has no color and no smell, and it takes oxygen’s seat in the blood and holds it about two hundred times harder. Why the symptoms look like the flu, why the fingertip monitor reads normal, the injury that shows up weeks later, what the storms taught Texas about generators, and what the law asks.
One Word: Invitee →
The shopper, the hotel guest, the patient, the fan: anyone a business asks in is an invitee, and Texas owes that person its widest premises promise, to make the place safe or warn of what it knew or should have found. The four things an invitee has to prove, and why the fight is almost always over what the owner knew.
Dispatch: The Hood Line →
A low car strikes an adult in the legs and the body wraps onto the hood; a tall front meets a child above the center of balance and throws the child forward and down. Hoods above forty inches were about forty-five percent more likely to kill, and Texas asks a driver for due care to anyone on foot and proper precaution on seeing a child.
One Word: Eggshell →
The person who hurt you takes you as he finds you. Why a pre-existing condition is not a defense in Texas, what aggravation means, why the word degenerative on an MRI proves almost nothing, and how to build the before.
Dispatch: The Pole →
A pole slips past the frame rails built to fold, so a crash people picture as minor can be fatal. The claim survives against a dead driver’s estate, fault is divided among everyone involved, and your own uninsured and underinsured coverage stands behind the gap.
Dispatch: Airtime →
A ride restraint set with a gap turns the weightless instant into a spike down the spine, and a San Antonio study found disk injuries at only 4.5 to 5 g. Texas requires every ride to be insured and inspected, and a restraint known to be wrong can be a choice a jury may punish.
Dispatch: Smoke →
Smoke inhalation looks minor and is often the most dangerous injury in a fire: two poisons that read normal on the monitor and an airway that swells over the first day. What a hotel owes a paying guest, and why the case turns on when they knew.
Dispatch: The Swerve →
An animal on a dark road, half a second to react, and a rollover that is almost always tripped by the edge the tire caught. Texas counts about 7,585 animal crashes a year, and the law judges the reaction as closely as the hazard.
The Body: The Egg Carton →
How a school bus protects children without belts, where compartmentalization stops in a side impact and a rollover, what Texas now requires on every bus, and who answers when a car crosses the line into one.
The Body: Low-Side, High-Side →
A motorcycle that loses its grip slides out on its low side or throws the rider over the high side. The traction budget, what each fall breaks, why the rider could not steer out of it, and what the road keeps as evidence.
The Fifth Circuit: Phillips v. Ethicon →
A Texas product-death case ended on a letter never sent: an implied-warranty claim needs presuit notice to the seller, a one-sentence request to amend is not enough, and a dismissal with prejudice follows the family into the next suit.
One Word: Single-Vehicle →
One vehicle on the scene does not mean nobody at fault. The road, the debris, the vehicle itself, the car that never touched you, and the passengers: where the other defendant is, and the Texas rules for each.
The Body: Seven Times the Energy →
Every car is built for a crash in the thirties, and a car at 100 carries seven to eight times that energy. The same crash at 40, 50 and 56 mph, stopping distance, and where speed becomes gross negligence.
Dispatch: The Left Turn →
In 45 percent of fatal two-vehicle motorcycle crashes in 2024, the other vehicle was turning left. Why a driver can look straight at a motorcycle and still not see it in time, the Texas yield rule, and why the helmet goes to injury, not fault.
Dispatch: Broadside →
Side impacts were 22 percent of passenger vehicle occupant deaths in 2024. Why the struck side gets inches instead of feet, what the federal side standard tests, and the Texas right-of-way presumption.
Dispatch: High Water →
A foot of water floats many vehicles. Going around a barricade weighs against the driver but does not end the case, and a missing or broken warning the government was told about can put it in the case.
Dispatch: Rolled →
Rollovers were 28 percent of the people killed riding in passenger vehicles in 2023. Why a rollover puts the vehicle on trial: stability, the roof, and whether it kept the people inside.
Dispatch: Stranded →
Two people on foot were killed on Houston freeways the same Saturday night. A driver’s duty to a person on foot does not end where the sidewalk does, and what to do if your car dies on a freeway.
Dispatch: Thrown →
Of the vehicle occupants totally ejected in fatal crashes nationally in 2023, 82 percent were killed. The belt’s first job is keeping you inside; the car has that job too.
Dispatch: The Phone →
Texas tied distracted driving to 86,384 crashes and 299 deaths in 2025. The danger is the eyes, not the phone, and the phone that caused the crash is the record that proves it, if someone moves to preserve it.
Dispatch: The Belt →
Texas counted 965 people killed unbuckled in 2025. Why the belt keeps the body inside the survival space, and why since Nabors v. Romero a jury can score the missing belt against the recovery.
Dispatch: On Foot →
The state counted 772 people killed on foot in 2024. Why the ground is so often the fatal impact, and why the case turns on who owed the yield.
Fog →
Mild traumatic brain injury, and why a clean scan is not the same as no injury.
The Clot →
How immobilization after a serious injury creates its own deadly risk.
The Body at 84 →
The eggshell-plaintiff rule, and why a defendant takes the victim as they find them.
Mitigation →
The duty to limit harm, and how the defense turns it against the injured.
Common Questions
How long do I have to file a personal injury case in Texas?
Generally two years from the date of injury under Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code Section 16.003, and the same two-year period applies to wrongful death. Some situations shorten it, so it is best to act well before the deadline.
Can I recover if I was partly at fault?
Often yes. Texas reduces recovery by your share of fault and bars it only if you are found more than fifty percent responsible. Partial fault is not the end of a claim, though the defense will try to exaggerate it.
Who can bring a wrongful death claim in Texas?
The surviving spouse, children, and parents can bring a wrongful death claim for their own losses. The estate can separately bring a survival claim for what the person endured before death. The two together address the full harm.
Tell me what happened.
Free consultation. No fees unless we win. Speak with me directly, not a screener.
Contact Orlando Rodriguez