The adjuster who called you the morning after your wreck was pleasant, organized, and sympathetic. That was not a coincidence. Our Houston automobile accident attorneys represent injured drivers and passengers across Harris County, and most of the work is undoing what the insurance company accomplishes in the first two weeks while nobody is watching them.
You are talking to someone who does this five hundred times a year. You are doing it once.
Before you call that adjuster back, spend ten minutes with us at (713) 973-8888. It costs nothing and it is not a commitment.
Terry Bryant and his hand-picked team know how to help car crash victims.
Should I accept the insurance company's first offer after a car wreck?
No, and the timing of the offer tells you why. A first offer arrives before your treatment is finished, which means it was calculated without knowing what your treatment will cost. That is not a mistake on their end. That is the point.
Signing a release closes the claim permanently. If the disc that is bothering you turns into a surgery in November, that is your problem, not theirs, because you already settled in August.
Three other moves worth recognizing when you see them:
The friendly recorded statement. Framed as routine paperwork. It is not. It is a transcript, and the questions are built to produce sentences about fault and about how you feel today.
The blanket medical authorization. The form they send is often unlimited, which lets them pull a decade of your records looking for anything they can call a pre-existing condition.
The quick check for the car. Property damage and injury are separate claims. Some adjusters try to close both in one conversation, and people sign without noticing.
None of this is illegal. It is just their job, done well. Yours is to not participate in it alone.
What happens if the car accident was partly my fault in Texas?
You can still recover as long as your share of the blame is not more than 50 percent, but every point they push onto you comes straight off your recovery, and at 51 percent you get nothing. Texas calls this proportionate responsibility, and it lives in Chapter 33 of the Civil Practice and Remedies Code.
Now you understand the recorded statement.
| Your share of fault | On a $200,000 case value |
| 0% | $200,000 |
| 20% | $160,000 |
| 50% | $100,000 |
| 51% or more | Nothing |
Illustrative only. Not based on any specific case.
Houston hands the defense some easy arguments here, and you should know which ones are coming.
Feeder road merges. Our frontage roads dump traffic onto the freeway with almost no runway. Any merge collision gets argued as shared fault by default, no matter who actually drifted.
Rain. A Gulf Coast downpour turns into standing water under the overpasses in minutes. The defense position writes itself: you should have slowed down more, so some of this is on you.
The unprotected left. Left turn crashes at Houston's wide intersections are the single most commonly disputed fault scenario we see.
Do not guess at speeds. Do not estimate distances. Do not agree with a summary of events read back to you over the phone by a stranger. If you are not certain, the honest answer is that you are not certain. For how this argument plays out in practice, read our breakdown of comparative negligence in Texas car accidents.
The Number Nobody Mentions Until the End: Available Coverage
Case value has a ceiling, and the ceiling is not your injuries. It is how much insurance exists to pay them. A catastrophic injury against a driver carrying Texas minimum limits is worth the minimum limits unless somebody finds another policy, and finding that second policy is often the most valuable thing that happens in a case.
What builds the number underneath that ceiling:
Economic losses. Emergency care, imaging, surgery, therapy, future treatment, lost paychecks, and reduced earning capacity if you cannot go back to the work you did before.
Non-economic losses. Physical pain, impairment, disfigurement, mental anguish. This is the contested half of every case, because it cannot be proven with a receipt.
Exemplary damages. Rare, and reserved for conduct that crossed from careless into reckless.
Where a second policy usually turns up: an employer's commercial auto policy, your own underinsured motorist coverage, a rideshare or delivery platform's contingent coverage, a negligent vehicle owner who handed the keys to someone they should not have, or a co-defendant nobody had identified yet.
If you have the other driver's insurance information and your own policy in front of you, call (713) 973-8888 and we will tell you today what the realistic ceiling looks like.
What do I do if the other driver had no insurance?
Open a claim under your own uninsured or underinsured motorist coverage, and understand that your insurer becomes your opponent the moment you do. This coverage is built into Texas auto policies unless you rejected it in writing, so pull your declarations page before you assume you do not have it.
People are genuinely surprised by how this goes. You have paid this company for eleven years. You have never filed anything. And now an adjuster who has never heard your name is questioning whether your neck injury came from the wreck.
That is not personal. It is structural. Once you file a UM claim you are a claimant, and claimants get evaluated.
Hit-and-run cases run through the same coverage, which matters in Houston more than most places, because a driver with no license and no insurance has every reason not to stay at the scene. The Texas Department of Insurance publishes plain-language explanations of what Texas auto policies have to include.
What if the driver who hit me was working at the time?
Then there is probably a commercial policy sitting behind the personal one, and your claim just got substantially more serious. Employers can be responsible for crashes their employees cause on the job, and business auto policies carry limits far above what individual drivers buy.
This is everywhere in Houston and it is not always obvious.
- A contractor or service tech driving between calls
- A delivery driver running a route in an unmarked personal car
- A rideshare driver, where coverage turns on whether the app was on and whether a passenger was aboard
- An employee sent out for supplies in their own vehicle
- An oilfield or plant worker driving a company truck home
Expect the employer's insurer to argue the driver was on a personal errand, off the clock, or outside the scope of the job. Those arguments get made early, before anyone subpoenas a dispatch log or an app record.
If the vehicle had a company name on it, if the driver mentioned a delivery or a job site, or if the crash happened on a weekday in a work truck, say so on the first call. It is one of the fastest ways a modest claim becomes a real one.
Do I have a claim if I was the passenger?
Yes, and passenger claims are usually the cleanest cases we handle, because almost nobody argues that the passenger caused the wreck. You can claim against whichever driver was at fault, and in a two-car collision where fault is genuinely split, you may have a claim against both.
The part that stops people is that the at-fault driver is often a friend, a relative, or a coworker. Nobody wants to sue their sister.
You are not suing your sister. You are making a claim against an insurance policy she bought precisely so this would be covered, and which she has been paying for every month. Her insurer defends her and her insurer pays. Her out-of-pocket cost in the ordinary case is nothing.
Passengers in a rideshare have another layer, because those platforms carry substantial coverage that applies while a passenger is in the car. Which policy responds depends on the driver's status at the moment of the crash, and that is worth having someone check rather than guess at.
If you were riding in a car that got hit and you have been waiting because it felt awkward, that is a solvable problem and it is worth one phone call.
How long do I have to file a car accident claim in Texas?
Two years from the crash date for most Texas car accident claims, under Section 16.003 of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code. The exception that catches Houston drivers is a government vehicle, where written notice can be required within months and the City of Houston's own window is shorter still.
So the first question is not how long you have. It is who hit you.
A Metro bus, a city truck, a school district van, a county vehicle, a state agency car. Every one of those puts you on the short clock. People lose those claims while sitting comfortably inside the two-year deadline, because a notice requirement expired months earlier and nobody told them it existed.
Even in an ordinary two-car crash, the evidence runs out before the statute does. Repair shops release vehicles. Businesses overwrite camera footage on a two-week loop. Witnesses move.
One thing you can do yourself today: request your crash report from TxDOT. The Texas Peace Officer's Crash Report, called a CR-3, carries contributing-factor codes and an officer's narrative that the insurer will lean on hard. If it gets the sequence wrong, that is fixable, but only if somebody catches it early.
Deadlines for other injury claims work differently, including medical malpractice and claims involving a child. Those are covered on our Houston personal injury lawyer page.
What Comes Out of a Settlement Before You See It
Nothing comes out of your pocket, but several things come out of the settlement, and the time to understand them is before you sign a fee agreement rather than at the end. We work on contingency, so there is no attorney's fee at all if there is no recovery.
The deductions people are not warned about:
Health insurance liens and subrogation. If your health plan paid your crash-related bills, it often has a right to be repaid from your settlement. Getting those repayment claims reduced is real work and it puts real money back in your hands. Ask any firm you interview whether they negotiate liens or simply pass them through to you.
Provider balances. Some doctors treat under a letter of protection and get paid at the end. Those balances are negotiable too.
Case expenses. Records, reconstruction, expert review. We advance these while the case runs.
Your property damage claim stays separate from all of this. You can get the vehicle and the rental resolved while the injury case is still open, and you generally do not have to settle one to move the other.
For the full anatomy of injury fee agreements and what to ask before signing one, see our Houston personal injury lawyer page.
Car Accident Cases We Take
We handle crash claims from soft tissue injuries that will not resolve through catastrophic and fatal collisions.
- Rear-end and chain-reaction crashes
- Intersection and unprotected left turn collisions
- Feeder road and merge collisions
- Drunk and impaired driving crashes
- Distracted driving crashes
- Hit-and-run and unidentified driver claims
- Rideshare and delivery driver collisions
- Crashes causing brain injury, spinal injury, or death
If an 18-wheeler or commercial truck was involved, the rules and the deadlines are different. Start at our Houston truck accident lawyer page instead.
If a Drunk Driver Hit You, There May Be a Second Defendant
Texas allows claims against the bar, restaurant, or store that served an obviously intoxicated person who then caused a crash. These are called dram shop claims, and they matter because an individual drunk driver frequently carries minimum coverage while a commercial establishment carries a commercial policy.
The proof requirement is specific. It generally is not enough that the driver had been drinking somewhere. There has to be evidence the establishment served someone who was already obviously intoxicated to the point of being a clear danger.
Which is why these cases live or die on evidence that gets destroyed fast:
- Point of sale records showing how many drinks and over what period
- Interior video from the bar, usually on a short overwrite cycle
- Server and bartender identity before staff turns over
- Receipts, tabs, and card records
- Witnesses who were in the bar rather than at the crash
Nobody hands this over voluntarily, and none of it is in the crash report. It has to be demanded in writing, quickly, from a business that has no reason to help.
If you know or suspect the driver who hit you had been drinking somewhere before the crash, tell us where. That single detail sometimes doubles the available coverage in a case.
Who You Would Actually Be Hiring
Mr. Bryant is Board Certified in personal injury trial law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization, and he sat as a judge before he practiced on this side of it. Terry Bryant Accident & Injury Law has been trying injury cases in Houston since 1985.
The judge part is not a decoration. Sitting on a bench for years teaches you what a Harris County jury will not tolerate, which arguments collapse under their own weight, and what a defense lawyer is setting up three motions before they file it. That shows up in how a case gets built, not in how it gets advertised.
Cases here get filed where the crash happened or where the defendant lives. In practice that is usually the Harris County civil courthouse on Caroline Street, though Fort Bend, Montgomery, Galveston, and Brazoria all come up, and they do not move at the same pace or draw the same jury pool.
The firm is also recognized by the Texas Trial Lawyers Association, The National Trial Lawyers Top 100, and the Trucking Trial Lawyers Top 10. Prior results are published on our client victories page. Every case turns on its own facts, and past outcomes do not predict or guarantee any other result.
Where We Take Car Accident Cases
Our office sits on the Katy Freeway at 8584 Katy Freeway, Suite 100, and a large share of our caseload comes off that corridor and the Energy Corridor commute feeding it. We also maintain pages for the communities where we handle the most volume:
Consultas en español disponibles. Visite nuestra página en español.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I have to give the other driver's insurance company a recorded statement?
No. You are not required to give a recorded statement to the other driver's insurer and you generally should not. Adjusters are trained to ask questions that generate quotable answers about fault and injury severity. Your own policy does require cooperation with your own insurer, which is a separate obligation and still worth having a lawyer manage.
What if I did not feel hurt at the scene but I do now?
Get examined and tell the provider it started after a crash. Delayed symptoms are normal with soft tissue injuries, concussions, and disc injuries, because adrenaline masks pain for a day or two. Insurers use any gap between the crash and the first medical visit to argue the injury came from somewhere else, so the sooner you go, the smaller that gap is.
Can I still file if I was not wearing a seat belt?
Usually yes. Not wearing a seat belt does not automatically bar a Texas car accident claim, though the defense may raise it to argue your injuries would have been less severe. It becomes a fault allocation argument rather than an automatic loss, and it is worth discussing with a lawyer before you mention it to an adjuster.
The other driver got a ticket. Does that settle who was at fault?
It helps but it does not decide it. A citation is evidence, not a verdict, and the insurance company is free to dispute fault regardless of what the officer wrote at the scene. The reverse is also true. Plenty of strong claims involve no ticket at all.
How long will my Houston car accident case take?
Straightforward claims often resolve within a few months of finishing treatment. Serious injuries, disputed fault, or a filed lawsuit can push it past a year. The biggest single factor is your own medical care, because settling before you know your prognosis means guessing at your future costs.
Before You Call the Adjuster Back
The insurance company began building its version of your wreck the day it happened, and every week you spend deciding is a week it spends working. Call (713) 973-8888 and find out in ten minutes whether you actually need us. If you do not, we will tell you that, and it will still have been the most useful call you made this week.
No fee unless we recover money for you. Hablamos español.