Houston Personal Injury Lawsuit: Deadlines, Fault, and Damages

A personal injury lawsuit in Houston is a civil case filed in a Harris County district court seeking money damages for an injury caused by someone else’s negligence, and it runs on Texas’s two-year filing deadline, a modified comparative-fault rule, mandatory mediation before trial, and a heavily backlogged docket that pushes most cases toward settlement. Nearly every claim is handled on contingency, so you pay no attorney’s fee unless you recover.

The Two-Year Deadline That Governs Everything

Under Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code § 16.003(a), you have two years from the date of the injury to file suit. Miss it, and a Texas court will almost certainly dismiss the case.¹²

The exceptions are narrow. The clock is paused for minors until they turn 18 and for people who are mentally incapacitated. For injuries that are inherently undiscoverable when they happen, such as a surgical sponge left inside a patient or an asbestos illness that surfaces decades later, the discovery rule starts the two-year period when the injury is discovered or reasonably should have been. If the at-fault party leaves Texas, the limitations period may be tolled for the duration of their absence. Wrongful-death claims run from the date of death. Texas courts enforce these deadlines strictly and are less willing than courts in some other states to stretch the discovery rule.³²

Claims Against a Government Body Have Shorter Notice Deadlines

Suing a government entity carries extra hurdles. The Texas Tort Claims Act requires formal notice to the state or a county within six months of the incident, and some cities require notice in as little as 30 days. The two-year filing deadline still applies, but damages are capped at $250,000 per person and $500,000 per occurrence against the state or a municipality, and $100,000 against a unit of local government or an emergency-services organization.³⁴ The Texas Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that these caps are jurisdictional, meaning a court lacks the power to award more than the statutory limit and the plaintiff must prove which cap applies.⁵

How the Case Moves From Injury to Resolution

Medical Treatment Comes First

Treatment is step one, and not only for health reasons. Medical records are the evidentiary backbone of the claim, and gaps in treatment or missed appointments can erode case value later.⁶

If you lack health insurance, many Houston providers will treat you under a Letter of Protection (LOP). The LOP is a written agreement among you, your attorney, and the provider: the provider treats you now and waits for payment until the case resolves, and your attorney agrees to pay the bill out of any settlement or verdict.⁷ An LOP keeps bills out of collections during litigation, but if the case fails, you still owe the full amount.⁸ Defense attorneys sometimes argue the arrangement biases the treating doctor’s testimony.

Demand, Then Filing

Once you reach maximum medical improvement, your attorney assembles medical bills, lost-wage documentation, and other expenses into a demand package and sends it to the at-fault party’s insurer.⁶⁹¹⁰

Discovery

After the defendant answers, both sides enter discovery, the mandatory exchange of evidence. Texas Rule of Civil Procedure 190 assigns a level to each case. Most serious personal injury suits fall under Level 2, which allows discovery until 30 days before trial, with up to 50 hours of depositions per side and up to 25 written interrogatories. Smaller claims under $250,000 run on an expedited Level 1 track with a 180-day discovery window and 20 total deposition hours.¹¹

Discovery tools include interrogatories, document requests, requests for admission, and depositions taken under oath with a court reporter.¹² In truck-accident and industrial-negligence cases, attorneys often send spoliation letters early to preserve electronic evidence like black-box telematics data and internal corporate communications. Harris County judges expect parties to resolve discovery disputes themselves and may order attorney’s fees against a party that forces unnecessary court involvement.¹³

Discovery typically runs six months to a year, and complex cases take longer.¹⁴ Harris County’s backlog adds to those timelines. More than 150,000 cases were filed across the county’s 67 district courts in 2023, averaging nearly 2,500 per courtroom, and no new civil district courts had been created in the county in more than 50 years as of early 2025.¹⁵

Mediation Before Trial

Harris County district courts generally require mediation before trial.¹³ Mediation is a confidential negotiation session run by a neutral third party, often a retired judge or experienced attorney, who shuttles between the sides’ rooms relaying offers. The mediator cannot force a settlement, and nothing said during the session can be used later in court.¹⁶ If the parties cannot agree, the mediator may issue a mediator’s proposal, a suggested number both sides can accept or reject within a set deadline.¹⁷

About 95 percent of personal injury cases resolve through settlement rather than a jury verdict.¹⁸ Realistic leverage usually builds after key depositions and once medical records are finalized. The path to a fair settlement often runs through trial readiness, because the looming cost and unpredictability of trial is what motivates insurers to make reasonable offers.¹⁹

Trial

If settlement fails, the case goes to a jury: jury selection, opening statements, witness testimony, cross-examination, closing arguments, instructions, and verdict.²⁰ Cases that reach trial can take several years from the date of injury to a final resolution, especially in a venue as backlogged as Harris County.¹⁴

How Fault Affects What You Recover

Texas uses a modified comparative-fault system with a 51 percent bar. Under Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code § 33.001, if you are more than 50 percent at fault for your own injury, you recover nothing. At or below the 50 percent line, your award is reduced by your share of fault. If a jury finds you 30 percent responsible for a crash that caused $100,000 in damages, you take home $70,000.²¹

When multiple defendants are involved, the jury assigns a percentage of fault to each party, including any responsible third parties a defendant has designated. If a single defendant is found 51 percent or more responsible, that defendant faces joint and several liability, meaning you can collect the entire judgment from them alone.²² Defense attorneys routinely use the responsible-third-party designation to spread blame and push each defendant’s share below that threshold.

Where Damage Caps Apply, and Where They Don’t

Most personal injury cases in Texas have no statutory cap on compensatory damages. A jury can award whatever it deems appropriate for medical bills, lost income, pain and suffering, and other losses.²³

The major exception is medical malpractice. Under reforms enacted in 2003 through House Bill 4, non-economic damages in medical malpractice cases are capped at $250,000 per individual physician or health-care provider and $250,000 per health-care institution, with a combined maximum of $750,000 when multiple providers and institutions are involved. Economic damages are not capped.²⁴ Punitive damages, reserved for gross negligence or intentional wrongdoing, are capped at the greater of $750,000 or twice the amount of economic damages awarded.²³

Insurance Realities That Shape a Houston Case

Minimum Coverage and the UM/UIM Trap

Texas requires drivers to carry at least $30,000 per person and $60,000 per accident in bodily-injury liability coverage, plus $25,000 for property damage.²⁵ Those minimums are often inadequate for a serious injury, and more than 14 percent of Texas drivers carry no insurance at all.²⁶

Uninsured/underinsured motorist coverage (UM/UIM) fills that gap. Texas insurers must offer it, and a policyholder has to reject it in writing to decline it.²⁷ UM/UIM claims are often adversarial, because your own insurance company steps into the shoes of the at-fault driver and is allowed to dispute both fault and the extent of damages.²⁶ One procedural trap matters a great deal: you must notify your own insurer before settling with the at-fault driver’s carrier, or you risk losing your UIM benefits entirely.

Bad Faith and the Stowers Demand

When an insurer unreasonably denies or delays a valid claim, Texas law provides two bad-faith avenues: common-law bad faith, which requires proof the insurer knew or should have known the claim was legitimate, and statutory bad faith under Chapter 541 of the Texas Insurance Code, which prohibits deceptive and unfair practices from misrepresenting policy terms to using threats to coerce claimants.²⁸

A Texas-only doctrine, the Stowers demand, shapes most significant Houston personal injury negotiations. If a plaintiff’s attorney sends the at-fault party’s insurer a formal settlement demand within policy limits and the insurer rejects it, the insurer takes a real risk. Should a jury later return a verdict exceeding the policy limit, the defendant can assign their bad-faith claim to the plaintiff, potentially forcing the insurer to pay the full excess judgment.²⁹ Proving liability was “reasonably clear” when the demand was rejected is the hardest piece of a Stowers claim.

The Non-Subscriber Wrinkle in Workplace Injuries

Texas is the only state that does not require private employers to carry workers’ compensation insurance. Employers that opt out are called non-subscribers, and roughly 22 percent of Texas businesses fall into that category,³⁰ generating nearly 75,000 non-subscriber injury claims per year statewide.³¹

Employers who carry workers’ comp are largely shielded from employee lawsuits. Non-subscribers lose that shield and also forfeit key defenses: they cannot argue the worker’s own negligence caused the injury, that a co-worker was at fault, or that the worker knowingly accepted the risk.³² That makes non-subscriber lawsuits easier to win than typical negligence claims, and damages can be far broader. Unlike workers’ comp benefits, which generally cover only medical expenses and a portion of lost wages, a non-subscriber lawsuit allows recovery for pain and suffering, mental anguish, disfigurement, and even punitive damages.³¹

What a Case Is Worth

Settlement amounts vary enormously with the type and severity of injury. For Texas car accidents, soft-tissue strains and mild concussions typically settle for $5,000 to $25,000, fractures and disc injuries for $30,000 to $100,000, and severe or catastrophic injuries for several hundred thousand dollars and up.²⁵ Slip-and-fall claims settle for roughly $15,000 to $45,000 on average, though severe spinal or brain injury cases can reach $500,000 or more.¹⁸ Truck accident settlements run higher because of more severe injuries and larger insurance policies, with estimates of $100,000 to $500,000 for moderate injuries and $1 million to $5 million or more for wrongful-death claims.³³

The average Texas personal injury jury verdict has been reported at about $827,000, but the median is just $12,281, which shows how a handful of massive awards pull the average up while most cases resolve for far more modest sums.³⁴

Nuclear Verdicts and Why They Often Shrink

Harris County has become one of the country’s epicenters for nuclear verdicts, jury awards of $10 million or more. Between 2013 and 2023, Texas recorded 207 such verdicts totaling over $45 billion, the fourth-most of any state.³⁵ In May 2025, a Harris County jury returned a $640 million verdict in a wrongful-death case against TNT Crane & Rigging after a construction worker was crushed by an unsecured load during 45 mph wind gusts, consisting of roughly $160 million in compensatory damages and $480 million in punitive damages.³⁶

That verdict did not stick. Both sides filed a joint motion to abate the appeal in September 2025 after reaching a private settlement, and in October 2025 the Court of Appeals vacated the trial court’s judgment and remanded for entry of a judgment consistent with the settlement.³⁷ That outcome is common: massive verdicts generate headlines, but many are reduced, reversed, or quietly settled.

In 2023, the Texas Supreme Court tightened the rules on noneconomic damages in Gregory v. Chohan, ruling that arguments for pain-and-suffering awards must have a “rational connection, grounded in the evidence” to the injuries at issue. Comparing a widow’s grief to the price of a $71 million fighter jet, as counsel had done in that case, was declared an impermissible appeal to irrelevant considerations, and the damages award was reversed.³⁸ Appellate courts have since broadened that scrutiny to references to luxury goods, CEO salaries, and company asset values offered as benchmarks for human suffering.³⁹

What Hiring a Lawyer Costs

Nearly all Houston personal injury attorneys work on contingency, so you pay no fee up front. The attorney collects a percentage of the recovery only if the case succeeds. The typical split is roughly 33 percent if the case settles before a lawsuit is filed, 36 to 40 percent after suit is filed and the case enters litigation, and up to 40 percent if the case goes to trial or appeal.⁴⁰⁴¹

These percentages are not set by law and are negotiable. Texas has no statutory cap on contingency fees, though Rule 1.04 of the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct requires fees to be “reasonable” in light of the case’s complexity and result.⁴¹ All contingency agreements must be in writing and must specify whether the percentage is calculated on the gross recovery or the net amount after case expenses are deducted, a distinction that can significantly affect your take-home amount.⁴⁰

Case costs are separate from the attorney’s fee and cover items like filing fees, deposition transcripts, medical-record retrieval, expert-witness fees, and court reporters. Most firms advance these costs and recoup them from the settlement. Whether you owe anything for costs if the case is lost depends on the specific terms of your fee agreement.⁴² Hospital liens filed under Texas Property Code Chapter 55 and any outstanding Letters of Protection are also paid out of the settlement before you receive your share.⁷

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