A negligence claim in Texas turns on four things. Somebody owed a duty of care, they breached it, the breach caused harm, and the harm can be measured. Immigration status is not among them.
The Piri Law Firm spends a meaningful part of its personal injury practice explaining that sentence to people who assumed the opposite, and who had therefore already decided not to make a claim.
The assumption is understandable. A person without status has spent years learning that formal systems are places where questions get asked. A courthouse is a formal system. The instinct to stay away from it is the same instinct that has kept them safe elsewhere, and it is worth a great deal of money to the insurer on the other side of the crash.
The calculation people make is not irrational, only badly informed. They weigh an uncertain recovery against what feels like a certain risk of exposure. Nobody has told them that the four elements are the whole test, or that whether a driver ran a red light has nothing to do with the paperwork of the person they hit.
“The driver’s insurance company is not confused about who has a claim. They are relying on the injured person being confused about it.”
What follows from that instinct is predictable. No police report, or a report the injured person did not stay to correct. No ambulance, because an ambulance means a hospital and a hospital means paperwork. Treatment delayed until the pain is unbearable, at which point the insurer argues the injury cannot have come from the collision because nobody sought care for three weeks.
Each of those is a gap in the evidence rather than a gap in the law. The claim was always there. It got harder to prove.
The window for fixing that is short. Skid marks disappear, vehicles get repaired or scrapped, witnesses stop answering unknown numbers, and the other driver’s version of the collision hardens into the one everybody works from. Most of what a lawyer can do in the first fortnight cannot be done in the third month.
The Piri Law Firm handles immigration, crimmigration, criminal defence, personal injury and family law from an office on Ross Avenue in downtown Dallas, serving Dallas, Fort Worth, Arlington, Irving, Grand Prairie, Plano, Garland and Richardson. Keeping injury work in the same practice as immigration work is a deliberate arrangement rather than an accident of growth. It means one office can answer both halves of the question a frightened client is actually asking, which is not only whether they have a case but whether pursuing it will cost them something worse.
“People ask two questions in the same breath. Do I have a claim, and will making it get me deported. If your lawyer can only answer one of them you are going to get advice that is half right.”
The firm’s practical guidance after a collision is the same for everybody and matters more for clients without status. Get medical attention, on the day if possible, because the record of treatment is the record of the injury. Photograph the vehicles, the road and anything visible on your body. Get the other driver’s insurance details. Do not give a recorded statement to their insurer before you have spoken to a lawyer.
Michael Piri works in English, Spanish and French. He read International Politics and International Law at the American University of Paris and took his law degree at Saint Mary’s University School of Law in San Antonio. The firm works on contingency in injury matters and offers a free 30-minute consultation.
For somebody weighing whether to call at all, that half hour costs nothing and answers the question that has been keeping them from making the claim. The law on the four elements has not changed. What tends to change is whether anybody told the injured person what the four elements are.
