How long does a Texas injury claim actually take?

Week one: treatment and preservation

Two things happen at once, and both are urgent for different reasons.

You get treated. A gap between the injury and your first appointment is the first argument an adjuster makes, and head and soft-tissue injuries routinely present a day or two later.

And the evidence gets held. Business and doorbell cameras overwrite within days. Vehicles are repaired or sold for salvage, taking any onboard crash data with them. A commercial carrier’s dashcam cycles in days and its hours-of-service records need only survive six months. A preservation letter sent now holds material that is simply gone by month three.

Weeks one to four: investigation

The crash or incident report is obtained, witnesses are interviewed while they can still be found, and the scene is documented.

In parallel, coverage is identified. Not just the obvious defendant’s policy but every layer that might apply: an employer’s commercial cover, an umbrella policy, a property owner, a manufacturer, and your own uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage.

This is also when a governmental defendant has to be spotted, because a notice deadline against a city or transit authority can be ninety days.

Months one to nine: you treat, the firm handles the rest

Your job is to get better and keep your appointments. Missed visits and gaps do more damage to a genuine claim than almost anything else.

Meanwhile the adjusters, the bills and the paperwork are handled for you, and the medical record — which is the foundation of everything that follows — is assembled as it is created rather than reconstructed later.

An offer will probably arrive during this period. It will be framed as help with immediate bills, and it will be low, because nobody yet knows what your treatment involves.

At maximum medical improvement: valuation

MMI is the point at which your doctors can say where your recovery has landed — recovered, or permanently changed and by how much.

Only then can the claim be valued: past and future medical care, lost earnings and lost earning capacity, and the human cost of the injury. In a catastrophic case this is where a life care planner and an economist come in.

Valuing it earlier is guesswork, and the guess belongs to whoever makes the offer.

One to three months: demand and negotiation

A demand package presents the medical evidence, the liability evidence and the legal basis, and negotiation follows.

Most claims resolve here or shortly after. If yours does, the remaining work is resolving medical liens and any health plan’s right of reimbursement, which determines how much of the settlement you actually keep.

Nine to eighteen months more, if suit is filed

If the offer does not reflect what the case is worth, suit is filed. Filing is often what moves the number, because it changes the cost of continuing to refuse.

Then discovery — written questions, document production, depositions — followed in Bexar County by mediation, which the courts refer nearly every contested civil case to.

Most filed cases still settle, usually at mediation. A small share are tried. Every case is prepared as though yours will be, because that is what makes the settlement worth taking.

Common questions