Who Can File a Wrongful Death Claim in Texas?
Under the Texas Wrongful Death Act (Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code ch. 71), the surviving spouse, children, and parents of the person who died can bring the claim. A separate survival claim, brought through the estate, recovers what the person themselves suffered, the conscious pain and the medical expenses, between the crash and death.
What a Fatal Truck Case Can Recover
A wrongful death claim can recover the family’s lost financial support, lost companionship and guidance, and mental anguish. The survival claim adds the pain your loved one endured. These are not small cases, and the law does not ask grieving families to put a tidy number on an immeasurable loss alone. That is what the case is for.
Gross Negligence: When the Conduct Supports Punitive Damages
Texas allows exemplary, or punitive, damages when a trucking company acts with gross negligence (Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code ch. 41): actual awareness of an extreme risk, met with conscious indifference. Sending a truck out with known-bad brakes, knowingly forcing a driver past the hours-of-service limits, or falsifying logs to hide it is the kind of conduct that supports it. In one of our cases, a company falsified a driver’s logs after a child was killed, and we proved it. Our oilfield trucking page tells that story.
Most cases settle, and the number they settle at depends on whether the other side believes your case is ready for a courtroom. Ours always are; our Truck Accidents page shows exactly how we prepare one.
Go Deeper
The hub. Every company in the chain, and how we prepare these cases for court.
Truck AccidentsLease roads, fatigue, and federal motor carrier rules.
Oilfield TruckingThe head-on look at semi-truck crash cases.
18-Wheeler AccidentsThe two-claim structure Texas law gives surviving families, across every case type.
Wrongful Death
