Truck Accident Lawyer in Texas

Texas's statute of limitations for personal injury claims, including commercial truck crashes, is two years under Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 16.003. Texas also applies modified comparative fault with a 51% bar under Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 33.001 (the "proportionate responsibility" rule): if a jury finds you more than 50% at fault, you recover nothing. Trucking insurers know the bar and will push hard to pin responsibility on the injured driver. Counsel's job is to deploy FMCSA evidence — hours-of-service logs, drug test results, driver qualification files — to shift fault onto the carrier before the narrative settles.

Texas adopts the federal FMCSA rules (49 CFR Parts 390-399) for intrastate commercial motor vehicles through Tex. Transp. Code § 644.051, which directs the Texas Department of Public Safety to incorporate the federal safety standards into Texas regulations. Enforcement is handled by the DPS Motor Carrier Bureau and DPS Commercial Vehicle Enforcement. That means a federal safety violation — whether by an interstate or an intrastate Texas carrier — can support negligence per se in Texas state court.

A Texas truck case typically involves multiple defendants: the driver, the motor carrier both vicariously and for direct negligent hiring, training, and supervision claims, the tractor or trailer owner if different from the carrier, the cargo loader, the maintenance contractor, and sometimes a component manufacturer. Federal law (49 CFR § 387.9) sets the interstate carrier minimum at $750,000 for general freight and $5 million for bulk hazmat. These ceilings dwarf Texas's 30/60/25 personal auto minimum and are the reason serious-injury truck cases recover substantially more than comparable auto cases.

Oil and gas field trucking — frac sand haulers, crude oil tankers, and heavy equipment transporters in the Permian Basin and Eagle Ford Shale — generates a disproportionate share of Texas's most severe truck crashes. Intrastate-only oil field carriers sometimes argue they are not subject to federal FMCSA rules under the "oil field operations" exception in 49 CFR § 395.1(d). The scope of that exception is narrower than carriers typically claim, and a skilled Texas truck accident attorney can often defeat it — opening up the federal negligence-per-se theory and the deeper insurance pools that come with it.