Life doesn’t come with prior notice. You’re driving on MoPac, and then you have medical bills, lost wages (or worse, lost job) and an insurance adjuster who “needs to get back to you” but never actually does.
Enter the negligence lawyer, and if you are in Austin you have a lot to choose from negligence lawyer Austin Texas. Good ones. But choosing a lawyer isn’t like choosing the best breakfast taco joint (though Austinites are concerned about the latter).
What’s Negligence, anyway?
The quick and dirty of it is this. Negligence is that someone owes you a duty of care, they don’t exercise that duty of care, and you’re hurt because they don’t exercise that duty of care. Car accidents. Slip and falls. Medical errors. Dog bites. A defective stair in an apartment building that breaks at 2 o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon. All of these examples can be negligence claims.
We have a “modified comparative fault” doctrine in Texas. Fancy way of saying: if you’re partly to blame, you’ll have the damages you get reduced by your percentage of fault. And if you were more than 50% at fault, you get nothing. That’s why you need to have a lawyer who knows Texas’ legal system.
Austin is Its Own Animal
Austin isn’t Houston. It isn’t Dallas. The judges, the jurors, the process is all Austin. The Travis County attorney knows things the out-of-town firm doesn’t. Which judges move fast. What works with Austin juries. Where the inefficiencies lie in the local process.
Local knowledge is more than ideal. It is the difference between settlement and litigation.
How to Select a Negligence Attorney
Skip the billboards. Seriously. This does not mean that if they have money they must be good lawyers.
Instead, ask these questions:
– Do they have experience with the type of case you have?
– Are they trial lawyers, or will they settlements every case to get it over with?
– Will the lawyer you spoke to be working on your case or some paralegal you’ve never seen?
– How do they charge? The majority of negligence attorneys in Austin work on a no-win-no fee basis.
That last point matters. Contingency means they have an incentive to get you the best possible result. Skin in the game, as they say.