Texas Dram Shop Law Helps the Victims of Drunk Driving
For many people, an understanding of dram shop law begins and ends with the phrase "person sues bar." Many people have made it a point to object to this idea, considering it unfair that an establishment that serves alcohol should be held accountable for doing what they're paid to do--serving a patron. Without looking any...
How Drunk is a .32 BAC and How Dangerous Is It?
Toxicology results suggest that many people arrested for intoxication have a BAC in the range of .15 to .30—well over the legal limit, with the latter number approaching potentially lethal levels. Some accounts actually suggest that the highest BAC ever recorded in the United States was in 1982, when an unidentified 24-year-old woman staggered into...
How Does a Texas Jury Apportion Responsibility Between a Bar and a Drunk Driver?
I talk a lot about Texas dram shop law, where an establishment that serves alcohol may be held liable if a drunk person causes injury to himself or others, but it's definitely important to keep individual accountability in the equation. Dram shop laws don't excuse drunk drivers; it just acknowledges that the bars who provided...
How Trucking Companies Hide Behind Intentional Tort Arguments
By paying a monthly fee to an insurance agency, people essentially place a bet that something bad will happen to them or their property. To "win" on that bet, the insured must first actually lose by incurring serious damages. Depending on the policy in question, that could mean anything from a home ruined by a...
What’s the Difference Between Compensation and Restitution?
A common question we receive when someone calls us after they or a loved one has been involved in an accident is, "Won't the courts make the person who hurt me pay restitution?" As with many questions in the law, the answer to that question can be complex, because the law permits two different avenues...
Seeing the Signs: How We Spot Possible Dram Shop Accidents
Drunk driving appears to be a blind spot in our national consciousness. I cannot think of a single person, no matter how contrarian, who could compellingly argue that this practice has positive benefits. It's dangerous, it's illegal, and it flies in the face of common sense. I doubt I need to be worried about some...
Are Wet Road Conditions Grounds for an Act of God Defense?
While crashes due to inclement weather are not uncommon across the United States, I recently learned of an incident here in Texas, which prompted me to write a little more in-depth about the phenomenon. In wet, foggy conditions, a tractor-trailer hydroplaned just outside of Midland. It entered oncoming traffic and collided with a passenger vehicle,...
A Look at Commercial Truck Emergency Signal Regulations
Just before sunrise, January 9, 2017, Alex A. Ortega was killed in a collision with an 18-wheeler, which was reportedly blocking the intersection of County Road 1160 and Business 20 near Midland, Texas. According to news accounts, the truck stalled while crossing through the intersection before being struck by Mr. Ortega's vehicle. Without knowing more...
A Quick Refresher on Texas Dram Shop Law
Texas dram shop cases are seldom cut and dried. It's an important element of tort law; after all, bars and restaurants that over-serve their customers deserve to be held accountable for putting profits before safety. While the intoxicated individual most certainly owns a significant share of the responsibility—failing to observe his or her own limits,...
Is the 2017 Plains Ice Storm an Act of God, Legally Speaking?
This past weekend, an ice storm coated parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri with up to an inch of ice. As a result hundreds of thousands of people lost power, there were massive disruptions, and most tragically, 6 people are known to have lost their lives in storm-related traffic accidents. There is no word...
The Case of Caden Nieneker: How Do Texas Dram Shop Laws Relate to House Parties?
On the surface, house parties seem like a great idea. However, they can have downsides: Food and drinks may run out, the bathroom line can get ridiculous, some people don't know when to stop drinking (often with disastrous results), and depending on your guest list there's a risk of illegal underage consumption that's better controlled...
Stopping the Buck: Rose City Tragedy and Truck Accident Liability
President Harry Truman famously had a placard on his desk that read "The Buck Stops Here." The phrase ultimately means that one must take responsibility for their decisions and actions, and shouldn't "pass the buck" to avoid any consequences. That idealism is laudable, of course, but ducking blame has been practiced for millennia and shows...
How Trucking Company Lawyers Shift Blame Following an Accident
Defense Attorneys Say The Darnedest Things About a year ago, one of our firm's attorneys, Keith Purdue, was taking the deposition of a trucking company's "safety manager." This deposition was a fairly heated affair, wherein we were essentially accusing the man being deposed of having a largely ceremonious title and/or a job that merely existed...
How Can Human Perception Affect A Motorcycle Accident Case?
Perception is tricky. Two people can parse an image or a situation differently even when receiving identical input. Take this classic example: Or try this: Visual tricks like these have been around for years and illustrate a crucial point known to cognitive scientists and illusionists alike: In some instances, our senses lie to us. This...
Liability for Highway Obstructions in Texas Law
We have noticed a lot of news reports lately about motorists who for one reason or another collide with the rear of a tractor-trailer. Fault in these instances is always case-specific. Sometimes it falls on the passenger vehicle's driver; in other instances, fault lies with the trucker. There are even accidents where inclement weather or...
iFault: Should Apple Be Implicated in Distracted Driving Injuries?
Most people are passingly familiar with the psychological theory of classical conditioning, the process behind the famous "Pavlov's Dog" experiments. In that casee, the researcher takes an object of strong positive stimulus (food) and an object of neutral stimulus (a ringing bell). Over the course of the experiment, the dog is neurologically conditioned to anticipate...
Walk the Line: Pedestrians and the Texas Transportation Code
Texas is a pretty driving-intensive state, given its span of almost 270,000 square miles. Texans are used to sort of sprawling out horizontally, which means a lot of vehicular travel to get from living space to work space to activities and leisure destinations. That said, we're not without our share of pedestrians. They're not as...
What Do I Do If I’m in an 18-Wheeler Chain Reaction Accident?
On December 30, 2016, a chain-reaction collision begun by a 2001 Freightliner tractor-trailer led to one fatality and ten injured people on westbound Interstate 40 in St. Francis County, Arkansas. According to the official report filed by the Arkansas state highway patrol, six passenger vehicles were moving slowly in a line as traffic passed by...
“Blade” Crossbows with Faulty Safety Recalled by Carbon Express
A popular model of crossbow has recently been recalled by its manufacturer after a consumer experienced injury from a misfire. According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the manufacturer has issued a voluntary recall after receiving reports that a faulty safety still permits the crossbow to fire when engaged. Obviously this poses a...
Attorneys Indicted for $6 Million Porn-Piracy Extortion Scam
Ingenuity is more or less the notion of approaching an issue in a novel manner. The ability to creatively solve problems is invaluable; to take a perpendicular approach to a matter that has stymied traditional methods is sometimes the only way to solve it. Unfortunately, people perceive "problems" differently. For instance, two attorneys recently decided...
