San AntonioCar AccidentLawyer

You did everything right.

Green light, both hands on the wheel, kids buckled in the back. Somebody else decided their text, their hurry, or their sixth beer mattered more, and now you’re the one in the imaging center.

I’m Guy Muller, a car accident lawyer in San Antonio. Texas law generally puts the cost of a wreck on the driver who caused it, usually through their liability insurance (the coverage that exists to pay the people its driver hurts), and making that happen in real life is my job. It’s my name on the door, so it’s me you talk to.

Driving comes with a deal every one of us makes with everybody else out there: watch the road, keep your distance, stay sober, leave the phone alone. You kept your end. The deal only works when breaking it costs the person who broke it, and that part, the enforcement, is what I do.

Why “minor” car accidents usually aren’t

The insurance company loves a photo of a lightly scratched bumper. Bumpers are built to bounce back. Necks and backs heal slowly, when they heal all the way at all. A crash your car shrugged off can still leave you with whiplash (neck muscles and ligaments stretched past their limits), a concussion you got without ever hitting your head, disc injuries, and pain that shows up two days later instead of two minutes. Adrenaline lies. Two mornings later, your neck won’t turn.

So see a doctor within a day or two, even if you feel mostly fine. The gap between a crash and the first medical visit is often the adjuster’s favorite argument, and it’s an easy one to never hand them.

How much insurance does the other driver probably have?

Often, the legal minimum. Texas generally requires drivers to carry $30,000 in injury liability coverage per person, $60,000 per crash, and $25,000 for property damage. One trip to a San Antonio emergency room can pass $30,000 without a single surgery, and some drivers carry nothing at all.

That’s why the real work in a car accident case is often finding every policy that may apply, and there may be more than the one on the police report:

• The at-fault driver’s liability policy, the obvious starting point.
• Your own uninsured/underinsured motorist coverage, or UM/UIM (the part of your own policy that can step in when the other driver has too little or nothing). Bring your policy to the consultation and we’ll read it together.
• Personal injury protection, or PIP (a smaller coverage that may already be on your own policy).
• A commercial policy, if the driver was on the clock when they hit you.
• A dram shop claim against a bar or restaurant that kept serving someone who was obviously, dangerously drunk and whose intoxication caused the crash. Bars that train staff under state-approved programs may have a defense, so these cases turn heavily on the specific facts.

The insurance company may offer its limits fast and call the offer generous. Fast money may also be the cheapest exit they’ll ever buy, and a release (the document that ends your claim permanently) can’t be unsigned. Before you take anything, make sure somebody has hunted through the whole chain.

What if a city vehicle or government truck hit me?

Different rulebook, shorter clock. Claims against governmental units in Texas generally require the government to receive written notice within six months of the incident under state law, but San Antonio’s own city charter shortens that to 90 days, and some other cities set even shorter deadlines. Texas law also caps how much a governmental unit has to pay, regardless of how serious the injury is, and depending on which entity is involved, that cap can be as low as $100,000 per person. Those caps make it important to identify every possible defendant and every possible insurance source early. If any government vehicle touched your crash, a police cruiser, a city truck, a VIA bus, a school district vehicle, treat the timeline as urgent and get advice from day one.

The adjuster says I was partly at fault. Now what?

Texas splits blame by percentage under proportionate responsibility rules. If you’re found more than 50 percent responsible, you generally recover nothing. At 50 percent or below, your recovery is generally trimmed by your share. That math is the whole story behind the adjuster’s early fault theories: every point of blame parked on you is a discount for them.

The percentage they float on a phone call is a negotiating position. You can generally decline to accept it, and decline the recorded statement altogether, until someone has actually investigated your crash.

What should I do after a car accident in San Antonio?

Call 911 and get the crash report started, then let your phone work for you: photos of both vehicles where they stopped, the intersection, skid marks, debris, your visible injuries, the other driver’s plate and insurance card, and the names and numbers of anyone who saw it. Get checked by a doctor within a couple of days even if you walked away. Keep everything after that: bills, work notes, mileage to appointments, all of it.

And before you return the other insurance company’s friendly call, talk to somebody whose only job is you. The consultation is free, and you talk to me. If I take your case, my fee is a percentage of the recovery, agreed in writing up front, and I’ll explain before you sign whether you could owe case expenses even if there’s no recovery.

How long do I have to file a car accident claim in Texas?

Generally two years from the date of the crash. That window can run shorter if a government vehicle was involved, since San Antonio’s own charter gives the city just 90 days’ notice, and longer if the injured person was a minor or lacked mental capacity at the time of the crash. Two years sounds like plenty. It goes fast when you’re healing. And the practical deadline usually arrives sooner anyway. Intersection cameras and dashcams overwrite themselves, vehicles get repaired or scrapped along with the data inside them, and witness memories soften by the week. Cases get built out of what somebody bothered to save.

From the far West Side to Helotes

I handle car accident cases across San Antonio and all of Bexar County, from an office on Hausman Road on the northwest side, just inside Loop 1604, about two miles from the Helotes city line. I-10, Loop 410, Loop 1604, Bandera Road, Culebra, and the neighborhood streets where a school-run fender bender turns out to have hurt somebody after all. If you’re in Helotes, Grey Forest, Leon Valley, or anywhere between, you’re close. And most of the case runs by phone and text anyway, so the driving stays my problem, and the healing stays your job. I’m licensed to practice law in Texas.

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