Personal injury lawyer in San Antonio: Texas law, insurance and your claim

If you were hurt in San Antonio because someone else was careless, a personal injury lawyer’s job is to prove what happened, put a value on what it cost you and collect it from the people and insurers responsible. This page is the overview: who we are, the cases we handle, the Texas law that decides them, what happens after you call, and what it costs. It is written by LAWBOSS – Uvalle Law Firm, PLLC, and Personal Injury Lawyers SATX is our San Antonio website.

A Texas injury firm with an office in San Antonio

Personal Injury Lawyers SATX is the San Antonio website of LAWBOSS – Uvalle Law Firm, PLLC. We are a Texas personal injury law firm, not a referral service: when you call the number on this site, you reach LAWBOSS, and the attorneys who handle your claim are our own.

The firm was founded by Michael Uvalle, who worked for several of the largest insurance companies in Texas before he became a lawyer. He saw how adjusters value a claim, which records they look for, and why some claims are paid and others are pushed aside. He decided to switch sides and put that knowledge to work for injured people. Several of our attorneys took the same route, from adjusting, insurance defense or trial work for insurers to representing the people those insurers pay.

Our motto is Work Hard and Do Right. In practice that means we answer the phone at any hour, we tell you the truth about your claim, including when it is small or when we cannot help, and we explain every step before it happens. LAWBOSS has seven attorneys and offices in San Antonio, Houston and Dallas. More about the firm and its founder is on our about page and on the firm’s own website, lawboss.com.

Michael Uvalle, founding attorney

Michael Uvalle founded LAWBOSS – Uvalle Law Firm, PLLC. Before he became a lawyer he worked for several of the largest insurance companies in Texas, where he saw from the inside how injury claims are evaluated and defended. He decided to switch sides and use that knowledge for injured people, and the firm calls the result the Insurance Insider Advantage.

Several of the firm’s attorneys came the same way, as adjusters, insurance defense lawyers or trial attorneys for insurers, before they began representing injured Texans. They know which records an adjuster asks for, how a claim file is scored and when an offer is not the insurer’s last word.

The firm’s San Antonio office is rated 4.8 on Google from 701 reviews, as read in October 2026. You can read the reviews on Google.

The injury claims we take on in San Antonio

A personal injury claim is a claim for harm caused by someone else’s carelessness. Most of the calls we take in San Antonio start on the road, but not all of them. These are the kinds of cases the firm handles.

• Car wrecks. Rear-end collisions on I-35 and Loop 410, crashes at intersections, sideswipes in merging traffic and hit-and-run drivers.
• 18-wheeler and truck accidents. Freight traffic on I-35, I-10 and I-37, delivery trucks on city streets, and the federal rules trucking companies must follow.
• Motorcycle accidents. Riders hit by drivers who did not see them, and the helmet question insurers raise afterward.
• Drunk driver accidents. Crashes caused by an impaired driver, where Texas law can allow damages beyond ordinary compensation.
• Pedestrian, bicycle and rideshare crashes. People struck on foot or on a bike, and passengers or drivers hurt in an Uber or Lyft.
• Slip and fall and premises cases. Falls in stores, apartment complexes and parking lots caused by a hazard the owner should have fixed.
• Dog bites. Attacks by a dog whose owner knew, or should have known, it was dangerous.
• Work injuries. Injuries on the job, including claims against an employer that does not carry workers’ compensation, and claims against someone other than the employer.
• Catastrophic injuries and wrongful death. Brain and spinal cord injuries, paralysis and severe burns, and claims by families who have lost someone.

Road crashes have their own page: our accident lawyer San Antonio page covers what to do after a crash, the crash report and the roads where most of our cases begin. Injuries themselves, and the cases that do not involve a vehicle, are on our injury lawyer San Antonio page.

Every area of practice, wrongful death included, is listed on our practice areas page.

What happens after you call

1. Call us or send the form. Tell us what happened, when and where. The phones are answered 24 hours a day, and the first consultation is free.
2. An attorney reviews your claim. We look at the crash report, the insurance on both sides and your injuries, and tell you plainly whether we can help.
3. We gather the evidence. Photographs, the CR-3 crash report, witness names, requests to keep video, and your medical records and bills.
4. We deal with the insurers. Adjusters talk to us, not to you. When your treatment allows, we send a demand with the records behind every figure.
5. Settle, or take it to court. Many claims settle by negotiation. If an insurer will not be fair, we can file suit in the county where the case belongs.

Texas laws that decide every injury claim

Three parts of Texas law shape almost every claim we handle: how long you have to act, how fault is shared, and what can be recovered. Each section below is quoted or summarized from the current text on the Texas Legislature’s statutes site.

Two years to file suit

Civil Practice and Remedies Code section 16.003 requires a suit for personal injury to be brought not later than two years after the day the cause of action accrues, which in a crash is usually the day of the crash. For a death, the two years run from the date of death. If you do not file suit in time, the claim is normally lost, however strong it was. A settlement can be reached at any point inside those two years, but an insurer has no reason to pay a claim that can no longer be filed.

There are exceptions. Under section 16.001, the time a person is younger than 18, or of unsound mind, is not counted, so a child’s two years usually start at their 18th birthday. Claims against the government have much shorter notice deadlines, set out below.

The 51 percent rule

Texas shares fault by percentage under Chapter 33 of the Civil Practice and Remedies Code. A jury assigns a percentage of responsibility to each person who caused the harm, including you (section 33.003). Your damages are then reduced by your own percentage (section 33.012). Section 33.001 bars recovery entirely if your share is greater than 50 percent. So a driver found 20 percent at fault recovers 80 percent of their damages, and a driver found 51 percent at fault recovers nothing.

This is why insurers work hard to put some of the blame on the injured person, and why the first statements after a crash matter. A defendant may also ask the court to name a responsible third party, another person it says caused the harm, no later than 60 days before trial (section 33.004). A defendant found more than 50 percent responsible is jointly and severally liable for the damages (section 33.013), which matters when another party cannot pay.

Claims against the City, the county or the state

The Texas Tort Claims Act allows claims against a government unit for injury caused by an employee’s negligent use of a motor vehicle, and for some injuries caused by the condition or use of property (section 101.021). The government must receive notice of the claim within six months of the incident (section 101.101), and a city charter may set a shorter period. San Antonio’s does: Section 150 of the City Charter requires written notice to the City Manager or the City Clerk within 90 days, stating when, where and how the injury happened. Damages against a government unit are capped by section 101.023.

Who caused the harm	Notice deadline	Cap on damages for injury or death (section 101.023)
City of San Antonio (for example a city vehicle)	Written notice within 90 days (City Charter Section 150)	$250,000 for each person, $500,000 for each occurrence
Bexar County or another unit of local government	Notice within six months (section 101.101)	$100,000 for each person, $300,000 for each occurrence
The State of Texas (for example a state vehicle)	Notice within six months (section 101.101)	$250,000 for each person, $500,000 for each occurrence

VIA Metropolitan Transit, CPS Energy and SAWS each handle claims of their own, separately from the City. The notice rules do not apply when the government unit already has actual notice of the injury (section 101.101(c)), but nobody should count on that. If a bus, a city truck or a county vehicle was involved in your crash, call us early.

Damages beyond compensation

Most damages compensate you for what you lost. Exemplary damages, sometimes called punitive damages, punish. Section 41.003 allows them only when the harm results from fraud, malice or gross negligence, proved by clear and convincing evidence. Section 41.008 caps them, but the cap does not apply to certain felonies, including intoxication assault and intoxication manslaughter, which is why claims against drunk drivers are treated differently. Separately, section 41.0105 limits recovery of medical expenses to the amount actually paid or incurred, so what counts is what your providers were paid or are owed, not the first figure on the bill.

Our Texas personal injury laws page goes further: auto insurance, crash reports, rideshare and bar liability, wrongful death, venue and the rules on lawyers’ fees, each with its section number.

Insurance decides more claims than the facts do

In a crash claim the money usually comes from insurance, and this is where Michael Uvalle’s time on the insurance side is most useful. Texas requires only $30,000 of liability coverage for injury to one person (Transportation Code section 601.072), and many drivers carry only that. Your own policy may add two coverages that matter more than most people realize: personal injury protection (PIP), which pays medical bills and lost income whoever caused the crash, and uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage (UM/UIM), which pays when the other driver has no insurance or not enough. Both are part of every Texas auto policy unless a named insured rejected them in writing (Insurance Code sections 1952.101 and 1952.152).

How each of these pays, and in what order, is on our Texas personal injury laws page.

The first days after a crash

Get medical care, report the crash, photograph the scene and the vehicles, take the names of witnesses, and do not give the other driver’s insurer a recorded statement before you have spoken to a lawyer. The officer who investigates an injury crash files a Texas Peace Officer’s Crash Report, form CR-3, with TxDOT within 10 days, and you can buy a copy. The full checklist, with the Transportation Code sections behind each step, is on our accident lawyer San Antonio page.

How a personal injury claim moves forward

Most claims follow the same path. The first weeks are about evidence and medical care. We gather the crash report, photographs and witness statements, ask businesses and agencies to keep video before it is recorded over, and put the insurers on notice. While you treat, we collect your medical records and bills and keep track of lost pay.

When your doctors can say what your recovery looks like, we send the insurer a demand: the facts, the law, the records and the damages, in one package. Negotiation follows. If the insurer will not pay a fair figure, we can file suit. In Bexar County that means the civil district courts at 100 Dolorosa, where the local rules set a schedule for each case, require mediation before trial and aim to bring jury cases to trial within 18 months. Filing suit does not mean a trial: many cases settle at mediation or before.

Every step, with what we do and what you do at each one, is on our personal injury attorney San Antonio page.

What an injury claim can recover in Texas

Texas law sorts damages into kinds. Economic damages are the losses that can be counted: medical bills already paid or owed, future medical care, lost wages and the loss of the ability to earn in the future. Noneconomic damages are real losses that cannot be counted from a receipt: physical pain, mental anguish, physical impairment and disfigurement. Exemplary damages, explained above, are rare and require proof of gross negligence, malice or fraud.

We do not publish amounts from past cases, and no honest lawyer can tell you what your case is worth on the first call. What a claim is worth depends on the injury, the treatment, how it changes your life, who was at fault and by how much, and how much insurance there is. What we can tell you early is which of these facts help you, which hurt, and what we need to prove each one. How injuries are proved, and why some are harder to prove than others, is on our injury lawyer San Antonio page.

What it costs to hire us

The first consultation is free. If we take your case, we work on a contingency fee: our fee is a percentage of what we recover for you, agreed in writing before we start. Texas law requires every contingent fee contract to be in writing and signed by both the attorney and the client (Government Code section 82.065).

Ask any lawyer you speak to how their fee is calculated, whether it changes if a suit is filed, and how costs are handled. Our best personal injury lawyer San Antonio page lists the questions worth asking before you sign with anyone, us included.

Four facts about injury claims in San Antonio

• 46,744 crashes in Bexar County in 2025. TxDOT’s crash records count 46,744 reportable crashes in Bexar County in 2025, with 190 people killed and 759 suspected serious injuries (Crashes and Injuries by County, 2025, data as of April 7, 2026).
• Two Level I trauma centers. University Hospital in the Medical Center is the only adult and pediatric Level I trauma center in San Antonio. Brooke Army Medical Center at Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston is the other adult Level I center, and most of its trauma patients are civilians.
• 90 days to notify the City. Section 150 of the San Antonio City Charter requires written notice of an injury claim to the City Manager or City Clerk within 90 days. VIA, CPS Energy and SAWS each take their own claims.
• Fourteen civil district courts. Injury lawsuits in Bexar County are heard in the civil district courts at the courthouse at 100 Dolorosa. Their local rules aim to bring jury cases to trial within 18 months and require mediation at least 45 days before trial.

San Antonio, Bexar County and the towns around it

Most of our San Antonio cases begin on a handful of roads: I-35 through downtown and out to the northeast, I-10 from the Medical Center to downtown and east toward Seguin, I-37 to the south, Loop 410 and Loop 1604 around the city, US 281 to the north, and busy arterials such as Bandera Road and SH 151. People seriously hurt there are often taken to University Hospital, on Medical Drive in the South Texas Medical Center, or to Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston.

Where a lawsuit is filed matters. Civil Practice and Remedies Code section 15.002 generally places a suit in the county where all or a substantial part of the events happened, so a crash in San Antonio is usually a Bexar County case. We also represent people from the towns around the city:

We also represent people from New Braunfels, Schertz, Converse, Universal City, Live Oak, Leon Valley, Helotes, Boerne and Seguin. Which county each town sits in, the roads that run through it and where a suit about a crash there would be filed are on our areas we serve page.

Before you hire anyone

You can check any Texas lawyer’s license and discipline history on the State Bar of Texas website, and you should. Be wary of anyone who contacts you about your crash before you have contacted them: Texas law makes it a crime for a lawyer to send a written solicitation about a personal injury claim before the 31st day after the accident (Penal Code section 38.12). Ask who will actually handle your case, how they will keep you informed and how the fee works.

Our best personal injury lawyer San Antonio page sets out every check we would make if we were choosing a lawyer ourselves.