What Are My Rights if a Loved One Dies in a Texas Industrial Accident?

In terms of a fatality, there are some laws that are a little bit different in Texas when it comes to workers’ compensation. If somebody dies in an industrial accident and let’s say that their employer has workers’ compensation, they’re still entitled to recover in that situation, and that’s unusual because normally workers’ compensation means you can’t sue your employer, but if you died due to negligence, you are able to sue the employer. We had a case where an individual died as a result of a gas release that had occurred. Gas was released, one worker died, an alarm went off, another worker went to rescue that individual who had died, and on his way to that individual, he also died because of inhaling the gasses. He left a wife and he left children. Because it was a death case, we could sue the employer. The caveat is that you have to sue the employer only for gross negligence, regular negligence you can’t sue them for, but if there’s a death, you can sue your employer even though they carried workers’ compensation for gross negligence, and we were able to get a substantial recovery for her, because again, in these situations, oftentimes when you look at multiple people dying in an industrial accident, that doesn’t just happen. There have to have been a series of events that contributed to it that allowed that to happen, and we were able to demonstrate there at least the threat of the gross negligence, and we were able to get a recovery there. In addition to that, if someone dies and let’s just say, let’s just leave workers’ compensation out of this, we could, let’s talk about somebody who did not have that workers’ compensation because there was not an employer-employee relationship. In those situations, a spouse and the children can sue for what’s called loss of consortium. And we rarely hear that word used consortia, but it would be like the loss of love and counseling and affection and instruction and direction, things of that type that you as a spouse would have gained from your spouse, that you as a child would have gained from your parent, and so the jury would be allowed to award money for loss of consortium. In the past, that is prior to the trial, but after the death, and would be allowed to award consortium damages, loss of consortium going into the future. So those are available as well. The spouse would also have standard type of recoveries for things like his, you know, loss of earnings of the individual. So if the spouse died and was earning $100,000 a year and was 35 years old, you could extrapolate out $100,000 a year until their expected age of retirement, and the spouse could sue for the recovery of that. Same thing if the children were young children, they could sue for the amount of money that would have expected to come to them just from their father paying for their school or their mother paying for their care or something of that nature, and so those would be available as well.