What Compensation Can I Get for an Industrial Accident in Texas?

In Texas you’ve got your workers’ compensation that is available to you as an employee and so your employer can provide you with workers’ compensation benefits that would provide you with weekly benefits that would extend out for a period of time until you reach what’s called maximum medical improvement, at which point that would stop. You’re also entitled to your cure and that would be all of your medical treatment for those injuries, and that will actually continue through the end of your life. So if you had something flare up down the road, 10 years down the road, that was related to what had happened 10 years earlier, you could still draw on that workers’ compensation insurance to pay for that. As to those who are not your employer, as to other companies, you know, oftentimes another company might be negligent in coming in or something we commonly see will have a worker who is a subcontractor, let’s just say it, subcontractors brought in to say Shell, and so Shell’s got a subcontractor working for them. The employee of the subcontractor might be injured by the negligence, say, of Shell, and in that situation, they would have workers’ comp from their employer, who was the subcontractor, but if it was Shell’s negligence that caused this, they could then sue Shell for that negligence. Now, in terms of what’s available to them, Texas recognizes just some standard elements of damages that you can sue to recover. You can sue for your lost wages in the past, if you’ve got an injury that’s gonna impact your earnings in the future, you can sue for your lost earning capacity. You can sue to recover your past paid medical, you can sue to recover future medical that you’ll need because of the injury, and then you get into what are called non-economic damages, and that would be pain and suffering, mental anguish, disfigurement, impairment. Texas law has gone through quite a change in the last two years on that, and there was a Texas Supreme Court case that came out that has been the subject of lots of different legal training, but the Texas Supreme Court has come out and said that there has to be a focus in all of this, on how the injuries affect a person in terms of the duration of the injury, the intensity of the pain or the impairment, and how frequent those things are occurring, and there’s gotta be evidence of that. And so, like I say, we’re in a time of sort of discovering how we’re going to apply that Texas Supreme Court decision. But there is lots of training going on about it, and more than ever before, when we go to trial, we’re having to focus upon how are these things actually affecting the life of the individual in order to support damage awards or money awards for things like mental anguish and disfigurement and impairment, but that’s what would be available to a typical worker.