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Sometimes. A Texas property owner is not responsible for every injury on the property. The owner is responsible when the owner owed you a duty, breached it, and the breach caused your injury. What the owner owed you turns largely on one question: why were you there?
What cannot wait is the evidence. Surveillance video, sweep and inspection logs, incident reports and maintenance records run on deletion schedules measured in days and weeks. A preservation letter can go out immediately, and it costs you nothing. If the property belongs to a city, a written notice deadline may also be running. Call 713-521-0059.
Texas sorts visitors into three categories and gives the owner a different duty for each.
You are an invitee if you were there for the mutual benefit of both parties or for a purpose connected to the owner’s business. A customer in a store, a hotel guest, a tenant and a restaurant patron are examples. This is the highest duty. The owner must use reasonable care to protect against a dangerous condition the owner knew about, or through reasonable inspection should have known about.
You are a licensee if you were present with permission but for your own purposes, and a social guest is the usual example. The owner must not injure a licensee willfully, wantonly or by gross negligence. The owner must also warn of or make safe a dangerous condition the owner actually knows about and the licensee does not. There is no duty to inspect for a licensee.
A trespasser is someone with no right to be there. The duty is to refrain from injuring the trespasser willfully, wantonly or by gross negligence. That is a real duty, not the absence of one, which is why a landowner cannot set a trap.
Moving you from invitee to licensee removes the duty to inspect, so the defense often argues the point.
Corbin v. Safeway Stores, Inc., 648 S.W.2d 292 (Tex. 1983) sets out what an invitee must establish. The owner had actual or constructive knowledge of a condition on the premises. The condition posed an unreasonable risk of harm. The owner failed to exercise reasonable care to reduce or eliminate the risk. That failure proximately caused the injury.
Knowledge is where these cases usually turn. Actual knowledge means the owner created the condition or was told about it. Examples are an employee who mopped and walked away, a maintenance ticket, a prior complaint, or an incident report about the same hazard.
Constructive knowledge means the condition existed long enough that a reasonably careful owner would have found it. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Reece, 81 S.W.3d 812 (Tex. 2002) holds that proximity alone will not do it. An employee standing near a spill, with no evidence of how long the spill had been there, shows only that discovery was possible, not that it reasonably should have happened. Texas courts generally require evidence of duration.
Surveillance video showing when a hazard appeared is the cleanest proof of duration, and it is often overwritten within seven to thirty days. Sweep logs, inspection sheets and work orders run on similar cycles, so an early preservation letter matters.
Austin v. Kroger Texas, L.P., 465 S.W.3d 193 (Tex. 2015) addresses this. It holds that a landowner generally has no duty to warn about or protect against a condition that is open and obvious, or already known to the person injured. The premises duty runs to concealed hazards.
The court kept two exceptions. The criminal activity exception applies where the owner should have anticipated harm from a third party’s crime despite your awareness of the risk. The necessary use exception applies where you had to use the dangerous area and could not adequately protect against the danger even knowing about it.
Austin arose between an employer and its employee where the employer had opted out of workers’ compensation. Its duty analysis is applied broadly, but its reach in other settings can be argued.
Yes, in some cases. A property owner can be liable for an assault, a robbery or a shooting committed by a third party. Texas calls this negligent security, and it is a premises claim.
The first question is foreseeability. Timberwalk Apartments, Partners, Inc. v. Cain, 972 S.W.2d 749 (Tex. 1998) directs courts to weigh whether similar crime occurred on or near the property. Courts also weigh how recently, how often, how similar it was, and how publicized, in deciding whether the owner knew or should have known of the risk.
Del Lago Partners, Inc. v. Smith, 307 S.W.3d 762 (Tex. 2010) holds those factors are not the only route. There, the owner had actual and direct knowledge that a violent brawl was imminent, and time and means to defuse it, and that was enough to give rise to a duty.
The second question is unreasonableness. UDR Texas Properties, L.P. v. Petrie, 517 S.W.3d 98 (Tex. 2017) adds a separate hurdle, because foreseeability is not enough. You must also prove the risk was unreasonable, weighing the burden of preventing it against the magnitude of the risk. The plaintiff in UDR lost on exactly that gap.
Yes. If you were hurt as a contractor, a subcontractor or an employee of one, while constructing, repairing, renovating or modifying an improvement to commercial property, Chapter 95 of the Civil Practice and Remedies Code governs. The property owner is not liable unless two things are both true. The owner exercised or retained some control over the manner in which the work was performed, beyond the right to order the work to start or stop or to inspect progress or receive reports. And the owner had actual knowledge of the danger and failed to adequately warn.
Constructive knowledge is not enough under Chapter 95, and neither is control alone. Both prongs must be met. This is a common reason a construction injury claim against a property owner fails.
Suing a city, county, school district or state agency is a different exercise. Chapter 101, the Texas Tort Claims Act, waives immunity only narrowly. It principally covers injury arising from the operation or use of a motor-driven vehicle or equipment, or from a condition or use of tangible personal or real property.
The caps are not one number. Section 101.023 sets $250,000 per person and $500,000 per occurrence for the state and for a municipality. It sets only $100,000 per person and $300,000 per occurrence for other units of local government, counties included.
Under Section 101.101(a), any governmental unit is entitled to notice of your claim within six months after the incident. Under Section 101.101(b), a city charter notice period permitted by law governs where it applies, and the City of Houston requires written, verified notice within 90 days. A claim can be lost on day 91 if you rely on the six-month period alone. Under Section 101.101(c), the notice requirement does not apply where the governmental unit had actual notice of the death, injury or damage. A notice deadline is not the limitations period and does not replace it; both can apply.
Two other statutes reduce liability. Chapter 75 limits a landowner’s duty to a person on the land for recreation, in many cases to the trespasser standard. Chapter 75A limits liability for injury during an agritourism activity where the required warning was posted or a compliant agreement was signed.
Texas applies proportionate responsibility. Under Section 33.001, you recover nothing if your percentage of responsibility is greater than 50 percent. Otherwise, Section 33.012 reduces your award by your percentage, even at exactly 50 percent. Being partly at fault usually does not end a case, but being mostly at fault does.
Under Section 16.003(a), suit for personal injury generally must be brought within two years after the day the claim accrues, which is usually the date of the injury. Under Section 16.003(b), a death claim has two years running from the date of death. Under Section 16.001, that time does not run while the claimant is younger than 18 or of unsound mind, if that was true when the claim accrued.
Damages commonly recovered in a premises claim include:
Under Section 41.0105, recovery of medical or health care expenses is measured by the amount actually paid or incurred by or on behalf of the claimant, not the amount a provider billed. The gap between a billed charge and the paid figure is often very large.
Section 18.001 allows the cost and necessity of services to be established by affidavit rather than live testimony, unless a controverting affidavit is properly served. The affidavit expressly does not prove causation, so an affidavit alone will not connect your treatment to the incident.
Exemplary damages require fraud, malice or gross negligence proven by clear and convincing evidence under Section 41.003, and are capped by Section 41.008. Under Section 41.008(c), the cap does not apply where the conduct was one of the listed Penal Code felonies committed knowingly or intentionally. Intoxication assault (Section 49.07) and intoxication manslaughter (Section 49.08) need not be knowing or intentional, and the exception reaches only the defendant whose conduct it was.
Every statute and case linked above was read at its primary source. Texas statutes change every legislative session and case law is constantly changing.
This page is general information about Texas law. It is not legal advice about your situation, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship.
Most of your evidence is in the owner’s hands: video, logs, work orders, incident reports and prior complaints. Your own photographs of the spot and the lighting, and the names of anyone who saw you fall, help fix the facts before the scene changes.
We start with why you were there and what the owner knew, because those two questions often decide a premises claim. The first step is written notice to keep the video and records. Then we check whether a government notice deadline applies and identify every party that owned, managed or maintained the property. If there is a case, we will say so. If there is not, we will say that as well, and explain why.
Schiffer Law Firm is a Houston personal injury firm with 50 plus years of combined experience representing injured people across Texas.
There is no charge to talk, and no attorney’s fee unless there is a recovery.
Call 713-521-0059.
In most cases, within two years after the day the claim accrues under Section 16.003(a), which is usually the date of the injury. If the property is owned by a governmental unit, a separate written notice deadline can also apply: six months under Section 101.101(a), or 90 days under the City of Houston charter.
Yes, unless your share of the responsibility is greater than 50 percent. Section 33.001 bars recovery above that line. At or below it, Section 33.012 reduces your award by your percentage.
The owner must have had actual or constructive knowledge of it. Constructive knowledge requires evidence that the condition existed long enough for a reasonably careful owner to have discovered it. Proof that an employee was standing nearby is not enough on its own.
Yes, in some cases. That claim is called negligent security. It requires proof that the criminal conduct was foreseeable and, separately, that the risk was unreasonable given the burden of preventing it.
In most cases, only if the owner both retained control over how the work was performed and had actual knowledge of the danger and failed to warn. Chapter 95 of the Civil Practice and Remedies Code requires both, and it is a common reason these claims fail.
The Texas Tort Claims Act waives immunity only narrowly, caps the recovery, and requires notice within six months unless a city charter period permitted by law governs or the governmental unit had actual notice. In the City of Houston, written, verified notice is due within 90 days, and the two-year limitations period still applies as well.