I’m Kurt Arbuckle. I’m a Houston attorney and I’m a litigator. That means that I try lawsuits for clients. And one client that I often have is one who’s been injured due to the carelessness or negligence of another person.
A question that I often get asked in those kinds of cases is what if the other side mostly at fault but I was partly at fault. And the answer is that Texas has what’s called Comparative Fault. If you are found to be more than 50 percent at fault for whatever happened, you get nothing. But if your percentage of negligence is less than 50 percent, then you get whatever percent is not attributable to you. So the court will take all of the parties that might be responsible and might ask the jury to assign a percentage to each one. If your percentage is 49 percent, you’ll get 50 percent of whatever the jury decides should be your damages. If your fault is 5 percent, then you get 95 percent of whatever the jury decides. But ultimately, the jury will decide what the percentages are that are assigned to each person, so you still may be able to recover for your injuries due to the other person’s fault, subtracting out any fault that may be your own.
Fortunately, most cases—80 to 90 percent—settle long before the jury gets to that point because they settle before a case is even filed in court for trial. It’s settled in negotiations. And I’ve talked about that in other videos that you might want to look at. So don’t be discouraged if you’re 5 or 10 percent at fault and the other person or group of people or group of companies was more at fault. You still have the right in Texas to recover your legitimate damages.