Arlington Personal Injury Lawyer

Arlington is the seventh-largest city in Texas and sits at the heart of the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex, flanked by I-20, I-30, SH-360, and SH-183. With AT&T Stadium, Globe Life Field, Six Flags, and one of the largest entertainment districts in the South, Arlington generates enormous traffic — and with it, serious accidents every day.

Patterson Law Group has served Arlington and the surrounding communities for decades. When you've been hurt in a car accident, truck crash, slip and fall, or any other injury caused by someone else's negligence, our local Arlington attorneys are ready to fight for you immediately.

We handle every case on a contingency fee basis — you pay nothing unless we win. Our firm has recovered over $100 million for clients and achieved one of the largest wrongful death settlements in Texas history.

Cases We Handle in Arlington

Arlington's Most Dangerous Roads

Texas Personal Injury Law — What Arlington Residents Need to Know

Why Patterson Law Group for Your Arlington Case?

About Our Arlington Office

We're not a 1-800 number with a website. Patterson Law Group keeps a physical Arlington office at 2310 West Interstate 20, Suite 100, Arlington, TX 76017, right off the I-20 frontage road between Cooper and Matlock. When an Arlington resident calls us, they aren't getting routed to a faraway intake center — they're getting a Tarrant County firm that has been representing injured Texans in this county for decades.

Michael H. Patterson is the resident partner at the Arlington office. Michael personally meets with Arlington clients, signs Arlington files, and tries Arlington cases. That continuity matters. When the insurance company's defense lawyer calls to ask who's handling the file, the answer is a named partner who has lived and worked in Tarrant County for more than thirty years — not a rotating cast of associates and case managers. Clients meet their attorney early, talk to their attorney often, and reach their attorney directly when something matters.

The consultation is free and substantive. We review the police report, look at the medical records, ask the questions that actually matter, and tell you in plain English what we think the case is worth and how we'd get there. No obligation, no pressure, no fee unless we recover money for you. If you decide to handle the claim yourself or hire someone else, you walk out owing nothing.

Office hours flex around our clients' lives. Many Arlington clients are working people who can't take a half-day off to meet a lawyer. We schedule evenings and Saturdays, take phone and video consultations, and come to you at home or in the hospital when the injury makes travel impossible. Call (817) 784-2000. Se habla español.

What to Do After an Arlington Accident

The first hour after a crash sets the trajectory of the case. What you do — and what you do not do — in the minutes and days after an Arlington accident often determines what your claim is ultimately worth. Here is the sequence we recommend, and the one we wish every client knew before they called us.

Get medical care, even if you think you're fine. Adrenaline masks pain for hours. Soft-tissue injuries, concussions, and internal bleeding routinely present the next morning, not at the scene. In Arlington, the two Level III trauma centers most accident victims are taken to or self-present to are Texas Health Arlington Memorial Hospital on West Randol Mill Road and Medical City Arlington on Matlock Road. Both run twenty-four-hour emergency departments and are fully equipped for serious trauma. If you can be transported by EMS, do it — that ambulance run becomes contemporaneous evidence of injury severity that an insurance company cannot later argue away.

Call the Arlington Police Department from the scene and wait for an officer to work the crash. A Texas Peace Officer's Crash Report (CR-3) is the foundation document of your case. It captures driver information, insurance, witness names, point of impact, and the officer's opinion of contributing factors. Without it, the case becomes one driver's word against another's.

Photograph everything before vehicles are moved if it is safe to do so — final resting positions, debris fields, skid marks, traffic controls, license plates, and visible injuries. Photographs from your phone are time-stamped and GPS-tagged, and they win cases.

Do not give a recorded statement to the other driver's insurer. They will call within forty-eight hours and ask friendly-sounding questions designed to lock you into an early version of events before you've seen a doctor or a lawyer. You are not required to give that statement. Politely decline and refer them to us.

Write down what happened while it is fresh — the weather, where you were going, what the other driver did, what they said at the scene. Memory fades fast. Then call Patterson Law Group at (817) 784-2000 before you sign anything from any insurance company.

Common Injuries We See in Arlington Cases

Arlington's road geometry produces a specific pattern of injuries. High-speed interstate crashes on I-20 and I-30, heavy-truck distribution traffic on SH-360, and dense surface-street activity around the Entertainment District and UTA campus each create their own injury profiles. After three decades in Tarrant County personal injury work, the categories below are what we see most often.

Traumatic brain injury and concussion lead the list, particularly in rear-end collisions and rollovers. TBI is the injury insurers most aggressively minimize because mild and moderate brain injuries often do not appear on standard imaging. We work with neurologists, neuropsychologists, and life care planners who can document cognitive deficits with objective testing — and we know how to present that evidence to a jury.

Cervical and lumbar spine injuries — herniated discs, bulging discs, facet joint injuries, and the radiculopathy that follows — are the most common serious orthopedic injuries from Arlington crashes. They often require epidural steroid injections, radiofrequency ablations, or, in the worst cases, fusion or disc replacement surgery. Insurance companies routinely argue that disc injuries are "degenerative" and unrelated to the crash. We have the medical experts and the deposition strategy to break that defense.

Fractures and orthopedic trauma — wrist, ankle, tibia/fibula, pelvic ring, and the catastrophic open fractures we see in motorcycle and pedestrian cases — typically require surgical hardware, extended physical therapy, and often a second surgery to remove hardware once healing is complete. Future medical costs in these cases routinely run into six figures.

Shoulder injuries — rotator cuff and labral tears — are signature injuries of the seat-belted driver whose arm is on the wheel at impact. Many require arthroscopic repair and months of physical therapy.

Catastrophic injuries — spinal cord injuries with paralysis, amputations, severe burns, and brain injuries with permanent impairment — demand a different caliber of litigation, with life care planners and economic experts. Patterson Law Group has the resources to fund and try these cases to verdict.

Texas Personal Injury Law: What Arlington Plaintiffs Need to Know

Texas law is not plaintiff-friendly, and it has been getting less so for twenty years. Anyone telling an Arlington injury victim that "the law will take care of you" is selling something. The reality is that a series of statutes and judge-made rules quietly limit what an injured Texan can recover, even in a clear-liability case. Here is what every Arlington plaintiff should understand before signing with any firm.

Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code §16.003 gives most personal injury plaintiffs only two years from the date of injury to file suit. Miss it and the claim is gone, no matter how strong the liability or how severe the injury. Wrongful death claims under Chapter 71 carry the same two-year clock, running from the date of death. Some claims involving governmental defendants carry far shorter notice periods — as little as six months — which is why a quick consultation matters even when the deadline feels far off.

§33.001 — Texas's modified comparative fault rule — bars any recovery if the plaintiff is found 51 percent or more responsible for the incident. At 50 percent fault or less, recovery is reduced by the plaintiff's percentage. Defense lawyers and insurance adjusters work tirelessly to push fault onto the plaintiff. Our job is to push it back where it belongs, with evidence — crash reconstruction, scene photographs, witness depositions, and event data recorder downloads.

§41.0105 — the "paid or incurred" statute — restricts a plaintiff's medical damages to the amount actually paid or owed, not the gross "sticker price" on the hospital bill. A $200,000 hospital chargemaster bill that health insurance settled for $42,000 generally becomes a $42,000 medical damages number at trial. This is the single most consequential evidentiary rule in modern Texas PI practice, and handling it correctly takes experience.

§41.008 — the exemplary (punitive) damages cap — limits punitive damages to the greater of $200,000 or two times economic damages plus an equal amount of non-economic damages (capped at $750,000). Compensatory damages have their own statutory and case-law limits in certain medical malpractice and governmental claims.

Chapter 71 — the Texas Wrongful Death and Survival Act — defines who may bring a wrongful death claim (surviving spouse, children, and parents) and what the deceased's estate may recover through a survival action. Properly framing the two causes of action is critical to maximizing recovery for the family.

How Insurance Companies Hurt Arlington Injury Victims

An insurance company is not your friend, and the adjuster is not on your side. That is not cynicism — it is structural. The adjuster's job is to close the file for the lowest defensible number. The faster they can do it, and the less you understand about what your case is actually worth, the better their performance metrics. Here is the playbook we see used against Arlington injury victims every week, and how we counter it.

The early lowball offer arrives within ten to fourteen days. A claims rep calls, sounds sympathetic, and offers two or three thousand dollars to "wrap this up." That happens before you've finished imaging, before you know whether you need PT, and long before anyone knows if surgery is needed. Once you sign the release, the claim is closed forever.

The recorded statement is a trap. The adjuster asks how you're feeling — and if you say "okay" because you're being polite, that becomes Exhibit A at trial. They ask whether you saw the other driver before impact, and however you answer, they will find a way to assign you a percentage of fault under §33.001. The right answer to a recorded-statement request is: "I'm represented, please call my lawyer."

Medical record fishing expeditions follow next. They send authorization forms asking for ten years of medical history — including unrelated providers — hunting for any prior back pain, neck pain, or headache reference they can use to argue your injury is pre-existing. The proper response is a narrowly tailored authorization, limited to the relevant body parts and a defensible time window.

Delay is a weapon. Files sit unanswered for thirty, sixty, ninety days because the carrier knows that medical bills accumulate, lost wages compound, and pressure to settle for less builds. We pierce that delay by filing suit when the carrier refuses to negotiate seriously — and Tarrant County juries do not respond well to carriers who string injured plaintiffs along.

Surveillance and social media come last. Investigators sit outside your home with a camera, and anything you post on Facebook or Instagram — even old photos — gets weaponized. Lock down social media and assume you are being watched.

What Compensation Can You Recover Under Texas Law

Damages in a Texas personal injury case fall into three buckets, and a competent demand presentation has to account for all of them: economic damages, non-economic damages, and — in narrow cases — punitive damages. The numbers can be substantial when the file is properly built. They can also be devastatingly low when corners are cut at the workup stage.

Economic damages are the hard, provable, dollar-figure losses: past medical bills (post-§41.0105 adjustments), future medical care projected by a life care planner or treating physician, past lost wages documented by tax returns and employer records, and loss of future earning capacity calculated by a vocational economist. Property damage, household services, and out-of-pocket costs round out the category. Economic damages are the floor of the case — and the foundation that supports the rest of the demand.

Non-economic damages compensate the human toll of the injury. Texas law recognizes past and future physical pain, past and future mental anguish, past and future physical impairment, disfigurement, and — in survival and wrongful death cases — loss of consortium, loss of companionship, and the pecuniary loss of guidance and support a family member would have provided. These damages are not "soft" or "made up." They are real harms recognized by Texas statute and a century of Texas case law. Quantifying them takes craft. We use treating physician testimony, family member depositions, "day in the life" video where appropriate, and demonstrative exhibits that show a jury what daily living actually looks like after a serious injury.

Exemplary (punitive) damages are available under Chapter 41 when the plaintiff proves by clear and convincing evidence that the harm resulted from fraud, malice, or gross negligence. Drunk-driving crashes, intentional torts, and certain corporate-misconduct cases are the typical fact patterns. The statutory cap discussed above applies, but in the right case, the threat of an exemplary verdict drives the settlement value substantially higher.

Wrongful death and survival recoveries under Chapter 71 follow their own framework — and Patterson Law Group's 2024 eight-figure Texas wrongful death settlement is among the largest in state history.

Where Arlington PI Cases Are Filed

Arlington sits in Tarrant County, and that is where Arlington personal injury lawsuits are filed. Knowing the courthouse, the judges, the local rules, and the unwritten customs of Tarrant County litigation is a real and measurable advantage for clients. Out-of-county firms learn this the hard way. Patterson Law Group has tried cases in this courthouse for decades.

Tarrant County District Court — 100 N. Calhoun Street, Fort Worth — is the main civil trial court for Arlington personal injury cases of any consequence. Tarrant County has seventeen district courts, randomly assigned by the clerk. Each one has its own discovery preferences, motion practices, and jury-charge tendencies. That familiarity shapes how we draft pleadings, schedule depositions, and try cases.

Tarrant County Courts at Law handle civil cases with amounts in controversy at or below the statutory threshold (currently $250,000 exclusive of interest, statutory damages and penalties, court costs, and attorney's fees). Many lower-exposure Arlington auto cases are properly filed there. The courts at law move faster than district court and frequently produce earlier trial settings — which can be a significant strategic advantage for a plaintiff facing an unreasonable carrier.

Justice of the Peace courts handle Tarrant County cases under $20,000. We rarely use JP court because most genuine injury cases exceed the jurisdictional cap, but for some property-damage-only or low-value soft-tissue claims, it is the right venue.

Federal court — the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Fort Worth Division — comes into play when an Arlington case involves diversity of citizenship with amount in controversy over $75,000, or a federal question. Trucking cases with out-of-state defendants frequently end up there. The Northern District has its own scheduling culture, magistrate-judge practices, and jury pool. Knowing how to litigate there matters.

Common Arlington Crash Corridors

Arlington's traffic problems are predictable, which means the crashes are predictable too. After working hundreds of Arlington files, the same corridors and intersections show up over and over. If your crash happened on any of the roads below, we have likely litigated against the same insurance carriers, on the same stretch of road, in front of the same judges.

I-20 runs east-west across south Arlington and is the spine of the city's interstate system. Heavy commuter traffic, frequent construction zones, and a steady stream of commercial truck activity make I-20 the single most common location for serious rear-end and merging crashes in Arlington.

I-30 runs across the north side of the city, connecting Fort Worth and Dallas through the Entertainment District. Game-day and event traffic spikes routinely overwhelm I-30, and high-speed multi-vehicle pileups in those windows are common.

SH-360 is Arlington's distribution-corridor spine, lined with warehouses, fulfillment centers, and freight terminals. It carries some of the heaviest commercial truck traffic in Tarrant County, and the combination of heavy trucks with passenger commuters produces severe injuries.

US-287 brushes the southern edge of Arlington and Mansfield and carries through-traffic from Fort Worth to East Texas. It is a divided highway with at-grade intersections in places, which creates a specific risk profile for left-turn and crossing crashes.

Cooper Street is one of the busiest north-south arterials in central Arlington, running past UTA, the Parks Mall, and the medical district. Intersection crashes, left-turn collisions, and pedestrian knockdowns are the signature Cooper Street case.

Collins Street runs through the Entertainment District and bears the brunt of game-day and event traffic. Pedestrian and rideshare cases concentrate here.

Lamar Boulevard parallels I-30 and absorbs spillover traffic during major events. High-speed surface-street crashes occur here regularly.

Pioneer Parkway is a busy east-west arterial running through south Arlington that sees a heavy concentration of commercial vehicle traffic and signal-controlled intersection crashes.

Division Street is Arlington's historic east-west spine and remains a high-volume corridor with frequent intersection collisions and pedestrian incidents near transit stops and older commercial blocks.

Patterson Law Group Arlington Awards & Recognition

We earn the work, and the recognition follows. Texas advertising and disciplinary rules require that any award or distinction a law firm claims be verifiable, and we list only what we can document.

Super Lawyers — Recognition through the Thomson Reuters Super Lawyers peer-review and independent-research process, awarded to a small percentage of Texas attorneys.

AVVO 10.0 Rating — The highest rating issued by AVVO's attorney-rating service, calculated from experience, professional achievement, and disciplinary history.

$100 Million Club — Membership earned through documented case recoveries exceeding $100 million in lifetime client compensation.

Top 10 Texas Wrongful Death Settlement, 2024 — Our 2024 eight-figure wrongful death settlement is among the largest of its kind in Texas that year.

Million Dollar Advocates Forum — Life Member — National membership recognizing trial lawyers who have served as lead counsel in cases with verdicts or settlements of at least one million dollars. Life Member status is reserved for attorneys with multiple qualifying results.

Tangible client outcomes Arlington-area clients can verify include the firm's $8 million commercial trucking settlement, $2.5 million automobile collision result, eight-figure Texas wrongful death settlement, and 483+ five-star Google reviews from former clients across the firm's three Texas offices.

We do not list awards we cannot defend on cross-examination, and we will not put fabricated logos on a website. Everything on this page is documentable.

Serving Arlington and Surrounding Areas

Arlington sits at the center of the DFW suburb network, and our practice extends naturally throughout it. Many of the same insurance carriers, the same trauma centers, the same interstate corridors, and the same Tarrant County courthouse serve all of these communities — which is why the firms that handle Arlington cases well typically handle the surrounding cities well too.

Patterson Law Group represents injury victims throughout the following communities, in addition to Arlington proper:

- Grand Prairie — Immediately east of Arlington, sharing the SH-360 and I-30 corridors and much of the Entertainment District traffic spillover. - Mansfield — South of Arlington along US-287 and SH-360. - Kennedale — Small Tarrant County community immediately southwest of Arlington along US-287. - Pantego — Enclave city surrounded by Arlington, with its own municipal police and court system. - Dalworthington Gardens — Small enclave community within central Arlington. - Fort Worth — West of Arlington, the Tarrant County seat and the courthouse where most Arlington cases are filed. - Hurst, Euless, Bedford — The HEB suburbs north of Arlington, all in Tarrant County. - North Richland Hills — Northeast Tarrant County, frequently sharing I-820 traffic with the Arlington corridor.

If you've been injured in any of these communities, the Arlington office is the closest Patterson Law Group point of contact. Call (817) 784-2000, use the contact form, or stop by 2310 West Interstate 20, Suite 100. Consultation is free. There is no fee unless we recover money for you. Se habla español.

Frequently Asked Questions