Texas Wrongful Death Attorneys

Why Families Across Texas Trust Patterson Law Group

Nothing about losing a family member to someone else's negligence is okay. A civil case will never bring them back, and we will never pretend otherwise. What a wrongful death case can do is hold the responsible party accountable, secure your family's future, and force the system to acknowledge that your loved one mattered.

Patterson Law Group has spent more than 30 years representing grieving Texas families. We've sat at kitchen tables with surviving spouses, parents who lost children, and adult children who lost a parent. We've also won — and in 2024, we secured the highest wrongful death settlement in the state of Texas, an 8-figure recovery for a single family.

The consultation is free. We work on a contingency fee. You will never pay us out of pocket.

Offices in Fort Worth, Arlington, and San Antonio. Every case is taken on a contingency fee — no recovery, no fee.

Wrongful Death Cases We Handle

Wrongful death claims arise any time negligence, recklessness, or intentional wrongdoing causes a death. The most common categories we handle:

Texas Wrongful Death Law

Texas wrongful death claims are governed by Texas Civil Practice & Remedies Code Chapter 71. The right to file belongs to the surviving spouse, children, and parents of the deceased. If none of those statutory beneficiaries file within three months of the death, the personal representative of the estate may file on behalf of the family.

Recoverable damages include the deceased's lost future earning capacity, lost household services, loss of inheritance, mental anguish and emotional pain of the surviving family members, and loss of companionship, comfort, and consortium. A separate 'survival action' under §71.021 allows recovery for the deceased's own pre-death conscious pain and suffering and medical bills.

In cases involving gross negligence — drunk driving, willful corporate misconduct, repeated safety violations — Texas allows exemplary (punitive) damages. The statute of limitations is two years from the date of death (CPRC §16.003), with limited exceptions for fraud or concealment.

How We Work With You

Our process is simple. You focus on your recovery. We handle everything else.

1. 1
   Call us. Tell us what happened. Free, confidential, no obligation. We'll give you an honest answer about whether you have a case.
2. 2
   We investigate. Police reports, surveillance footage, medical records, witness statements, expert consultations. We build the case the right way from day one.
3. 3
   You focus on healing. We handle every insurance call, every demand, every negotiation. If they refuse to pay fairly, we take them to trial.

Local Offices & City Pages

Patterson Law Group serves all injured Texans from our physical offices in Fort Worth, Arlington, and San Antonio. For city-specific information on this practice area:

Who Can File a Wrongful Death Claim in Texas

Texas does not allow every grieving relative to file a wrongful death lawsuit. The right to bring a claim is defined by statute, not by emotion or proximity to the deceased. Under the Texas Wrongful Death Act, codified at Chapter 71 of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code, only three categories of survivors have standing to sue: the surviving spouse, the surviving children (including legally adopted children), and the surviving parents of the person who died. Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 71.004(a). Siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, fiancés, and unmarried partners — no matter how close the relationship — cannot bring a wrongful death claim in Texas, even if they were financially dependent on the decedent.

Any one of the statutory beneficiaries may file the claim individually, or they may file jointly. § 71.004(b). The lawsuit is brought for the benefit of all eligible survivors, and the recovery is divided among them based on each person's individual losses — not split equally as a matter of course.

If none of the statutory beneficiaries files suit within three months of the date of death, the executor or administrator of the deceased's estate is authorized to bring the wrongful death claim on the family's behalf, unless all of the eligible beneficiaries specifically request that no suit be filed. § 71.004(c). This three-month window matters: it ensures the case is preserved while limitations is still running, and it prevents disputes among family members from quietly killing the claim.

Adult children, minor children, and adopted children all qualify. Stepchildren who were not legally adopted do not. Parents of an adult child have the same right to sue as parents of a minor child. These distinctions matter at the front end of every wrongful death case Patterson Law Group evaluates, because identifying every eligible beneficiary protects the family's full recovery.

The Texas Survival Statute vs. the Wrongful Death Statute

Texas law actually gives families two distinct causes of action after a death caused by negligence, and most well-handled cases assert both. The two statutes serve different purposes, compensate different losses, and belong to different plaintiffs — but they are routinely filed in the same lawsuit.

The Wrongful Death Statute, Chapter 71 of the Civil Practice and Remedies Code, belongs to the surviving spouse, children, and parents. It compensates the survivors for their own losses — what they suffered because their loved one was taken from them. Those losses include lost financial support, lost services, lost companionship, mental anguish, and loss of inheritance.

The Texas Survival Statute, codified at § 71.021, is different. It belongs to the deceased's estate, not to the survivors directly. The Survival Statute keeps alive any personal injury claim the decedent would have been able to bring had they lived. In other words, it asks what the deceased themselves suffered between the moment of injury and the moment of death — and it allows the estate to recover for those harms. § 71.021(b). Recoverable Survival Act damages typically include the deceased's conscious pain and suffering before death, medical expenses incurred during the final illness or treatment, funeral and burial expenses, and lost earnings during the period between injury and death.

The estate's recovery under the Survival Statute is distributed according to the decedent's will, or — if there is no will — under Texas intestacy law. That means a Survival Act recovery may flow to heirs who could not have filed a wrongful death claim in their own right (a sibling, for example, who inherits under the will).

Filing both claims together is the standard practice in serious cases. A semi-truck crash that kills a father instantly may still produce a meaningful Survival Act claim for the seconds of conscious suffering before death, and the funeral and burial expenses always belong on the Survival side. Patterson Law Group structures the pleadings so that no recoverable category of loss is left on the table.

Damages Recoverable in a Texas Wrongful Death Case

The categories of damages a Texas family can recover are spelled out in § 71.010 of the Civil Practice and Remedies Code, which directs juries to award "the amount of damages proportioned to the injury resulting from the death." Texas courts and pattern jury charges break that broad command into specific buckets, each of which is asked separately on the verdict form.

Pecuniary loss is the financial value of what the survivors would have received from the deceased had they lived. For a spouse, that includes lost wages, lost benefits, and the value of household services. For a child, it includes lost support through the years of dependency and beyond. For a parent of a deceased adult child, it covers the support and services the parent reasonably expected to receive.

Mental anguish compensates the survivors for the emotional suffering caused by the death — the grief, the shock, the disruption of daily life. Texas juries are asked to consider mental anguish suffered in the past and that which, in reasonable probability, will be suffered in the future.

Loss of companionship and society captures the relational losses — the lost love, comfort, guidance, and care a spouse, child, or parent would have received from the deceased. This is sometimes the largest single category in cases involving the death of a young parent.

Loss of inheritance is the value of what the deceased would, in reasonable probability, have added to the estate and left to the survivors had they lived a normal lifespan.

Exemplary (punitive) damages are available when the death was caused by a willful act or omission or by the gross negligence of the defendant. § 71.009. These are addressed in a separate section below because the rules differ in important ways.

A Texas jury is asked to make each of these findings separately as to each statutory beneficiary. That structure — beneficiary-by-beneficiary, element-by-element — is why presentation of damages in a wrongful death trial demands more than a single number.

How Damages Are Allocated Among Survivors in Texas

A Texas wrongful death verdict is not a lump sum poured into a single bucket. The jury allocates damages individually to each statutory beneficiary, and the allocation reflects each person's relationship to the deceased and each person's particular losses. § 71.010(b). A surviving spouse's mental anguish and loss of companionship are answered on the verdict form separately from a surviving child's, and separately again from a surviving parent's.

That structure means a wrongful death trial is really several damages trials at once. The lawyer must prove — and the jury must answer — what each individual survivor lost. A spouse of forty years and a estranged adult child do not present the same loss-of-companionship case, and the verdict reflects that.

When there are minor children among the beneficiaries, the court oversees how funds awarded to those children are handled, typically through a court-supervised structured settlement or a registry account, so that the child's recovery is preserved for adulthood. Texas courts are vigilant about protecting minor beneficiaries, and any wrongful death settlement involving children must be approved by the court before the case can be dismissed.

The Survival Act recovery flows through the estate and is distributed under the will or intestacy. That can mean a Survival recovery ends up with a different mix of people than the Chapter 71 recovery. Sorting out who gets what — and making sure the allocations are defensible against later challenges — is part of the work of resolving any serious wrongful death case.

Statute of Limitations on Wrongful Death Claims in Texas

A Texas wrongful death lawsuit must generally be filed within two years of the date of death. Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 16.003(b). This is one of the hardest deadlines in Texas civil practice. With narrow exceptions, a wrongful death claim filed even one day late is barred forever — no matter how strong the underlying liability case.

The two-year clock runs from the date of death, not from the date of the original injury or the date the family learned of the negligence. That distinction matters in cases where someone is gravely injured, survives in the hospital for weeks or months, and then dies. The wrongful death clock starts when the heart stops.

The discovery rule — which sometimes delays the running of limitations in ordinary tort cases — is sharply limited in Texas wrongful death claims. Texas courts have repeatedly held that the date of death is generally the trigger, even when the cause of death is not immediately apparent.

For minor children who are statutory beneficiaries, limitations is tolled during minority. A child who is fourteen at the time of a parent's death does not lose the right to sue when the two-year mark passes; the clock for that child begins at age eighteen and runs for two years from there. Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 16.001(a)(1) & (b). Adult beneficiaries, however, are not protected by the minor's tolling.

Other limitations wrinkles apply in specific contexts: medical malpractice claims have their own framework under Chapter 74, and claims against governmental entities require formal notice under the Texas Tort Claims Act often within six months of the incident. These deadlines move fast. Patterson Law Group recommends families speak with a wrongful death lawyer as soon as practical — not because every case must be filed immediately, but because preserving evidence, identifying witnesses, and protecting limitations are all easier the earlier the work begins.

Exemplary Damages in Texas Wrongful Death Cases

Exemplary damages — sometimes called punitive damages — are available in Texas wrongful death cases when the death was caused by the defendant's gross negligence, malice, or willful act. Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 71.009; § 41.003. They are designed to punish particularly egregious conduct and to deter similar conduct in the future, and they are awarded on top of the compensatory damages described above.

Texas generally caps exemplary damages under § 41.008(b) at the greater of (1) two times the amount of economic damages plus an amount equal to noneconomic damages not exceeding $750,000, or (2) $200,000. That cap is a meaningful constraint in many cases — and it is one of the reasons defendants often fight hardest at the threshold question of whether gross negligence even reaches the jury.

But the cap is not absolute. Section 41.008(c) lists a series of felony offenses for which the exemplary damages cap does not apply. Among the offenses on that list are intoxication manslaughter, murder, manslaughter, aggravated assault, and certain other serious crimes. When a wrongful death is caused by conduct that constitutes one of those felonies — for example, a drunk driver who kills another motorist and is convicted of intoxication manslaughter under Texas Penal Code § 49.08 — the statutory cap on exemplary damages falls away entirely. The jury's punitive verdict is governed only by constitutional due process limits, not by the Chapter 41 cap.

To recover any exemplary damages at all, the plaintiff must prove gross negligence (or malice) by clear and convincing evidence, a higher standard than the preponderance-of-the-evidence standard that governs ordinary negligence. § 41.003(b). The jury must be unanimous on both the finding of gross negligence and the amount of exemplary damages awarded. § 41.003(d).

Identifying whether a case carries cap-busting potential under § 41.008(c) is one of the earliest strategic questions Patterson Law Group works through. A drunk driving fatality, a fatal assault by a security guard, a workplace death involving criminal violations — each can change the entire economic shape of a case if the felony exception applies.

How Patterson Law Group Handles Wrongful Death Cases

A wrongful death case is not just a larger personal injury case. It is a different kind of case, and it requires a different kind of representation. The family has lost a person. The legal team has to handle that reality with care while also building, in parallel, the most rigorous liability and damages presentation Texas law allows.

Patterson Law Group has built our wrongful death practice around three commitments. First, we take the work of grief seriously. We do not push families to make decisions before they are ready. We meet survivors where they are, often at their homes, and we take the time to understand who the person was — not just the medical chronology or the wage history. That understanding shapes every part of the case the jury eventually sees.

Second, we build the case to be tried, even when we expect to settle. Most wrongful death claims resolve before a jury verdict. They resolve on the best terms when the defendant's carrier sees a file that is genuinely trial-ready: complete records, retained experts, prepared witnesses, a damages model the jury can adopt. Cases settle better when they are ready to try.

Third, we never leave money on the table. That means asserting both the Chapter 71 wrongful death claim and the § 71.021 Survival claim where the facts support it. It means identifying every § 41.008(c) cap-busting felony that may apply. It means tracking down every defendant — the at-fault driver and the trucking company; the property owner and the security contractor; the manufacturer and the distributor. Texas wrongful death verdicts are won at the margins, and the margins come from preparation.

In 2024, Patterson Law Group secured the highest wrongful death settlement in the state of Texas. We cannot share the details under the terms of the resolution, but the work that produced that result is the same work we bring to every family who comes through our door.

Our consultations are free, and we handle wrongful death cases on a contingency basis — there is no fee unless we win. To speak with a member of our team, call (817) 784-2000. Se habla español.

Frequently Asked Questions