3 Surprising Things About Texas Personal Injury Claims.

Hey, this is Shane McGuire, personal injury lawyer here in Texas. And today I'm going to walk you through three aspects of car wreck law in Texas that may surprise you. Just three things that wouldn't even be on your radar necessarily, but you're in a wreck and they may be three things that you have to deal with. Number one, you go to the ER after a car wreck. The emergency room has two options with regard to your bill. Well, I guess they have three options. First, I suppose they could just not charge you at all, but they're not going to do that. But the two real options that they have are they can bill your private health insurance. Okay. Yeah. Blue Cross, Aetna, whatever. They can send a bill to private health insurance or they can put a lien on the claim you have against the at-fault driver's insurance company. I want to tell you like why this is from the hospital perspective and what this means for you. So you've been to the hospital before, you know, for a procedure or to have a baby or whatever, and you get the bill in the mail. And the bill, if you have private health insurance, it'll have the charged amount, and then it will have what they call a contractual adjustment because you have Blue Cross or whatever. And then it says the amount that's actually paid. And so you may have a $10,000 bill, but $8,500 of it gets written off. And then, you know, Blue Cross pays $1,500 as an example. Now, Medicare pays even less than that. Medicaid pays even less than that. And workers' comp is like the worst of everything. So when you go to the hospital after a car wreck, they have the option to send it to one of those health insurance providers if it applies to you, or they can file a notice of lien in the county where the wreck took place, or the county where the treatment was, or both, and say, hey, listen, we want to get paid our bill out of the settlement. And they're capped at 50% of the total recovery. So if you have a $20,000 ER bill and you get a $10,000 recovery from the outfall driver's insurance, the ER bill is going to go down to $5,000, okay? And likewise, if you get a $30,000 recovery, the ER can't get more than $15,000 of that. So they are capped in terms of a percentage of what your recovery is, but they're putting a lien on that claim. And very often, they will notify you of that lien in writing. They'll file that lien with the county. And when the insurance company, the outfall driver's insurance company, runs a report before they're going to stroke a check to us, they'll say, hey, listen, we saw there's a lien in Smith County, Anderson County, Dallas County, whatever it is, from this hospital for this claimant, satisfy that lien. And so then we've got to go to negotiate the lien. We have to go negotiate that lien down so then we can get drafting instructions from the insurance company to get everybody paid. So the first just weird thing you may encounter in a car wreck in Texas is the ER puts a lien on the case, okay? Number two, the second kind of unexpected, weird thing that you may encounter after you've been in a car wreck in Texas is an AG child support lien, an attorney general lien for back child support. I'm sure this is none of my listeners, okay? None of my viewers on the YouTube. But you may know people who, they have a child. And I'm going to tell you what happens. And the biggest one that I've personally ever paid off on behalf of a client through one of these cases was like something like that. People will have a child and very often, fellas, it's the dad that doesn't pay child support. And because why? They go to their job and the job garnishes wages. And so what do they do? They say, well, I'll go work for my brother-in-law and get paid cash under the table. And brother-in-law doesn't take child support out of the cash. So what happens is very often, again, it's the dad is screwing over his family by not paying back child support. This huge child support lien builds up. Not only what was owed like the principal, but all kinds of penalties build up over time. Well, guess who looks at that? The auto insurance company. You know, if the attorney general's office, they keep track of all the back child support that's owed. And so they see a big claim come in like an 18-wheeler wreck. Buddy, they're going to make sure that that child support lien gets paid. And that attorney general child support lien has to get paid before the client gets paid. It's got to be fully satisfied. In other words, you owe 50 grand in back child support. When we settle your case for $30,000, you're not seeing any cash out of that. Probably. I mean, unless the AG's office just takes pity on you for some reason. But that money is going to the attorney generally. It's going to lower the amount you owe in back child support. But what I need from my clients on this is you got to tell me up front. Tell me up front that you have back child support. Now, this can be a huge blessing to you as my client. Okay. If you owe back child support, I had one happen, man, a month or two ago, where he owed 10 grand in back child support. We settled this case for $60,000 or $70,000. There was very little in terms of medical bills. And so I get that child support paid off. He's free and clear. All of a sudden, he gets a raise in his weekly paycheck because the AG's office is no longer taking out extra money to pay back back child support. Okay. So it is a benefit to the client when that back child support gets paid. But sometimes it operates as a huge surprise. So if you owe back child support, just be aware that insurance company is going to find out because the AG's office is going to let them know. And then they're going to get paid at the end of the day. They're going to get some of the money off of the car. Speaking of money and speaking of wages, the third thing that may surprise some people in car wreck cases in Texas is this. When you're claiming lost wages or loss of earning capacity as a result of injuries from the wreck, that has to be shown. If you try the case, we have to show it as after tax dollars. Okay. So what does this mean? It means if you make $80,000 a year doing whatever it is you do for a living, you don't get to claim and you're off for a month. You don't get to claim, you know, whatever that is, whatever, you know, 80 divided by 12. You don't get to claim that gross amount. It has to be reduced by your tax liability. Why? Because money obtained through a settlement from a personal injury is not taxable. It's literally the only tax law I know other than pay your taxes. Okay. Is that money recovered in a settlement for a personal injury claim is not taxable. That means that your wage claim is an after tax claim. Let me tell you where this comes into play for clients. Very often, a lot of people are self-employed and what happens is my, I mean, you may do this. I've had family members do this when they do their taxes is they will show a loss or they will show that they've made very, very little money when really they had a lot of income. Well, now it's time to pay the piper on that because what I can't do as your lawyer is go show the jury your tax return and say, Hey, this guy has been poor manning the government for 20 years, acting like he's making $20,000 a year off of his business. But ladies and gentlemen of the jury, really, he makes $120,000 a year and he was off work two months. And boy, we sure would like to have $20,000 in lost wages. No, sir. Regardless of what people on the jury do in their real life, their public position is going to be, we pay all the taxes that we have. Okay. I can't go to a jury on your behalf, not in good faith, not in good conscience and say, I know his tax returns show a loss, but really he made a whole lot of money. They will punish you for that. They're going to lower what they award on everything down the line, pain and suffering, medical bills, physical impairment, because they're distrustful of the number we're showing for loss of earning capacity or loss of income. So when you have a lost wage claim from a wreck, which is a really important aspect of the damages claim, Hey, come to me with pay stubs. Come to me with tax returns. And let's talk about how to prove up that loss of income claim. Whether you have a traditional W-2 job or whether you're self-employed, you've got to take into account expenses out of the business, stuff like that. So it's harder than you would think to prove up loss of earning capacity in Texas because of the number of self-employed and really side hustle people that we have who need to prove up lost wages. So three things that may surprise you in Texas, the existence of an emergency room lien on your case, the existence of a child support lien on your case, and proving up lost wages as after tax earnings. And for more advice on how to maximize your car wreck claim, follow us at McGuireFirms.