Austin Dog Bite Lawyer

The dog belongs to someone you know. Here is why that matters less than you think.

Ask a hundred bite victims in Travis County who owned the dog and most of them will name a person, not a stranger. A neighbor two doors down. The tenant in the unit above. An uncle at a barbecue. A roommate's dog that had never done this before.

So the first question is almost never legal. It is do I really want to do this to them.

Sit with the mechanics of it for a second, because they are not what people picture. A homeowners or renters policy exists precisely to absorb this. The owner already paid for it. When a claim comes in, the carrier assigns an adjuster, the carrier hires and pays any defense lawyer, and the carrier pays the settlement out of the liability limit. The owner's involvement is usually a phone call and a written statement.

What a claim does do to that person: it may raise their premium at renewal, and if the carrier decides the dog is a standing risk, it may decline to renew the policy. Those are real consequences and we will not pretend otherwise. They are also, in most cases, the whole list.

What it does not do: it does not reach into the owner's savings, take their house, or garnish their paycheck, unless the damages exceed the policy limit and the owner has meaningful assets to collect from. On a typical Austin bite that is not the shape of the case.

We have also watched the other version of this play out. A family absorbs the ER bill, absorbs the plastic surgery consult, absorbs the deductible, and two years later the scar has widened as the child grew and the revision surgery is quoted at five figures. By then the two-year deadline has run. Nobody sued the neighbor. The neighbor's insurance company kept the money.

If the honest answer after we look at it is that the claim is small, awkward, and not worth opening, we will say that. We would rather tell you that in week one than string you along.

Homeowners and renters insurance is what usually pays

Standard homeowners and renters policies in Texas carry personal liability coverage. It applies when the insured is legally responsible for bodily injury to someone else, and a dog bite is one of the classic covered events. Most policies also carry a small no-fault medical payments line, often $1,000 to $5,000, that pays emergency treatment without anyone admitting fault.

The coverage generally follows the person, not the address. A renter's policy can respond to a bite that happened at a park. A homeowner's policy can respond when the dog got loose and bit someone down the block. Where the dog was standing matters much less than who is on the policy and what the policy says about animals.

Practical consequences that change how a case is worked:

• The limit is the ceiling. A $100,000 personal liability limit means $100,000, and the amount is knowable early. We ask for the declarations page in the first letter. There is no point building a case toward a number the policy cannot reach unless there is a second source.
• There is often a second policy. An umbrella policy sits on top of the homeowners policy and can add $1 million or more. People forget they have one. Apartment residents frequently carry renters coverage they bought at lease signing and have not thought about since.
• The adjuster on the other end is not the same animal as a retail claims department. This is a homeowners carrier handling a bodily injury claim against its own insured, who is your neighbor. The early calls are friendly and they are recorded. The offer that arrives before the wound has finished healing is an offer priced on an incomplete medical picture.

The Insurance Information Institute, an insurance-industry research group rather than a government agency, publishes an annual analysis of dog bite claims with State Farm. Their figures are the best available picture of what these claims are worth to carriers, and they are worth reading with the source in mind.

What the records actually show, and where each number comes from

Every figure below comes from a named public report or a named industry dataset. We pulled each one on September 5, 2026, and each is reproducible from the source listed at the end of this section. Where a number is Austin, we say Austin. Where it is Texas or national, we say that too.

Three things about that table deserve saying out loud.

Austin does not publish a dog bite count. The City's open data portal carries Animal Center intakes and outcomes and no bite dataset. The closest published figure is the monthly count of rabies exposure reports officers entered, and that covers every mammal from a chihuahua to a bat. The nine monthly reports from January through September 2023 report 187, 217, 263, 223, 205, 232, 204, 220 and 158 exposure reports. Those nine published figures add to 1,909. We did that addition; the City published the nine monthly numbers. Reporting in that format stops after September 2023, and the most recent monthly report on the department's Reports page as of our pull date is June 2024.

The Auditor corrected its own number, and the corrected version is the one we use. The September 2023 audit of the Austin Animal Center originally reported 412 moderate and 67 severe bite-history dogs placed. In December 2024 the Auditor's office identified inaccuracies in that exhibit, revisited the methodology, and reissued it in January 2025 with 320 moderate and 32 severe over calendar years 2019 through 2023. Any site still quoting 479 is quoting a superseded draft. The corrected report is linked below.

The average claim value is not a prediction about your case. It is an average across every dog bite claim an insurer paid in a year, from a nipped finger to a mauling. Nobody can price a specific case honestly in the first week, and you should be careful with anyone who tries.

Sources. City of Austin, Austin Animal Services monthly reports, austintexas.gov/department/reports-1. City of Austin, Office of the City Auditor, audit of the Austin Animal Center, September 2023, Exhibit 3 revised January 2025. Texas Department of State Health Services, Zoonosis Control, Rabies in Animals, Texas – 2024. CDC, MMWR QuickStats 2023;72:999, National Vital Statistics System, ICD-10 W54. Insurance Information Institute and State Farm, dog bite claims tables and 2025 claims analysis — an insurance-industry source, not a government one.

Animal-liability exclusions and breed exclusions in the policy

A liability policy can look like coverage right up until someone reads the endorsements. This is the part of a dog bite claim that quietly decides the outcome, and it is invisible from the outside.

Three exclusion patterns show up repeatedly:

The blanket animal-liability exclusion. Some carriers, particularly in the lower-cost renters and manufactured-home market, exclude bodily injury arising from any animal owned or kept by an insured. The policy covers the kitchen fire and the delivery driver who trips on the step, and it covers nothing the dog does.

The breed exclusion. A named list, usually attached as an endorsement, removing coverage for injuries caused by particular breeds or mixes containing them. Whether the dog actually is that breed becomes a genuine dispute, because breed identification at an apartment complex is usually somebody's guess written on an incident form.

The prior-incident exclusion. Coverage disappears for any animal with a documented bite history or an official dangerous-dog designation. This one bites hardest in exactly the cases with the strongest liability, because the same prior determination that proves the owner knew the dog was dangerous is the fact that voids the policy.

There is a related trap. Some owners disclose the dog when they buy the policy and some do not. When a carrier discovers an undisclosed dog after a bite, it may attempt to rescind or deny. The dispute then moves from is the owner liable to does the coverage respond, which is a different fight requiring a different set of documents.

We ask for the full policy, not the summary page, and we read the endorsements before we form a view of what the claim is worth. If the animal liability is excluded, that changes the strategy immediately: the case has to look for a second responsible party, an umbrella policy, or a defendant with assets, and sometimes the honest answer is that there is nothing collectible.

Two ways a Texas dog owner is liable, and why the difference matters

Texas has no dog bite statute imposing automatic liability on owners. Recovery runs on common law, and there are two separate roads. Most websites blur them into a single sentence about a "one bite rule." The difference between them controls what has to be proved and what defenses the other side gets.

Strict liability under Marshall v. Ranne

In Marshall v. Ranne, 511 S.W.2d 255 (Tex. 1974), the Texas Supreme Court adopted section 509 of the Restatement (Second) of Torts. A possessor of a domestic animal who knows or has reason to know that the animal has dangerous propensities abnormal to its class is liable for the harm the animal causes.

To recover on this theory a plaintiff shows that the defendant owned or possessed the animal, that the animal had dangerous propensities abnormal to its class, that the defendant knew or had reason to know of them, and that those propensities produced the injury.

Two consequences follow, and they are the reason this theory is worth pursuing:

• How careful the owner was is irrelevant. Once knowledge of the dangerous propensity is established, the degree of care used does not matter. The owner who built a good fence and the owner who built a bad one are in the same position.
• Ordinary contributory negligence is not a defense. Marshall held that the defense available against this theory is voluntary assumption of the risk — the plaintiff knew of the specific danger and freely chose to encounter it with a reasonable alternative available. In Marshall itself the plaintiff had no reasonable alternative, because the hog kept him penned in his own house, and the Supreme Court rendered judgment for him.

Negligence and negligent handling under Allen v. Albin

The second road does not require any history at all. Allen v. Albin, 97 S.W.3d 655 (Tex. App.—Waco 2002, no pet.), sets out the elements of negligent handling: the defendant owned or possessed the animal, owed a duty to exercise reasonable care to prevent it from injuring others, breached that duty, and the breach proximately caused the injury. The plaintiff does not have to prove the animal was vicious, dangerous, or had ever bitten anyone.

This is the theory that fits the ordinary Austin case. The gate was propped open. The leash was clipped to a flexi-lead the handler could not control. The dog was left in a yard with a section of fence down. The child was allowed to approach a food bowl while the adults were inside.

Because it sounds in negligence, this theory brings proportionate responsibility with it. Under Texas Civil Practice & Remedies Code Chapter 33 a jury can assign a percentage to the injured person, and recovery is barred entirely above 50 percent. The defense arguments in bite cases are predictable: the person provoked the dog, teased it, ran at it, reached over a fence, or was somewhere they had no right to be.

We plead both theories where the facts support both. They are not alternatives you pick between at the outset; they are separate paths to the same verdict with different proof and different defenses.

The dog had a history: proving the owner already knew

Knowledge is the hinge. Establish it and the case moves onto the strict-liability track, where the owner's carefulness stops mattering. It is proved with records, and the records exist in specific places.

Where prior knowledge actually comes from in Travis County cases:

1. A prior report to Animal Protection. Someone else filed a bite affidavit about this dog months ago. The report exists whether or not it went anywhere.
2. A prior dangerous-dog determination. If an animal control authority has already determined this dog is a dangerous dog, that determination is direct evidence the owner knew, because the statute defines the notice that gives the owner knowledge.
3. Complaints to a landlord or an HOA. Emails and maintenance tickets about the dog in unit 214. Property managers keep these and produce them under a subpoena.
4. The neighborhood record. Nextdoor threads, neighborhood Facebook groups, and group texts. People post about a dog that lunges. Those posts are dated and they name the dog.
5. The owner's own precautions. A "Beware of Dog" sign, a muzzle in the closet, a bite-history note in the vet chart, a trainer hired for aggression, a policy of putting the dog away when guests arrive. Every one of those is an admission that the owner knew.
6. The prior owner or the shelter. Where the dog came from a shelter or a rescue, the placement file may carry a behavioral note. Given what the City Auditor found about placements out of the Austin Animal Center, this is a live line of inquiry in Austin cases rather than a theoretical one.

Breed is not on that list. Texas law looks at the individual animal's propensities, and Health & Safety Code § 822.047 forbids Texas cities and counties from writing dangerous-dog rules that single out breeds. An argument built on breed is an argument built on nothing.

The bite report, the quarantine, and the paper trail that starts on day one

An official record of a dog bite in Austin gets created almost automatically, and most families have no idea it is happening. Understanding it is the single most useful thing you can do in the first week.

The report. Under Texas Health & Safety Code § 826.041, a person who knows of an animal bite or scratch that could reasonably transmit rabies must report it to the local rabies control authority. That duty falls on anyone with knowledge, including the treating hospital. Austin Animal Services states the local rule plainly: all animal bites must be reported to Animal Protection. You report by calling 3-1-1 or by submitting a signed bite affidavit.

The quarantine. Section 826.042 requires the owner to submit an animal that has exposed a person to rabies. The observation period is set by 25 Texas Administrative Code § 169.27: ten days, beginning at the time of the exposure, and it applies regardless of the animal's vaccination status. Home observation may be allowed when the local rabies control authority approves a secure enclosure, the dog's rabies vaccination is current (or the dog was unvaccinated and under 16 weeks old at the time of the exposure), the custodian monitors the dog and reports any change, the authority or a veterinarian observes the dog on the first and last days, and the dog was not a stray at the time of the exposure. Failure to quarantine is a Class C misdemeanor under § 826.044.

Why this matters to a claim. That process generates a dated government record identifying the dog, the owner, the address, the vaccination status, and what happened, created by a City officer with no stake in the case. It is the cleanest evidence in a bite file, and it exists before anyone hires a lawyer.

Where it goes wrong. The single most common thing we hear is that the dog's owner asked the family not to report it. Sometimes it is embarrassment. Sometimes it is a fear the dog will be destroyed. The family agrees, no report is made, and eight months later the owner's position is that the bite never happened or that it was the neighbor's dog. There is now nothing to contradict them.

Report it. The report protects the injured person's medical care first, because the ten-day observation is how a physician decides whether to start post-exposure prophylaxis. The evidentiary value is a second benefit that arrives free.

Austin's leash rules and how a violation is used

The City of Austin identifies its leash law as Austin City Code § 3-4-1, inside Title 3, the animal regulation title. The general rule is that a dog owner or handler keeps the dog under restraint, with the off-leash exception at Austin City Code § 3-4-4 for the areas the city designates. State law expressly leaves this space to cities: Health & Safety Code § 822.007 says the dangerous-dog subchapter does not stop a municipality or county from adopting leash or registration requirements.

How we use a violation, stated carefully. In Texas, violating a statute or ordinance can constitute negligence per se where the ordinance sets a standard of conduct and the injured person is within the class the ordinance was written to protect. Whether a particular municipal ordinance supports negligence per se, or is admitted as evidence of negligence for a jury to weigh, depends on the ordinance and on how the court reads it. We plead it and we brief it. We do not promise a client that an off-leash citation decides the case.

What it reliably does do is fix the facts early. A citation issued at the scene is a City record, written that day, saying where the dog was and that it was not restrained. That is worth more than a recollection reconstructed a year later.

Two Austin-specific wrinkles worth knowing. The off-leash exceptions are geographic, so whether a park section is a designated off-leash area is a question with a mapped answer. And tethering a dog within the Austin city limits is prohibited by ordinance unless the owner is physically present with the dog, which becomes relevant when a dog on a chain in a front yard reaches the sidewalk.

When a dog is officially declared dangerous

Subchapter D of Chapter 822 creates a formal designation with real machinery behind it, and it operates independently of any civil claim.

The definition. Under § 822.041(2), a dangerous dog is one that makes an unprovoked attack causing bodily injury in a place other than an enclosure in which the dog was being kept and that was reasonably certain to keep the dog from leaving on its own, or that commits unprovoked acts outside such an enclosure that cause a person to reasonably believe the dog will attack and cause bodily injury.

The determination. Under § 822.0421, when someone reports a qualifying incident, the animal control authority may investigate, and if it determines after taking sworn witness statements that the dog is a dangerous dog, it must notify the owner in writing. The owner has 15 days to appeal to a justice, county, or municipal court. In Austin this is why the City directs people seeking the designation to file a signed bite affidavit.

What the owner must then do. Section 822.042 gives the owner 30 days from learning the dog is a dangerous dog to register it with the animal control authority, restrain it at all times on a leash in a person's immediate control or in a secure enclosure, and obtain liability insurance or show financial responsibility of at least $100,000 for damages from an attack causing bodily injury. Section 822.043 sets the annual registration fee at $50 and requires proof of the insurance, current rabies vaccination, and the enclosure.

Why a prior determination is powerful in a civil case. Section 822.042(g) spells out how an owner "learns" they own a dangerous dog: they know of a qualifying attack, a court has found the dog dangerous, or the animal control authority has informed them. Each of those is documented. Each maps directly onto the knowledge element of the Marshall strict-liability theory. A dangerous-dog file is the closest thing a bite case has to a confession.

The criminal exposure. Section 822.005 makes it an offense for an owner who, with criminal negligence, fails to secure a dog that then makes an unprovoked attack off the owner's property causing serious bodily injury or death, and for an owner who knows the dog is dangerous and lets it attack outside a secure enclosure. It is a third-degree felony, and a second-degree felony where the attack causes death. Section 822.001(2) defines serious bodily injury for this purpose as severe bite wounds or severe ripping and tearing of muscle that would cause a reasonably prudent person to seek medical treatment and would require hospitalization, whether or not the person actually sought treatment.

A criminal case is the District Attorney's to bring, not ours, and it proceeds on its own schedule. It does not compensate anyone. It does produce an investigative file.

Landlords, apartment complexes and a tenant's dog

A large share of Austin bites happen at apartment complexes and rental houses, and the tenant who owns the dog frequently has no renters policy and no assets. The question that follows is whether the property owner is on the hook.

The Texas answer is narrow, and we would rather you hear it accurately than optimistically. In Batra v. Clark, 110 S.W.3d 126 (Tex. App.—Houston [1st Dist.] 2003, no pet.), a nine-year-old was attacked by a pit bull at a rental house. The landlord knew a dog was there, and the lease prohibited pets without his written consent. The court still rendered judgment that the landlord owed no duty, because the evidence did not establish that he had actual knowledge of the dog's vicious nature. Knowing a dog exists is not enough.

The framework the court described requires, in substance: actual knowledge of the dog's presence on the leased premises, actual knowledge of the dog's dangerous propensities, and the ability to control the leased premises either through the lease terms or through property rules — plus a failure to exercise that ability.

So the investigation on the landlord side is about documented notice and retained control:

• Written complaints from other residents about this specific dog, and what the office did with them.
• Prior incident reports, courtesy-officer logs, and maintenance tickets naming the dog or the unit.
• The lease and the pet addendum: breed restrictions, weight limits, required pet insurance, the right to remove an animal.
• Where the attack happened. A bite in a shared breezeway, a dog park, a laundry room, or a pool gate area sits in space the complex controls and maintains. A bite inside the tenant's own unit generally does not.
• Whether management knew and kept collecting rent anyway. Knowledge plus the contractual power to act plus inaction is the combination the cases care about.

A word on the boundary. This analysis lives on this page because it turns on knowledge of an animal. Physical hazards on a property — a broken stair tread, an unlit walkway, standing water — run on a different doctrine and belong on our Austin premises liability page.

Bites to children: faces, scars and surgery years later

Bite geometry is a function of height. An adult is bitten on the hand, forearm, or lower leg, because that is what is closest and what they put up to defend themselves. A four-year-old's face is at the level of a large dog's head. That is the entire explanation for why paediatric bites concentrate on the face, scalp, lips, cheeks, and ears, and why they behave so differently as claims.

What treatment actually looks like on a facial bite in a small child:

• The ER closure is not the repair. Bite wounds carry a high infection risk, so the initial management is irrigation, debridement, sometimes deliberate delayed closure, and antibiotics. Cosmetic outcome is a secondary priority at hour one.
• Reconstruction is staged, and it is staged over growth. Scar revision, Z-plasty, tissue expansion, and lip or eyelid reconstruction are timed around a child's facial development. A repair that looks right at seven can distort at thirteen as the face lengthens. It is entirely normal for a child bitten at five to have a surgery scheduled at eleven.
• Scars change on their own. Hypertrophic scarring and contracture develop over twelve to eighteen months. A scar assessed at three months post-injury has not finished becoming what it will be.
• The non-surgical burden is real and it is documentable. Silicone sheeting, pressure therapy, laser treatment, sun protection for years, and, frequently, the child's fear of dogs — which shows up as avoidance of parks, of friends' houses, of walking to school.

Valuing a child's scar is the piece that separates these cases from the rest of our work, and it is why we treat disfigurement as its own damages category rather than folding it into general pain and suffering. Texas juries are asked about physical disfigurement separately, past and future, and future disfigurement in a growing child is a question about decades. The proof is photographic, sequential, and expert-supported: dated photographs from the ER forward, a treating plastic surgeon's opinion on the number and timing of future procedures, and a cost projection for each. Our deeper treatment of that category sits at disability and disfigurement.

The other categories still apply and we pursue them: medical expenses, emotional distress, and, where a parent has to stop working to manage a surgical schedule, lost wages.

One boundary. A small child knocked down by a large dog can strike their head, and a head injury is a different case with different proof. If that is what happened, read our Austin traumatic brain injury page and call us; we will not try to squeeze it into a bite claim.

Rabies, infection and the medical care nobody plans for

Two medical realities drive the early bills, and neither is intuitive.

Infection. A dog's canine teeth puncture rather than slice. The wound closes over at the surface while bacteria sit at depth, which is why hand bites in particular get admitted for IV antibiotics and washout in the operating room. Tendon sheath and joint involvement in the hand can mean permanent stiffness and a hand-therapy course measured in months.

Rabies. Post-exposure prophylaxis is a series of vaccine doses plus, for most previously unvaccinated patients, rabies immune globulin dosed by body weight and infiltrated around the wound. The immune globulin is the expensive component and the bill routinely lands in the thousands.

The decision whether to start that series usually turns on the ten-day observation described above. A dog that is available, identified, and quarantined can be observed. A dog that ran off, or whose owner will not identify themselves, cannot — and the physician has to make the call without that information. That is a clinical decision, made by the treating doctor, not by us. We describe it here because it is the single most common way "we did not want to make a fuss" turns into a course of injections that might have been avoided.

For local context, Texas DSHS confirmed 68 animal rabies cases in Travis County in 2024, the highest county total in the state, and 63 of those were bats. Statewide the same year there were 5 confirmed cases in dogs out of 412 positive specimens. Rabies in an Austin dog is genuinely rare. The observation requirement exists anyway, and the City's own guidance says the risk in Travis County should not be taken lightly.

Keep every receipt: the ER, the immune globulin, the follow-up doses, the antibiotics, the plastic surgery consult, the mileage. Bite cases carry a high proportion of costs people forget to claim.

Settling a claim when the injured person is a child

A child's claim runs on a different clock and settles through a different door.

The clock. The general personal injury deadline is two years from the day the claim accrues under Civil Practice & Remedies Code § 16.003(a). Section 16.001 provides that a person under 18 is under a legal disability and the time of the disability is not counted in a limitations period, so a child bitten at six generally has until around their twentieth birthday to bring their own claim.

That tolling is narrower than it sounds, and the trap catches parents constantly. The parent's own claim — for the medical expenses they paid and are obligated to pay — belongs to the parent and runs on the ordinary two-year clock. Wait until the child turns 18 and the medical bills, which are usually the largest hard number in the file, are gone.

The door. A minor cannot settle their own case. A parent files as next friend, and the settlement goes to a court for approval. Where the child's next friend appears to have an interest adverse to the child — most often over how settlement proceeds are divided — a court appoints a guardian ad litem under Texas Rule of Civil Procedure 173 whose job is to advise the court whether the settlement is in the child's best interest. Travis County civil matters are heard at 1700 Guadalupe Street in downtown Austin.

Where the money goes. Courts do not hand a child's settlement to a parent to spend. The typical structures are a registry deposit with the county, released when the child turns 18, or a structured settlement annuity that pays out on a schedule — often timed to college, and often designed with a reserve for the revision surgery everyone knows is coming.

Plan the money around the surgical timeline, not the other way around. A settlement that funds a fifteen-year-old's revision procedure is worth more to that family than a slightly larger number locked up until they are eighteen.

What to do this week

Ordered by how quickly the thing disappears.

1. Report the bite to Austin Animal Protection. Call 3-1-1, or submit the signed bite affidavit. Do this even if the owner asks you not to. It is how the ten-day observation starts and it is how a neutral record of the dog and the owner gets created.
2. Get the dog's rabies vaccination certificate. Ask the owner directly, in writing, on the day. A text message asking "can you send me the vaccination record?" is a dated document that also establishes the owner acknowledged the bite.
3. Photograph the wound before it is dressed, and then every week. Same angle, same lighting, phone camera. Twelve weekly photographs of a healing facial wound do more for a child's disfigurement claim than any expert report, and they cannot be recreated later.
4. Write down who owns the dog and where it lives. Full name, unit number, phone. In apartment cases the owner is frequently identified only as "the guy in 214" and by the time anyone looks, 214 has turned over.
5. Get the names and numbers of anyone who saw it. Bites at parks and complexes have bystanders who scatter within minutes.
6. Photograph the enclosure. The propped gate, the gap in the fence, the chain, the open door. A landlord repairs a broken fence within days of a bite, and the repair erases the evidence.
7. If the dog has a history, capture it now. Screenshot the Nextdoor thread or the group text before it is deleted.
8. Tell the pediatrician about the fear, not only the wound. Nightmares, refusing to walk past a house, refusing the park. If it is not in the chart it is a story; if it is in the chart it is a record.
9. Call before you give a recorded statement. The owner's homeowners carrier will call within days and it will be a pleasant conversation. A statement given while you are still deciding whether to "make a big deal of it" gets read back to you two years later.

How we get paid on a dog bite case

No fee unless we recover. You pay nothing up front and nothing out of pocket while the case runs. Our fee is a percentage of the recovery, stated in the written agreement you sign before we do anything, and if there is no recovery there is no fee.

Case expenses are separate from the fee, and they look particular on a bite case. We advance them. On most Austin bite files they are modest by injury-case standards: a records request to the treating hospital and to the plastic surgeon, an open-records request to Austin Animal Services for the bite report, the quarantine record, and any prior report or dangerous-dog file on that dog, a subpoena to the apartment complex for complaint logs and the lease, and the treating surgeon's fee for a written opinion on the number, timing, and cost of future scar revisions.

That last item is the one that carries a paediatric case, and it is the reason we are willing to advance costs on a claim that looks small at first glance. A child's file with a documented surgical plan is a different case from the same child's file without one.

What is not on that list, compared with our other work: no vehicle download, no crash reconstruction, no biomechanical engineer. Bite cases are proved with records, photographs, and one treating physician. They are, relative to their value, inexpensive cases to build properly.

If we look at your file and conclude that the coverage is excluded, the owner is uncollectible, and the injury is minor, we will tell you that on the first call. Opening a case that cannot pay for itself does you no favors.

What people ask after a dog attack

The questions people actually ask us in the week after a bite, answered for this page.

More general questions are answered on our FAQ page.

Related pages on this site

• A bite or attack on an apartment complex's property
• Scarring, disfigurement and how it is valued
• Medical expenses and the paid-or-incurred rule
• Israel Medina
• Rikki Medina

Talk to us about the bite

This page is general information about Texas law. It is not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Every case turns on its own facts. Past results do not guarantee future results.