Austin Premises Liability Lawyer

Who you were on the property decides what you are owed

Before anyone argues about the railing or the lighting or the gate, Texas law asks a narrower question: what were you doing there, and did the property owner get anything out of your being there.

The answer sorts you into one of three legal categories, and the category sets the duty. Somebody shopping in a store is owed a great deal. Somebody visiting a friend is owed less. Somebody who climbed a fence is owed almost nothing, with one large exception for children.

This sounds technical, and it is the single most consequential fact in most premises cases. Two people can be hurt by the identical broken step on the identical afternoon and get opposite results, because one was a paying tenant's delivery driver and the other had wandered in off the street. Defense lawyers know this, which is why the first thing an adjuster asks is why you were there and who invited you. Answer it accurately, and answer it once.

Invitee, licensee, trespasser: the Texas classifications in plain terms

Invitee. You entered for a purpose connected to the owner's business or with the owner's express or implied encouragement. A customer, a hotel guest, a tenant, a tenant's guest in most Texas apartment settings, a client walking into an office. This is the highest duty. The owner has to use ordinary care to make the premises reasonably safe from unreasonably dangerous conditions it knows about or should have discovered through reasonable inspection, or adequately warn about them. The inspection obligation matters. An invitee does not have to prove the owner actually saw the hazard.

Licensee. You entered with permission but for your own purposes, and the owner gains nothing from your visit. A social guest at somebody's house is the textbook example. The duty here runs only to conditions the owner actually knows about. There is no obligation to go looking. If nobody at the property knew the deck board was rotten, a licensee generally loses.

Trespasser. You entered without permission. The owner owes a duty only to refrain from injuring you wilfully, wantonly or through gross negligence. Texas put that rule in statute at CPRC § 75.007(b). The same section carries the exception for children, which we cover further down.

Three things people get wrong about these categories:

1. Your status can change while you are on the property. Walk into the customer area of a warehouse as an invitee, wander past a staff-only door, and the argument becomes that you were a licensee or trespasser in that part of the building. Where you were standing matters as much as why you came.
2. Paying rent makes you an invitee of the common areas. Hallways, stairwells, laundry rooms, mail rooms, pools, gates, garages and parking lots at an apartment complex stay under the landlord's control, and a tenant is owed the invitee duty there. That is the doctrinal foundation of most Austin apartment cases.
3. A "no trespassing" sign is not a magic word. It is evidence about permission. It does not resolve the question by itself, and it does nothing at all about a hazard the owner created and knew children could reach.

This classification framework is the core of premises liability, and it is where this page lives. If your injury was a fall on a wet or uneven floor inside a store, the analysis narrows quickly to a different set of proof problems and we handle that on the Austin slip and fall page.

The four things a premises claim has to prove

For an invitee, Texas requires four elements. Every one of them has to be proved, and defendants attack them one at a time.

One. The owner had actual or constructive knowledge of a condition on the premises. Somebody with responsibility either knew, or would have known if they had done the inspecting the law expects.

Two. The condition posed an unreasonable risk of harm. Not every imperfect thing on a property is unreasonably dangerous. A curb is a curb. A missing handrail on a switchback stairwell is a different matter.

Three. The owner failed to exercise reasonable care to reduce or eliminate the risk. This is where maintenance logs, work orders, budget decisions and ignored complaints do the work.

Four. That failure proximately caused your injury. The link between the condition and the harm has to hold up.

The Texas Supreme Court set these out in Keetch v. Kroger Co., 845 S.W.2d 262 (Tex. 1992), and refined the knowledge element in CMH Homes, Inc. v. Daenen, 15 S.W.3d 97 (Tex. 2000). Daenen carries a line worth knowing before you get your hopes up: the law does not require a property to be perfect, and the fact that a condition eventually failed does not by itself prove the owner should have known it would.

For a licensee, the elements shift: you have to prove the owner actually knew of the condition, that you did not, and that the owner failed to warn you or make it safe. Losing invitee status usually costs a case its inspection theory, which is often the whole theory.

Knew, or should have known: actual versus constructive knowledge

Actual knowledge is somebody at the property knowing. A work order. An email. A prior complaint. A maintenance tech who wrote it up in March. In apartment and commercial cases this is often sitting in a property-management system that nobody has looked at, and it comes out in discovery rather than from the plaintiff.

Constructive knowledge is the harder and more useful concept. It means the condition existed long enough, or was obvious enough, that a reasonably careful owner conducting reasonable inspections would have found it. A gate latch that has been broken for eleven months, a stairwell light out through two billing cycles, a balcony with visible rot, a pool fence with a two-foot gap — these are constructive-knowledge facts, and they are proved with photographs, prior tenant complaints, vendor invoices, inspection schedules and the absence of any inspection schedule at all.

For a hazard that appears and disappears in minutes, such as a spill on a store floor, Texas asks a narrow time-on-the-floor question, and that fight belongs on the slip and fall page. For the conditions this page is about — structures, lighting, gates, locks, stairs, pools, security — the condition usually persisted for weeks or months, and constructive knowledge is usually provable. That is the practical difference between the two case types.

What proves it, in the order we go after it: photographs with timestamps, the property's own work-order history, prior complaints from other tenants or customers, inspection and preventive-maintenance records, vendor and contractor invoices, code-enforcement and fire-marshal records, and the deposition of the person whose job it was to walk the property.

A dangerous condition is not the same as a dangerous activity

Texas splits negligence on property into two theories, and the split has consequences.

A premises defect is a dangerous condition that existed on the property. The claim is that the owner failed to fix it or warn about it. That is the four-part test above.

A negligent activity is somebody's contemporaneous conduct injuring you — the injury comes from the activity itself, as it is happening. A worker drops a pallet on you. A driver backs a cart into you.

Both are negligence, and they have different elements and different jury questions. In United Scaffolding, Inc. v. Levine, 537 S.W.3d 463 (Tex. 2017), a plaintiff who won at trial on a general negligence question lost everything on appeal, because the injury was really a premises defect and the jury was never asked the premises questions. The Supreme Court rendered a take-nothing judgment.

That is a case lost on pleading and charge, not on facts. It is one of several reasons we would rather look at a case early than late, and it is why the first substantive conversation about a premises case is usually about which theory the facts actually support. Sometimes it is both, pleaded in the alternative. Sometimes it is one, and choosing wrong ends the case two years in.

When the hazard was obvious and you got hurt anyway

This is the doctrine most likely to defeat a claim, and any honest page about Texas premises law has to say so.

In Austin v. Kroger Texas, L.P., 465 S.W.3d 193 (Tex. 2015), the Texas Supreme Court confirmed the general rule: a landowner generally has no duty to warn or protect an invitee against a condition that is open and obvious, or that the invitee already knows about. The reasoning is that a warning adds nothing to what you can already see.

The Court then confirmed two exceptions, and named them:

The criminal-activity exception, which "may arise when a dangerous condition results from the foreseeable criminal activity of third parties." That exception is the hinge of the negligent-security cases in the next section.

The necessary-use exception, which may arise "when the invitee necessarily must use the unreasonably dangerous premises, and despite the invitee's awareness and appreciation of the dangers, the invitee is incapable of taking precautions that will adequately reduce the risk." A tenant who has to use the one stairwell that serves her unit, in a building whose other stairwell is chained shut, is arguing necessary use.

Where an exception applies, the Court said, the obviousness of the danger and your appreciation of it "may be relevant to a landowner's defense based on the invitee's proportionate responsibility," and they do not relieve the owner of the duty to make the premises reasonably safe. In plain terms: the fact that you knew the light was out can reduce your recovery under Texas comparative fault without ending the case, so long as an exception is in play.

We will tell you straight when the open-and-obvious rule is likely to end your case, including when the answer is that the case is not worth opening. That conversation costs you nothing and it is better to have it in week one.

Negligent security: when the danger on the property was another person

Everything above assumes the thing that hurt you was a condition. Sometimes the thing that hurt you was a person, and the property owner is still on the hook — because the risk that a person like that would be there was foreseeable, and the owner did nothing about it.

Texas recognises this. A property owner who knows or has reason to know of an unreasonable and foreseeable risk of harm to invitees has a duty to use ordinary care to protect against criminal acts of third parties. In Del Lago Partners, Inc. v. Smith, 307 S.W.3d 762 (Tex. 2010), a resort that watched ninety minutes of escalating hostility between two groups in its bar, and did nothing, was held liable when it ended in a beating in the exit doorway.

These are the fact patterns we handle under this heading:

• An assault, robbery, shooting or sexual assault in an apartment complex breezeway, laundry room, mail area, stairwell or parking lot
• An attack in a parking garage or surface lot where lighting, gates, cameras or patrols were absent, broken or abandoned
• A shooting or beating outside a bar or music venue, in the lot or at the door
• Assaults at hotels and extended-stay motels where the exterior corridor door locks or key controls had failed
• Assaults in student housing where perimeter access control was propped, broken, or never enforced
• Attacks that follow a long, documented history of the same kind of crime at the same address, which the owner answered with nothing

What a negligent-security case is not is a claim that the owner should have prevented all crime everywhere. Texas has been explicit that it will not require "conspicuous security at every point of potential contact between a patron and a criminal." The question is narrower and more answerable: given what this owner knew about this property, was the risk foreseeable, was it unreasonable, and would something ordinary have addressed it.

The Timberwalk questions a court asks about foreseeable crime

Timberwalk Apartments, Partners, Inc. v. Cain, 972 S.W.2d 749 (Tex. 1998), set the framework. Texas courts ask whether criminal conduct previously occurred on or near the property, how recently, how often, how similar it was to what happened to you, and what publicity those earlier crimes received. The Supreme Court named the five factors: proximity, recency, frequency, similarity, publicity, and said they must be considered together.

What each one means in practice:

Proximity. There must be evidence of other crimes on the property or in its immediate vicinity. A citywide crime rate proves nothing about your complex.

Recency and frequency. Foreseeability "depends on how recently and how often criminal conduct has occurred in the past." One incident four years ago is different from nine incidents in eighteen months.

Similarity. Prior crimes "must be sufficiently similar to the crime in question as to place the landowner on notice of the specific danger." A string of car burglaries does not automatically put an owner on notice of an armed robbery, though the two can be linked with evidence.

Publicity. Whether the earlier crimes were reported, covered, or otherwise brought to the owner's attention.

Then there is a second question, and it is the one that decided UDR Texas Properties, L.P. v. Petrie, 517 S.W.3d 98 (Tex. 2017). Petrie was assaulted and robbed in an apartment complex's visitor parking lot. The court of appeals treated foreseeability and unreasonableness as one blended question. The Supreme Court reversed and rendered for the complex, holding that foreseeability and unreasonableness are separate inquiries, and that the Timberwalk factors measure only the first. "A risk is unreasonable when the risk of a foreseeable crime outweighs the burden placed on property owners — and society at large — to prevent the risk." Petrie lost because he offered no evidence of what preventing his assault would have cost or required.

That is a plaintiff's burden, and it is why a negligent-security case cannot be built out of a crime report alone. It needs the prior-crime record, and it needs proof about the specific measure that would have made a difference and what that measure would have taken — a working gate motor, a relamped garage, a camera that recorded, a courtesy patrol the complex advertised in its leasing brochure and then cancelled.

Apartment complexes, parking garages, bars and student housing

Every figure in this section comes from a named public dataset. We pulled each one on 2026-09-05 and each is reproducible from the query recorded with the source. Where a number is national, we say so.

Read this before the numbers. Reported offence counts are police reports. They are not findings of liability, and they say nothing about whether any particular property owner did anything wrong. Their use in a premises case is narrow and specific: under Timberwalk, prior crime near a property is evidence bearing on whether a later crime was foreseeable. That is the only thing these counts are doing here.

Where violent offences were reported in Austin in 2025

Austin Police Department reported 2,193 aggravated assaults and 758 robberies occurring in calendar year 2025. The dataset codes a location type for each incident.

Source: City of Austin Open Data Portal, APD Crime Reports, dataset `fdj4-gpfu`, occurrence dates in 2025, UCR categories 13A and 120. Pulled 2026-09-05.

The parking row is the one that matters most for this practice area. Parking lots and garages were the second most common reported location for robbery in Austin in 2025 and the third most common for aggravated assault. Of the 419 combined offences at parking locations, 221 — about 53% — occurred between 8:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. That is a lighting fact and a patrol fact, and it is the fact a property manager is answering when asked why the garage lamps were never relamped.

Nine of Austin's 42 reported murders in 2025 occurred at a parking lot or garage. Thirteen occurred at a residence.

Whether the trend supports "recency and frequency"

Aggravated assault plus robbery, by occurrence year and location type, same dataset and same filter. Citywide, these counts are trending down. A property owner's exposure does not turn on the citywide trend. It turns on the record at that address, and a complex can be going the opposite direction from the city.

Which parts of town

Reported aggravated assaults and robberies by Austin council district in 2025: District 3 (606) and District 4 (593) carried the highest counts, followed by District 1 (370), District 2 (367) and District 9 (322). Districts 8 and 10 reported 67 and 71. Twenty-three records carried no district code.

This is not a map of dangerous neighborhoods and it should not be read as one. Districts differ enormously in population, in commercial density and in how much nightlife and how many large apartment properties they contain. The number is useful for one purpose only: it tells you that the proximity and frequency evidence in a Timberwalk analysis is going to look very different depending on where the property sits, and that a case has to be built on the record for the specific address.

A cross-check, and why it does not match

The FBI's Crime Data Explorer reports 4,213 violent-crime offences for the Austin Police Department in 2025, down from 4,688 in 2024 and 5,334 in 2022. The city portal's own count of murder, rape, aggravated assault and robbery for 2025 is 3,528. These two figures will never match, and neither one is wrong. FBI NIBRS agency submissions and the city portal count different things: the portal records only the highest-level offence per incident and only incidents where a report was written, and totals shift as investigations reclassify offences. We publish both so you can see the gap rather than trusting a single number.

How large the Austin apartment market actually is

The Census Bureau's American Community Survey five-year estimates for 2020-2024 put Austin at 456,113 occupied housing units, of which 257,933 are renter-occupied — about 57% of all households in the city. Of those renter households, 180,523 live in a building with five or more units, 108,081 in a building with twenty or more, and 72,586 in a building with fifty or more.

That is the exposure honestly stated. Well over a hundred thousand Austin households live in a property where the gates, the garage, the stairwells, the laundry room, the mail area and the pool are somebody else's legal responsibility. This is why negligent security is a live area of Texas law in this city and not an academic one.

What we deliberately do not tell you. The Austin dataset's location field has one value, "residence / home," that covers a single-family house, a duplex and a four-hundred-unit complex without distinguishing them. We could not split apartments out of that number without guessing, so we did not. There is no student-housing location code in the data either, so there is no student-housing count on this page. And no public dataset reports negligent-security lawsuits or outcomes, in Austin or anywhere else, so there is no such figure here.

Who actually controls the property: owner, manager, tenant, contractor

At most Austin commercial and multifamily properties, four or five entities touch the place where you were hurt. A title-holding LLC. A national management company. A regional maintenance vendor. A commercial tenant with a lease that carves out its own space. A landscaping or elevator or security contractor.

Texas premises duty follows control, not the deed. The question is who had the right to control the specific condition or the specific area at the time. That is a fact question, and the answer usually lives in the lease, the management agreement and the vendor contracts.

The practical consequences:

• Sue the right entities early. A title LLC that has delegated everything to a manager may not be the party with the duty, and a manager that took over three months after your injury is not either. This is a records problem before it is a legal one, and it is a reason to open a file before the two-year clock gets close.
• Watch for the responsible-third-party designation. Under CPRC § 33.004, a defendant can move to designate someone else — including the criminal who attacked you, and including a party you did not sue — as a responsible third party, and the jury then apportions a percentage to that person. The motion is normally due 60 days before trial. Texas grants these motions readily. The effect in a negligent-security case is that the assailant absorbs a share of the responsibility and the recoverable percentage against the property drops. Planning for that designation is part of building the case, and it is another reason the evidence about what the owner failed to do has to be strong rather than merely sympathetic.
• Comparative fault applies to you too. CPRC § 33.001 bars recovery entirely if you are found more than 50% responsible, and reduces it proportionally below that line.
• Joint and several liability is limited. Under CPRC § 33.013, a defendant generally pays only its own percentage, unless its share exceeds 50% or it acted in concert with specific intent to do harm.

One boundary worth stating plainly. If a landlord's liability for a tenant's dangerous dog is what brought you here, that is a premises theory and it is a real one, and it is analysed in full on the Austin dog bite page rather than here.

Children, pools and attractive nuisance

A child who gets onto property without permission is technically a trespasser, and Texas does not treat children the way it treats adults.

CPRC § 75.007(c) codifies the test. An owner may be liable for injury to a child caused by a highly dangerous artificial condition when all five of these hold:

1. The owner knew or should have known that children were likely to trespass where the condition is;
2. The owner knew or should have known the condition existed and involved an unreasonable risk of death or serious bodily harm to children;
3. The child, because of youth, did not discover the condition or realise the risk;
4. The utility of maintaining the condition and the burden of eliminating the danger were slight compared to the risk to the child; and
5. The owner failed to exercise reasonable care to eliminate the danger or otherwise protect the child.

Pools are the classic application, and Texas legislated the details. Health & Safety Code Chapter 757 applies to a pool owned, controlled or maintained by the owner of a multiunit rental complex or by a property owners association. Under § 757.003 the pool yard must be completely enclosed, the enclosure must be at least 48 inches high, gaps may not pass a four-inch sphere, and chain link is prohibited entirely for enclosures built after January 1, 1994. Under § 757.004 a gate must be self-closing and self-latching, must open outward away from the pool, and the latch must sit at least 60 inches above the ground unless narrow alternative specifications are met. Section 757.012 gives tenants, association members and others a direct cause of action for failure to comply, and allows punitive damages where the failure was intentional, malicious or grossly negligent — including where the owner was in compliance but consciously indifferent to unauthorised access being repeatedly gained to the pool yard.

That last clause describes a propped gate that everybody at the complex knew about. It is worth reading twice.

For scale, the Consumer Product Safety Commission's May 2026 report estimates 5,900 emergency-department-treated nonfatal pool or spa drowning injuries per year to children under 15 nationally for 2023-2025, and 376 reported pool or spa drowning deaths per year to children under 15 for 2021-2023. Seventy-one percent of the nonfatal injuries and 77% of the deaths involved children under five. Forty-two percent of the ED-treated child victims were admitted to the hospital or transferred to another one, against 4% for all consumer-product injuries in that age group — these are not minor emergency-room visits.

On location, CPSC found that 36% of ED-treated child drowning injuries in 2023-2025 happened at a residence and 28% at a public location, and that among children aged 5 to 14 the public share rises to 41%. Among reported deaths in 2021-2023, public, community or business locations accounted for 15% overall and 40% of deaths among children aged 10 to 14. These are national figures, not Austin ones. They are here to size the problem, and the "public location" category is where apartment and neighbourhood pools sit.

Recreational use, government property, and other places the rules change

Four statutory carve-outs surprise people, and any of them can change the answer.

Contractors and their employees — Chapter 95. If you were injured while constructing, repairing, renovating or modifying an improvement on commercial property, CPRC Chapter 95 may control instead of ordinary premises law. Section 95.003 says a property owner is not liable to a contractor, subcontractor or their employee for injury arising from the condition or use of that improvement unless the owner both (1) exercised or retained some control over the manner in which the work was performed, beyond ordering it to start or stop or inspecting progress, and (2) had actual knowledge of the danger and failed to adequately warn. Both prongs. Constructive knowledge does not satisfy the second one. Note also that "property owner" in § 95.001 means an owner of real property used primarily for commercial or business purposes, so the chapter does not reach a homeowner. If you were hurt doing this kind of work, the control-exception fight is the whole case and it lives on the Austin construction accident page.

Recreational entrants — Chapter 75. If an owner gave you permission to enter for recreation — swimming, hiking, biking, dog walking, disc golf and a long statutory list — CPRC § 75.002(c) drops the duty owed to you to the trespasser standard. Section 75.002(d) leaves liability intact for gross negligence, malicious intent or bad faith. There is a real limit worth checking: under § 75.003(c) the chapter generally applies only to an owner who does not charge for entry, or whose total recreational charges in the prior calendar year were no more than twenty times the property's ad valorem taxes, or who carries insurance at the levels § 75.004 specifies. A commercial operation charging real money is often outside the shield.

City, county and state property — Chapter 101. The Texas Tort Claims Act waives immunity only in defined circumstances and then limits it hard. For a premises defect, § 101.022(a) gives you only the duty owed to a licensee — the lower, actual-knowledge standard — unless you paid for the use of the premises. Damages against a municipality are capped by § 101.023(c) at $250,000 per person and $500,000 per occurrence; against a unit of local government, § 101.023(b) caps them at $100,000 and $300,000. Section 101.024 bars exemplary damages against a governmental unit entirely.

The notice clock is the part that kills these claims. Section 101.101(a) requires notice within six months, and § 101.101(b) expressly ratifies shorter periods set by city charter. The City of Austin instructs claimants to send a written claim within 45 days of the incident, addressed to the City of Austin Law Department Claims division. Forty-five days. If you were hurt on a City sidewalk, in a City park, at a City pool or in a City facility, this is the single most urgent thing on this page.

The first two weeks after an injury on someone else's property

This list is specific to this kind of case. The evidence that decides premises and negligent-security claims is short-lived and controlled by the other side.

Days one to three.

1. Photograph the condition itself and everything around it — the gate, the latch, the light fixture, the railing, the tread, the lock, the fence line — from several distances, with your phone's timestamp on.
2. Photograph the absence of things: no camera on the pole, no lamp in the fixture, no sign, no gate arm.
3. Get the incident report number and the name of the person who took it.
4. Get medical care and describe how the injury happened, accurately, to the provider. That record becomes the first written account.

Within two weeks, and this is the one nobody thinks of.

1. Send a written surveillance-preservation letter to the owner, the management company and any security vendor. Most commercial and multifamily camera systems overwrite on a 7 to 30 day loop. Footage that exists today is gone in three weeks, and once it is gone it is gone. The letter should name the date, time window, camera locations and the systems involved, and demand preservation of the native files rather than a phone video of a monitor. This is the single highest-value thing that happens in the first month of a premises case, and it has to be done before anyone knows whether the case is worth filing.
2. Ask for the prior-incident record. In a negligent-security case, ask in writing for the property's crime and incident history and its courtesy-patrol or security-vendor records.
3. Write down the names of everyone who told you the condition had been like that "for a while." Constructive knowledge is built out of those sentences.
4. If the property is owned or operated by the City of Austin, send the written claim now. See the 45-day rule above.
5. Do not give a recorded statement to the property's insurer before you have talked to a lawyer. The questions about why you were there and what you saw are aimed directly at your classification and at comparative fault.

Punishment damages when an owner ignored a known danger

Most damages categories work the same way across every injury case, and we cover them at /compensation — medical bills past and future, lost income and lost earning capacity, physical pain, disfigurement, and, where someone died, wrongful death damages.

The category that belongs to this page is exemplary damages, and Texas has built a specific and counterintuitive rule around them for cases involving crime.

Exemplary damages punish rather than compensate. Under CPRC § 41.003 they are available only on clear and convincing evidence of fraud, malice or gross negligence. Section 41.001(11) defines gross negligence as an act or omission that objectively involved an extreme degree of risk, of which the actor had actual, subjective awareness and proceeded anyway with conscious indifference. A landlord who was told about the broken gate nine times and did nothing is the fact pattern that statute describes.

Then comes the trap. CPRC § 41.005(a) says that in an action arising from harm resulting from an assault, theft or other criminal act, a court may not award exemplary damages against a defendant because of the criminal act of another. Read literally, that closes the door on punitive damages in most negligent-security cases.

Section 41.005(b) opens four exceptions, and two of them matter here:

• § 41.005(b)(3). The criminal act occurred where the defendant was maintaining a common nuisance under CPRC Chapter 125 and had not made reasonable attempts to abate it. Section 125.0015 lists aggravated assault, robbery, aggravated robbery and murder among the qualifying activities, so a property where those habitually occur and where the owner knowingly tolerated it without reasonable abatement efforts can fall inside this exception.
• § 41.005(b)(4). The criminal act resulted from the defendant's intentional or knowing violation of a statutory duty under Subchapter D, Chapter 92 of the Property Code, and occurred after the compliance deadline. That subchapter is the one requiring landlords to install security devices. Property Code § 92.153 requires, at the landlord's expense and without any request from the tenant, a window latch on every exterior window, a keyed dead bolt or doorknob lock on every exterior door, a keyless bolting device and a door viewer on every exterior door, and a pin lock plus a handle latch or security bar on every exterior sliding glass door. Section 92.164 sets out the tenant's remedies.

So the answer on punitive damages in an Austin apartment assault case is: usually barred, and specifically not barred where the complex ignored the statutory lock requirements or ran a property that met the common-nuisance definition. That is a narrow door, and it is a real one, and whether your facts fit through it is something we can usually tell within the first month.

If exemplary damages are recoverable, CPRC § 41.008(b) caps them at the greater of $200,000, or twice economic damages plus noneconomic damages up to $750,000, with a carve-out in § 41.008(c) for conduct that constitutes certain felonies committed knowingly or intentionally. More on this category at /compensation/punitive-damages.

What this costs you, and what we spend to run it

We work these cases on contingency. There is no hourly bill, no retainer, and no charge for the consultation. If we do not recover money for you, you owe us no attorney's fee.

The part worth understanding is the case expenses, because premises and negligent-security cases have an unusual expense profile and it is the reason some firms will not take them.

A slip-and-fall against a national retailer runs mostly on records: subpoena the incident file and the sweep log, take a deposition, done. A negligent-security case against an apartment complex runs on assembly of a crime history that nobody has assembled. That means public-information requests to the police department for calls for service and offence reports at the address over a multi-year window, purchase or extraction of prior-incident data, a security-practices expert who can testify what lighting levels, access control and patrol coverage were reasonable for this property type, a lighting or premises-security engineer to measure what the illumination actually was, sometimes a locksmith or access-control specialist for the gate and lock questions, and — because Petrie requires it — an expert who can put a real number on what the missing measure would have cost the owner to provide.

That last item is not optional. A negligent-security case with no burden evidence is the case the Supreme Court rendered judgment against in 2017.

We advance those costs. They come out of the recovery at the end, and we tell you what we are about to spend before we spend it. If a case does not justify a security expert, we say so rather than running up the file.

Your attorney

Rikki Olivia Medina, Founding Partner. Texas Bar No. 24144569. Juris Doctor, Baylor University School of Law. Admitted in Texas and Nevada. Member, Texas Trial Lawyers Association; Austin Bar Association; Travis County Bar Association. Premises liability and slip and fall are among the practice areas listed on her profile. → Full bio

Israel Ruiz Medina, Founding Partner. Texas Bar No. 24130487. Juris Doctor, Baylor University School of Law. Admitted in Texas and Nevada. Member, Texas Trial Lawyers Association; Travis County Bar Association; Austin Bar Association; American Association for Justice. → Full bio

Three practical things, because clients ask and other firms leave them out:

• Your immigration status does not stop a premises claim. It is not an element of any of the four things you have to prove, and it does not belong in a discussion about a broken gate.
• You do not have to come to Austin to talk to us. The first conversation can happen by phone or video, and we can start on the surveillance-preservation letter the same day.
• The consultation happens in English or Spanish, whichever you would rather use to explain what happened.

Past results do not guarantee future results. Every case is different.

Sources

`bordered box, live outbound links`

• City of Austin Open Data Portal — APD Crime Reports, Socrata dataset `fdj4-gpfu`. https://data.austintexas.gov/d/fdj4-gpfu · The 2025 filtered view is dataset `n376-8ah5`. Figures on this page use occurrence dates in calendar 2025 unless a multi-year table says otherwise. Pulled 2026-09-05. Publisher's note: the dataset reflects only the highest-level offence per incident, includes only incidents where a report was written, and may differ from official UCR statistics.
• FBI Crime Data Explorer — Austin Police Department, ORI TX2270100, summarized agency violent-crime totals, 2020-2025. https://cde.fbi.gov · Pulled 2026-09-05.
• U.S. Census Bureau — American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates 2020-2024, Tables B25003 and B25032, Austin city, Texas. https://data.census.gov/table/ACSDT5Y2024.B25003 · Pulled 2026-09-05.
• CDC WISQARS — 10 Leading Causes of Nonfatal Emergency Department Visits, United States, 2023. Data source NEISS All Injury Program (CPSC); produced by the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. https://wisqars.cdc.gov · Pulled 2026-09-05.
• U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission — Pool or Spa Submersion: Estimated Nonfatal Drowning Injuries and Reported Drownings, 2026 Report, May 2026. https://www.cpsc.gov/Research--Statistics/NEISS-Injury-Data · Pulled 2026-09-05.
• City of Austin Law Department — File a Claim, 45-day deadline. https://www.austintexas.gov/services/file-claim · Retrieved 2026-09-05.
• Texas statutes — Texas Legislature, Texas Constitution and Statutes. https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov

About the numbers on this page. Every figure above comes from a named public dataset. We pulled each one on September 5, 2026 and each is reproducible from the dataset itself using the query recorded in our source file. Austin crime counts describe police reports inside the Austin Police Department's reporting area — they are not findings of liability against any property owner, and they do not cover Travis County outside the city. National figures from CDC and CPSC are labelled as national wherever they appear. Where you see a number on this page, it is Austin or it is national, and we have said which.

Common questions about getting hurt on someone else's property

Seventeen questions written for this page. None of them appears anywhere else on the site.

Related pages on this site

• You fell on a floor inside a business
• A dog on the property attacked you
• Hurt on a construction site
• A death on someone else's property
• Pain and suffering
• Israel Medina

Talk to us about where it happened

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.