Drunk Driving Accident Lawyer in Alvin, TX

A drunk driver isn’t always the only name that ends up on your claim. Texas law sometimes lets you go after whoever handed that driver one drink too many, right alongside the person who hit you.

Two dozen of Alvin’s 2024 crashes had alcohol in them, per TxDOT’s DUI table. Some of those crashes hurt no one but the people directly involved. Others reached further, into passengers, other drivers, sometimes a bar that should have cut someone off long before they got behind the wheel.

Someone besides the driver may owe you too

Texas recognizes a narrow path called a dram shop claim. A bar, restaurant, or private host that keeps serving someone who’s already visibly drunk can share responsibility for what happens after that person drives away. It isn’t automatic. It depends on specific facts: whether staff had a real chance to notice, whether service kept going anyway, whether anyone tried to cut the person off at all. When a business shares the blame, a claim can end up inventorying more than one insurance policy: the driver’s, and the business’s too. That broader kind of claim falls under personal injury law.

The driver still carries the weight of the claim

None of that erases the driver’s own liability. Whether or not a bar shares the blame, the driver who chose to get behind the wheel still owes you for what happened. That claim gathers up the medical bills, the paychecks that stopped, and the losses no receipt can prove. That last kind of loss gets gauged claim by claim under pain and suffering. If the crash took a life, that loss opens a separate part of Texas law. That track treats who can step forward as its own question, found under wrongful death claims.

Criminal court doesn’t decide your claim

A DWI charge and a civil injury claim run in different courtrooms, under different rules, and neither one waits on the other to finish. The criminal side hands out fines, suspensions, and sometimes jail time. Your losses appear nowhere in that sentence; money for them moves only through the civil claim you file yourself. DWI dockets crawl; a year is normal. Nothing forces your claim to idle alongside it.

An arrest happens whether you lift a finger or not. Your claim doesn’t work that way. It waits for you to start it, whatever the criminal case is doing in the background. Those early moves tour the same ground whether the other driver was drunk or not. The full list sits in what to do after a crash.