Before the adjuster has read a single medical record, someone has already decided you were riding too fast. Jose Robles Jr is an Air Force combat veteran and a San Antonio motorcycle accident lawyer who takes that assumption apart with evidence, for riders hurt on Loop 1604, US-281, and the Hill Country roads west of Bexar County.
A San Antonio motorcycle accident lawyer helps injured riders recover medical costs, lost income, pain, impairment, and disfigurement. Texas requires helmets only for riders under 21, and not wearing one is not proof you caused a crash. You can still recover if you are 50 percent or less at fault. Free consultation, no fee unless we win.
Because the rider is judged before the evidence is. Insurers know that many adjusters, and many jurors, arrive with an assumption that motorcyclists ride recklessly, and they build the file around it.
You see it in the first phone call. The questions are about how fast you were going, whether you were lane splitting, what you were wearing, and whether you had a helmet. None of those questions is about the driver who turned across your lane. They are about moving your share of responsibility upward, because Texas law gives the insurer a reason to try.
Under Texas law, you cannot recover anything if you were more than half to blame. At 50 percent or less you still recover, reduced by your share. Every point of fault an adjuster can pin on a rider is money saved, and above the halfway line the claim disappears entirely. That single rule explains almost everything the other side does in the first month.
Answering it requires the physical record rather than the narrative: scene photographs before the bike is moved, damage patterns on both vehicles, roadway sight lines, and where the debris field actually landed. Riders who assume the police report settles the question are often surprised, because a report is one officer's opinion formed after the fact, not a finding a court is bound by.
This is the practical difference between motorcycle accident lawyers and general practitioners. Attorneys who represent riders regularly expect the bias and gather the evidence that answers it, instead of discovering the problem when the first offer arrives.
Only riders and passengers under 21 must wear one. Adults may ride without a helmet if they completed an approved safety course or carry qualifying health coverage.
This is the point most riders have heard about and almost nobody has read. Here is what Texas law actually says.
Texas helmet law for motorcycle riders.
Under 21
A helmet is required. No exceptions.
21 or older
May ride without a helmet after completing a motorcycle operator training and safety course approved by the state, or while covered by a health insurance plan providing medical benefits for injuries from a motorcycle collision.
Any rider stopped by police
An officer may not stop or detain you for the sole purpose of checking whether you completed the course or carry the coverage.
Every rider, in a claim
The helmet law says nothing about injury claims. Not wearing a helmet is not proof you caused a crash, though the other side may still argue it made a head injury worse.
One detail is worth correcting, because it appears on a great many Texas law firm pages: the helmet law names no dollar amount of health insurance. The frequently repeated "$10,000 in coverage" figure is not in the statute. What the statute requires is a health insurance plan providing medical benefits for injuries incurred in a motorcycle collision.
Not to prove you caused the crash. A helmet has no bearing on who failed to yield, and the helmet law is a traffic rule that says nothing about injury claims.
What a defendant may try is a severity argument: not that you caused the collision, but that a head injury would have been less severe with a helmet. That is a medical question, answered with medical evidence about the actual mechanism of injury, and it has no application at all to a broken femur, a shoulder reconstruction, or road rash.
Be careful with how this gets framed on the phone. An adjuster asking "were you wearing a helmet?" early in a claim is usually not gathering facts. Any statement you give the other side's insurer is voluntary, and there is no obligation to provide a recorded one.
If you were legally riding without a helmet and are now being told your claim is worthless, that is a negotiating position, not the law.
It means the driver failed to keep a proper lookout. Not seeing a vehicle that was there to be seen is a breach of duty, not an excuse for one.
The left-turn collision is the archetype. A driver waiting to turn across traffic misjudges the closing speed of an oncoming motorcycle, or scans past it entirely because the visual profile is narrow, and turns into the rider's path. The driver's account is nearly always the same sentence, and it is frequently the strongest fact in the rider's case rather than the weakest.
Riders in these collisions are frequently the most seriously hurt people on the road, and traumatic brain injury is common even among helmeted victims. Other recurring patterns in Bexar County include lane-change collisions where a driver merges into an occupied lane, rear-end impacts at lights where a rider is stopped legally, and road-surface cases involving gravel, uneven pavement, or a poorly marked work zone. That last category can bring a contractor or a governmental unit into the claim, and claims against governmental units carry notice deadlines far shorter than the two-year deadline.
The routes riders enjoy most are the ones with the worst mix of speed and cross traffic: Loop 1604, US-281 north, and the Hill Country roads leading out of the county.
Loop 1604 combines highway speeds with frequent entrance ramps and commercial driveways along its northern arc. US-281 carries heavy commuter volume through a corridor of constant merging. West and north of Bexar County, riders move onto two-lane Hill Country roads where blind curves, ranch entrances, and loose gravel at the shoulder create hazards that never appear in a city crash.
Closer in, the interchanges where Loop 410 meets I-10 and I-35 produce a different problem: dense, multi-lane merging where a motorcycle occupies a fraction of a lane and disappears from mirrors. Our office sits in the South Texas Medical Center just off Loop 410, minutes from the hospitals where seriously injured riders are taken. If you cannot travel, we come to you.
Get treated the same day, get the crash report number, photograph the bike before it is moved or repaired, and decline the other insurer's recorded statement until you have advice.
If the crash was weeks ago and none of this happened, the claim is not lost. It has to be rebuilt from what still exists, which is ordinary work.
You talk to the attorney handling your case, not a rotating queue of case managers. That is the whole model of this firm.
Jose Robles Jr is a decorated Air Force combat veteran with a 95% success rate, $5M+ recovered, 1,000+ cases handled, and a 4.9 star Google rating.
Before becoming a personal injury lawyer, Jose "Joe" Robles Jr served nearly 15 years as an Air Force Military Police officer, including four combat tours in the Middle East, and earned his law degree from Texas A&M University School of Law. Afterward he spent four years at Bailey & Galyen, rising to Managing Attorney of the Pre-Litigation Personal Injury Department, before founding this firm.
As a result, he has seen from the inside how insurers handle a rider's claim in the first two weeks, including how quickly the comparative fault theory gets written into the file. For San Antonio clients that means a bilingual team, an office in the South Texas Medical Center, and an attorney who understands the military community at Joint Base San Antonio.
We also handle San Antonio car accident claims and truck accident claims across Bexar County. For the firm's full range of services in the area, see our San Antonio personal injury page.
If you were treated by a doctor, missed work, or the other driver disputes fault, yes. Motorcycle claims carry a problem car claims do not: adjusters and juries often start from an assumption that the rider was speeding or weaving. Countering that takes evidence gathered early, including scene photographs, vehicle damage geometry, and sometimes reconstruction. If your injuries were minor and fully resolved, handling it yourself may be reasonable. The consultation here is free either way.
It depends on your injuries, your treatment, your lost income, and the insurance available, and no honest lawyer quotes a figure before reading your records. Texas allows recovery for medical expenses, lost earnings and lost earning capacity, physical pain and mental anguish, physical impairment, and disfigurement. Riders often have larger impairment and disfigurement components than car occupants because there is no cage between them and the road, and those categories are frequently the ones an insurer tries hardest to minimize.
The honest answer is that it depends on when your treatment finishes. Settling before your doctors know whether you need surgery means guessing at the value of your own claim, so a case usually cannot be resolved responsibly until you reach maximum medical improvement. Simple claims can resolve in a few months. Cases involving surgery, disputed fault, or a commercial defendant commonly take a year or more. Texas gives you two years to file suit.
Riders and passengers under 21 must wear one. Under Texas law, a person 21 or older may ride without a helmet if they have completed a motorcycle operator training and safety course approved by the state or are covered by a health insurance plan providing medical benefits for injuries from a motorcycle collision. The statute also bars an officer from stopping or detaining a rider for the sole purpose of checking whether either exemption applies.
The helmet law covers the traffic ticket and says nothing about injury claims. Not wearing a helmet does not cause a collision, so it is not evidence that you caused one. What a defendant may attempt is a severity argument: that a head injury would have been less serious with a helmet. That argument is answered with medical evidence about the actual mechanism of injury, and it does not apply at all to injuries below the neck.
That statement is common and it is not a defense. A driver has a duty to look for and yield to traffic that has the right of way, and a motorcycle is traffic. Left-turn collisions at intersections are the classic example: the driver turns across the rider's path and reports not seeing the bike. Failing to see a vehicle that was visible is itself a failure to keep a proper lookout, and physical evidence such as impact geometry and sight-line analysis is what demonstrates it.
Your own uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage may respond, and it is worth checking even if you believe you declined it, because Texas insurers must offer it and a rejection has to be in writing. Texas requires only $30,000 of injury coverage per person, which a single air ambulance ride can exhaust. Reviewing every available policy, including household policies, is part of the first meeting.
This page is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Consult a licensed Texas attorney about your specific situation.
6323 Sovereign Drive, Suite 220
San Antonio, TX 78229
(726) 241-2523
In the South Texas Medical Center off Loop 410. Home and hospital visits available across Bexar County.
No fee unless we win. Call us now or schedule your free consultation online.