What to Do After a Houston Auto Accident

Two things, and they are specific. Section 550.026(a) requires the operator of a vehicle in a collision resulting in injury, death, or damage leaving a vehicle unable to be driven normally and safely to give notice immediately, by the quickest means of communication, to the local police department if it happened in a municipality. Section 550.023 then requires giving your name, address, the registration number of the vehicle you were driving and the name of your motor vehicle liability insurer to anyone injured and to the other driver or occupant, showing your licence if requested, and providing reasonable assistance to anyone injured.

It matters more than almost anything else you can do, because the scene stops existing within minutes. Photograph both vehicles from several angles including close-ups of the damage, the final resting positions before anything is moved, the roadway including any debris or fluid, the traffic controls and sight lines, the other driver's licence plate, and the interior of your own vehicle. Final positions and crush geometry establish the angle and sequence of impact far more reliably than two conflicting accounts recorded weeks later.

Decline politely. It is common after a low-speed collision and it is almost always a bad idea. You do not yet know the extent of your injuries — soft-tissue and closed-head injuries commonly present a day or two later — and once you have accepted cash and left, you have no crash report, no exchange of insurance information, and no way to reopen it. It also removes the contemporaneous record that a collision occurred at all, which becomes the central problem if you later need to make any claim.

Get evaluated the same day anyway. Adrenaline reliably masks injury for hours, and the two categories that most often present late — closed-head injury and internal injury — are the ones where delay is dangerous rather than merely inconvenient. There is also a claims consequence: the gap between the crash and your first medical record is the first thing an adjuster points to, and gaps between later appointments are used the same way. Attending once and then stopping is treated much like never attending.

The CR-3 crash report is filed electronically with TxDOT and can be purchased through its Crash Records Information System. A crash investigated by the Houston Police Department can also be requested through HPD Records once processing is complete; a crash in unincorporated Harris County sits with the Sheriff's Office. The report matters because the officer records contributing-factor codes on it, and while those are neither binding nor always correct, they frame the adjuster's opening position — so an error is worth identifying in the first weeks.

Within days, in writing, and specifically. Businesses and homes near the scene frequently have cameras covering the roadway, and those systems commonly overwrite within a week or two in the ordinary course. A written request identifying the date, the time window and the camera view is far harder to satisfy narrowly than a general request to preserve evidence. This is the step most often missed and the one that most often decides a disputed liability case, because it is the only neutral record of what happened.

Promptly, because your policy contains a notice and cooperation clause and a breach of it can affect coverage independently of the merits. That is a different situation from the other driver's insurer, to whom you generally owe nothing and to whom a recorded statement should not be given until you have advice. Working out which company is on the phone before answering questions is the single most useful precaution in the first fortnight, because the two calls sound identical and are not.

Because a statement taken in the first days is the most useful one they will ever get. Your treatment is incomplete, so anything you say about how you feel understates the injury; your recollection of the sequence is still forming, so any uncertainty becomes an admission. Ordinary polite answers — "I'm fine", "I didn't see them until the last second" — are quoted back months later, and they matter because § 33.001 reduces recovery by your share of responsibility and bars it entirely above 50 percent.

Because the damages case is built from continuity rather than from the crash. Keep a simple record of appointments, symptoms, days missed from work, and tasks you cannot do — it is far more accurate than reconstructing it a year later, and it is the material from which lost income and impact on daily life are proved. Keep every bill and explanation of benefits too, because those become the basis of both the claim and the lien negotiation that determines what you actually receive.

This one is the checklist of actions in order. The companion page is about the calls specifically — which number, in what order, what to say and what not to say, and which conversations you are obliged to have. Between them they cover the practical first days; the claim itself, and the question of who ultimately pays, are covered on the Houston car accident and auto accident attorney pages respectively.