- March 22, 2025
- Auto Accident Injury
- By Cesar Ornelas
Table of Contents
If you’ve been injured at the workplace, a lot of depends on whether your employer has workers’ compensation. If they do, they are typically immune from lawsuits, no matter how the accident happened, just as you are eligible for compensation even if you caused the accident yourself. But what happens when an employer doesn’t have workers’ compensation, or if they do, but they have acted with gross negligence? In these cases, it may be possible to bring a workplace injury case, but you will want to talk to a work injury attorney in El Paso about the specifics of your situation.
How Do You Prove Negligence in a Workplace Injury Case?
Proving negligence in any injury case involves proving three important elements (there is a key fourth element you’ll also need to show, but that is to show exactly what your damages are and then link them to the injury caused by the other person’s negligence, not to prove the negligence itself). The three elements that prove negligence are that the person who caused your injuries had a duty of care towards you, that they breached the duty of care, and that this breach in the duty of care directly caused your injuries.
Proving Duty of Care & Breach of Duty
Employers have control over their employees and make a profit of the effort of their employees. This means they have a fairly high duty of care to ensure employee safety while on the job because of the power dynamic. They are required to take “all reasonable steps,” which is admittedly sometimes a subjective standard, to keep their employees safe.
Included in this duty is the requirement to properly supervise and train employees, provide safety equipment, guarantee that all materials and instruments being used on the job are safe and in good condition, enforce safety policies, and only hire people who are qualified to do the job they’re being asked to do. An employer must also keep up with all laws related to employee safety and proactively watch out for potential sources of harm and either fix them or, if they are intrinsic to the job, provide proper warning about how to deal with them in training.
Proving duty of care is only step one. The next step is to show this duty was breached. Just because there was an accident does not necessarily mean the employer has failed in their duty of care.
Evidence Needed
To prove that an employer has failed in the duty of care, you will need evidence. This could be statements by other people working at your company who can testify to the working conditions or lack of training. It could be documentation showing a lack of training or improper vetting of employees.
It could be timesheets showing that employees were being forced to work dangerous jobs when they were tired or without the required supervision. It could be notices from the state or from OSHA showing safety violations that the employer was not following. A lawyer will be able to tell you what evidence you need and help you find it.
Proving Causation
“Causation” refers to the requirement to prove that the employer’s actions were specifically the cause of your injuries. This is an important step. Just because an employer did breach their duty of care to you does not necessarily make that the cause of the accident. If the accident was caused by a third party or by you, even if your employer was breaching the duty of care, you may not be able to bring a case. Causation requires a direct link between the employer’s actions and your injuries: “but for” your employer’s action or inaction, you would not have been injured.
Evidence Needed
Here, the evidence that’s needed will be directly related to the accident. Witness testimony can be valuable if anyone saw the accident. If there are security videos, those will also be helpful. The accident report brought by you or other employees, pictures of the accident scene, and any internal communication of the company about what happened could potentially be evidence to prove causation.
The Fourth Element
As alluded to above, in addition to proving your employer’s negligence, you also have to specifically show what damages you suffered. Medical records and witness testimony are very important here.
Bringing a Lawsuit With a Work Injury Attorney in El Paso
When Your Employer Doesn’t Have Workers’ Comp
If your employer does not have workers’ compensation, bringing a claim is fairly straightforward. Texas law allows many employers to opt out of workers’ comp, and if they do, they lose their immunity to a civil lawsuit if they cause injury by their actions. The key here is proving all of the above elements and showing that your employer is more at fault in the accident than you are.
Texas has a modified comparative fault rule, which means that anyone more than 50% at fault for an accident is not eligible to collect damages. This rule also means that your compensation will be reduced by the same percentage as your fault. If you’re 20% at fault, for example, you can only recover 80% of your damages. This makes it very important to prove definitively that it was your employer’s negligence that was the primary cause of the accident. A work injury lawyer has experience with this and knows how to help.
When Your Employer Does Have Workers’ Comp
If your employer does have workers’ compensation, things get a little trickier. They will be normally immune to any civil lawsuit unless their actions crossed the line to be grossly negligent or deliberate. Even if the negligence did not cross the line from simple to gross negligence, if an employee died because of it, the employer becomes vulnerable to a wrongful death lawsuit by the employee’s family.
If there hasn’t been a death, however, gross negligence can be tough to prove. It’s a pretty high bar and only happens when an employer knowingly and deliberately does something they know is very dangerous and risky, with no regard to the safety of their employees. In order to bring this claim, you and your lawyer will have to prove that the employer knew exactly what they were doing and the risk that would be involved and then decided to do it anyway.
It takes a lot of clear and convincing evidence to prove gross negligence. You will usually need internal records from the business showing a deliberate decision to do something risky or possibly witness testimony from a third party whom your employer may have told about the situation. Another possibility might be if the employer received multiple warnings from OSHA about safety and continually ignored them, or if an employee had been injured in the past and the company refused to do anything about the situation that caused the injury.
Bringing a claim against your employer can be tough, but we can help. If you’ve been injured on the job, contact Cesar Ornelas Law in San Antonio, TX right away so we can get started fighting for your rights. We also serve El Paso, Midland, Odessa, Laredo, and parts of New Mexico and Northern California.
