Recent Recoveries
- $2,000,000Car crash — litigation settlement
- $1,750,000Slip & fall — litigation settlement
- $1,000,00018-wheeler — litigation settlement
- $850,000Tractor-trailer — litigation settlement
- $650,000Commercial collision — litigation settlement
- $650,000Trucking accident — litigation settlement
- $550,000On-the-job injury — litigation settlement
Prior results do not guarantee or predict a similar outcome in any future case. Every case is decided on its own facts.
Getting around Dallas on two wheels has never been more popular. Some people ride the Katy Trail before work, some commute through Uptown and downtown, and plenty head out to White Rock Lake or Oak Cliff at the weekend.
The roads were not built with any of them in mind. One careless turn, one door, one glance at a phone, and a ride ends with a rider on the asphalt and a car with a dent in the wing.
The first week decides most of what follows. The adjuster rings while you are still on painkillers and asks for a recorded statement; somebody wants to know whether to scrap the bike; the ER bill arrives before anyone has said who is paying it. None of that has to be handled by you, and almost none of it should be.
Free case review
You talk to the lawyer who would try it, not to an intake screener.
No fee unless we win
Nothing up front. The fee comes out of the recovery, or there is none.
We know these roads
Greenville, Ross, Fort Worth Avenue, the Katy Trail crossings — and the courts around them.
Why It Matters
Why a cyclist’s claim is fought differently
The injuries in a bike crash are rarely the argument. What gets argued is whether the rider should have been there at all — and the driver is usually the only one who got to say.
A crash that is a bad morning for a driver is a season off the bike for a rider, and often a good deal more than that. The car is dented; the person on the bicycle is in an ambulance. Everybody understands that part.
What riders do not expect is what happens next. The driver stayed upright, stayed on scene and gave the responding officer their account while you were being loaded into the back of something. That account goes into the crash report, the report is the first document every adjuster reads, and from that point the file has a version of events in it that nobody asked you about.
Undoing that takes evidence gathered in the first days — the bike, the ride file, the cameras along the route, the damage to the car — and a firm the other side knows will put all of it in front of a jury. That is the difference you are hiring.
Nobody disputes that the rider is the one in hospital. What gets disputed is whether the rider belonged on the road — and that is answered with evidence, not with indignation.
Aaron Genthe · Founder
- 01
Only one of you gives a statement
You were on the ground or in an ambulance. The driver stayed on scene, gave the officer their version first, and it went into the report as the account of what happened.
- 02
“He came out of nowhere”
The standard answer to a right hook or a left cross is that the rider was invisible, or fast, or somewhere they should not have been. It is an argument about the cyclist, not about the driving.
- 03
Every point of blame is money
Texas divides fault. No helmet, no lights, riding too far left — anything an adjuster can pin on the rider comes straight off the recovery, which is what makes the argument worth making.
How They Happen
The eight ways riders get hit here
Bike crashes are not random, and riders have names for most of them. Eight patterns account for nearly everything that comes through this office, and each is proved a different way.
- 01The right hookA driver overtakes you and then turns right across your wheel. The most common way a rider is hurt at a Dallas intersection, and the one drivers least often accept.
- 02The left crossAn oncoming car turns left through the gap you are riding into. The driver looked for a windscreen and did not find one, so they went.
- 03Unsafe passingBuzzed at speed on Northwest Highway, Preston or Fort Worth Avenue. Texas sets a minimum passing distance and most drivers do not know it exists.
- 04DooringA door swung into the lane in Deep Ellum or Bishop Arts, with nowhere to go but into it or under the next car. Rideshare pickups are a growing share.
- 05Failure to yieldRolled through a stop sign, or pulled out of a driveway or a car park exit without looking. The driver saw a gap where a bicycle already was.
- 06Distracted drivingA phone, a navigation app or a message at 40mph. The crash that leaves no skid marks, and the one juries treat least kindly.
- 07Struck from behindRear-ended in the lane or on the shoulder — the crash a rider has least warning of and least to absorb. Disproportionately fatal, and disproportionately a hit and run.
- 08Potholes, debris and roadworkAn unlit work zone, a steel plate proud of the asphalt, a trench left open. Where a contractor or a public body made the hazard, they are the defendant — on a much shorter clock.
Injuries
What a car does to a rider
There is no cage, no airbag and no belt — there is a helmet and a layer of lycra.
Head injury and traumatic brain injury
A helmet spreads the load of an impact on the skull. It does nothing about the brain moving inside it.
Collarbone, wrist and shoulder
The signature cycling fractures. A rider goes over the bars and lands on an outstretched hand or on the point of the shoulder, and a broken clavicle, a scaphoid or a distal radius is the result.
Road rash, degloving and scarring
Sliding contact with asphalt takes skin off to the fat and sometimes to the bone. It is scrubbed clean under anaesthetic, dressed for weeks, grafted where it will not close, and it scars.
Spine and pelvis
Disc injury and fractures through the neck, the lower back and the pelvic ring, up to partial or complete paralysis.
Legs, knees and feet
The bicycle takes the first hit and the rider’s leg takes the second. Tibial plateau fractures, ruptured ligaments and crushed feet are the injuries most likely to keep somebody off the bike for a season and out of a standing job for longer.
Case Value
What your claim can actually include
“What is my case worth?” is the first question on nearly every call, and no honest answer comes before the treatment is understood.
Economic losses
The half of the claim proved with paper. Keep the bills, the receipts and the pay stubs — and the receipt for the bike.
Medical treatment
Ambulance, ER, imaging, surgery, hardware and the physiotherapy still ahead of you, not only the bills already printed.
Lost income
The weeks you could not work, and the shifts that will go to appointments and a second operation months from now.
Lost earning capacity
Where a wrist, a shoulder or a back means you cannot return to the trade you had, or cannot do it for as many years as you had left.
The bicycle, the kit and the electronics
Frame, wheels, groupset, helmet, shoes, computer and power meter. Adjusters price a bicycle as though it came from a supermarket; a written valuation from the shop that sold it is what moves that.
Out-of-pocket costs
Prescriptions, braces, mobility equipment, mileage to treatment, and the help at home you had to pay somebody for.
Non-economic losses
The half no invoice arrives for, which is why a first offer ignores it. It is argued rather than added up, and on a serious bike claim it is usually the larger half.
Pain and suffering
The physical toll of the injury and of the treatment it took to put right, over the months it actually took.
Disfigurement
Scarring and grafts, valued separately from the surgery that caused or repaired them.
Physical impairment
What you can no longer do — lift, kneel, grip, or turn a pedal without pain.
Mental anguish
The flinch at every engine coming up behind you, and the riders who never go back out on the road at all.
Loss of consortium
A claim belonging to a spouse or a parent, for what a catastrophic injury took out of the relationship.
Who Pays
The policies that actually pay a bike claim
Almost nobody knocked off a bicycle knows how many policies are in play, and the driver’s is often the smallest of them.
The driver’s auto liability policy
The first place to look and often the smallest. The Texas minimum is $30,000 per injured person, and one air ambulance and two nights on a ward can pass that before anyone has discussed a settlement.
Your own auto policy — even though you were on a bike
This is the one almost every cyclist gets wrong. Uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage follows you, not your car.
Personal injury protection
PIP pays medical bills and some lost income regardless of who was at fault. Texas insurers must offer it and it is on your policy unless you rejected it in writing, so a good many riders have it without knowing.
A hit-and-run driver
A driver who leaves and is never identified is treated as an uninsured motorist under your own policy.
An employer, a contractor or a public body
If the driver was working, their employer answers for them. If the hazard was in the roadway, the defendant is whoever put it there or failed to fix it.
Texas Law
The five rules that decide a cyclist’s claim
Even where the crash was plainly the driver’s doing, Texas law shapes what you recover. These five decide most of it, and the second is the one riders most often get wrong.
A bicycle is a vehicle, and drivers have to leave you room
Transportation Code §551.101 gives a person on a bicycle the rights and the duties of a driver.
Riding without a helmet is not a defence
Texas has no bicycle helmet law for adults. Dallas required one at every age until 2014; since then the city ordinance reaches riders under 18.
Lights after dark are the law, and the argument
§551.104 requires a white lamp on the front and a red reflector or lamp on the rear when you ride at night. It is the one rule an insurer checks first on any crash after sundown.
Blame is divided, and the split is the case
Texas is a modified comparative fault state. You recover as long as you are found less than 51% responsible, and whatever share is assigned to you comes off the award.
Two years, and a good deal less in practice
Most Texas injury claims must be filed within two years of the crash. Claims involving a government defendant, an injured child, or a death run to different clocks, several of them shorter.
The Process
What happens when you call us
If you have never worked with a lawyer before you may feel overwhelmed, or a little suspicious.
- 01
Free case review
You call or message. We ask what happened, where, what you are dealing with now, and what is left of the bike.
- 02
We take the calls
We notify the insurers, and every call comes to us from that point. You give a recorded statement to nobody.
- 03
We preserve the bike and the data
Before it is scrapped, repaired or written off — and we pull the ride file off your head unit while it is still on it.
- 04
We build and negotiate
Future care, impairment, the bicycle and the kit, valued properly. Then we push the adjuster, and file suit if the number will not move.
- 05
You get paid
We go through the settlement line by line. Nobody leaves here wondering what just happened to their case.
Client Reviews
What our clients say about us
None of these was left by a cyclist — they are people represented by this firm after somebody else’s driving hurt them, published as they wrote it.
Rated five out of five stars
“Upon getting ran over by car in a crosswalk, Aaron was one of my first phone calls. He knew what therapy and doctors I needed… cared about my physical pain and agony… and treated me like an individual, not just a case.”
Adrianne Miller
Rated five out of five stars
“I was badly injured. Broken knee. Broken ankle. Severe head and neck trauma. I called several attorneys for help. No one returned my calls… He made sure I had the best specialists that covered every medical issue that I required.”
Tracy Fortner
Rated five out of five stars
“Throughout the entire process, him, Rebecca and their team kept me up to date, and explained processes or procedures I didn’t quite understand. There wasn’t a moment where I felt unprepared, or distrustful of their counsel.”
Tenecia Imariee
Your Attorney
The lawyer who works your case
This page has promised you a real attorney rather than a call centre several times over. It is only fair to say who that is.
Founder · Trial Attorney
Aaron Genthe
A Texas A&M graduate who went into personal injury straight out of law school, Aaron spent years as a litigator at one of the larger firms in Dallas — long enough to build a reputation as an aggressive and effective attorney, and long enough to watch how easily a client becomes a file number at a firm that size.
He started Genthe Law Firm so that the person you speak to about your crash is the person who tries it. He has litigated collision cases across Dallas County and North Texas since, including the ones where the injured person was the only one at the scene without a windscreen to hide behind.
- Practising since
- 2015
- Cases handled
- Hundreds, in Dallas and across Texas
- Education
- Texas A&M graduate
- Fee
- Contingency — nothing unless you recover
Questions
Bicycle accident FAQs
The questions riders ask on the first call, answered the way we answer them on the phone.
Do I have a case if I was not wearing a helmet?
Yes. Texas has no bicycle helmet law for adults, and the Dallas ordinance applies to riders under 18.
What if the driver drove off?
Hit-and-run is common in Dallas bike crashes and it does not end the claim. A driver who is never identified is treated as an uninsured motorist under your own auto policy, which is available to you even though you were on a bicycle.
The driver only had the minimum insurance. Is that all I can get?
Usually not. Texas minimum liability cover is $30,000 per injured person, which a serious cycling injury passes quickly.
Who pays to replace my bicycle and my gear?
The at-fault driver’s property damage cover, as part of the same claim. That includes the frame, the wheels, the helmet, shoes, clothing and any electronics destroyed in the crash.
Can I still recover if I was partly at fault?
Yes, as long as you are found less than 51% responsible. Texas applies modified comparative fault, and your share is deducted from the award — awarded $200,000 and found 20% at fault, you receive $160,000.
Also Handled Here
If your crash was something else
The neighbouring claims this firm litigates most often, including the two other ways of being hurt on a Dallas road with nothing around you.
- 01Pedestrian AccidentsStruck in a crosswalk or a car park
- 02Motorcycle AccidentsThe other rider the insurer blames first
- 03Car AccidentsThe driver who turned across you
- 04Traumatic Brain InjuryHead injury under a helmet
- 05Wrongful DeathClaims brought by a surviving family
- 06Uber & RideshareDoors, pickups and layered policies
- 07Truck AccidentsBox trucks, tankers and trailers
- 08Construction AccidentsWork zones and hazards in the roadway
Read more on riding in Dallas
- The Most Dangerous Places to Ride a Bike in DallasWhere the crashes actually happen
- How to Deal with Insurance Companies After a Bicycle AccidentThe call that comes in the first 48 hours
- 5 Common Reasons Behind Bicycle Accidents in DallasWhat the crash reports show
- How to Avoid a Dangerous Bicycle AccidentPositioning, lights and being seen
- Uninsured & Underinsured Motorist Claims in TexasThe policy that pays when the driver has nothing
- Justice Served After a Dallas Cyclist Hit-and-RunA case note from this office
