If you are reading this, you probably already suspect that a doctor or hospital made a serious mistake with your care. Maybe a routine surgery went wrong, a diagnosis came too late, or someone you love went in for treatment and never came home.
Medical malpractice is a type of personal injury claim, but Texas holds these cases to special rules that ordinary injury claims never face. One of the strictest is the deadline.
In Texas, the law gives you very little time to act, and most of that time is often gone before patients realize a deadline ever existed.
We will be honest with you, because this is not a moment for a sales pitch. In a Texas malpractice case, proving you were hurt is rarely the hardest part. The real obstacle is a set of strict deadlines and filing rules that quietly end strong claims on procedure, long before a jury hears the facts.
This page explains those rules in plain language and what to do about them. If you believe a provider harmed you or a family member, call Russell Lorfing and our team at 325-225-0143 before you make any other decisions.
The hard truth about malpractice law in Texas
Most law firm websites skip the uncomfortable background, so we will not. Texas overhauled its medical malpractice laws in 2003, and the lawmakers behind that change were focused on protecting hospitals and insurance companies, not patients.
What they built was a thick layer of procedure. Notice letters, sworn expert reports, hard filing deadlines, and caps on certain damages all stack up between an injured patient and a courtroom.
The effect is easy to predict. The more procedural hurdles a hurt person has to clear, the more cases fall apart on paperwork instead of being decided on whether the care was actually negligent.
That is the system you are up against, and it is the system we built our practice to fight. Standing up for working Texans against large, well-funded institutions is the reason this firm exists.
The clock you can’t even see
Most people assume the deadline to sue starts when they discover they were harmed. In most injury cases, that is true. In Texas medical malpractice, it usually is not.
Under Section 74.251, the two-year deadline generally runs from the date the mistake was made, not the date you found out about it. Texas courts have refused to apply the “discovery rule” that protects patients in many other states.
That gap can be devastating. A scan misread in the spring can leave a cancer growing unnoticed for a year, so that by the time anyone catches it, only months remain on a deadline the patient never knew about.
There is also a second, harder limit sitting behind the two-year rule. Texas enforces a 10-year statute of repose, an absolute cutoff that bars almost any claim once ten years have passed since the error, no matter when the harm appeared.
This hits slow-developing injuries the hardest, like damage from radiation, a failed implant, or a condition that takes years to trace back to a provider. Texas courts have applied the repose deadline strictly enough to bar even some claims brought for children, so no parent should assume a child’s case can wait.
Reach out to us today if any of this sounds familiar. Our first job is to work out exactly how much time you actually have.
The 120-day fuse
For many Texans, this is the rule that ends their case, and it is the one they find hardest to believe.
After you file suit and the defendant files an answer, Section 74.351 gives you 120 days to produce a written report from a qualified medical expert. That report has to describe the accepted standard of care, explain how the provider failed to meet it, and connect that failure to your injury.
Missing the deadline is fatal to the case. The court is required to dismiss it permanently and to order you to pay the defendant’s attorney’s fees.
The timing is harder still because of a rule few patients ever hear about. Until that expert report is on file, the court limits what evidence you can gather, holding you to little more than your own medical records.
In other words, Texas expects you to prove a doctor caused your injury before it will let you fully investigate how it happened. That is why these cases need a firm that starts building the expert case immediately, instead of racing the deadline at the end.
When the hospital that hurt you is the government
More claims are lost to this single trap than to any other, mostly because few people think to ask one question. Was the hospital a public one?
If a city, county, district, state, or university facility treated you, the rules change for the worse. Public hospitals are protected by governmental immunity, an old principle that usually bars lawsuits against the government altogether.
The only way past that immunity is a narrow set of exceptions in the Texas Tort Claims Act. Even when a claim fits one of those exceptions, the Act shortens your window dramatically.
Instead of two years, you may have as little as six months to give the government formal written notice, and some cities require it even sooner. Blow that one deadline and a strong case can be over before it begins.
This is not a distant, big-city concern. UMC, one of Lubbock’s largest hospitals, is operated by the Lubbock County Hospital District, which describes itself as a governmental unit under the Tort Claims Act in its own audited financial statements.
Other county and district facilities operate across the Big Country and the Permian Basin. Whether a particular hospital counts as governmental is a legal question with a six-month deadline attached, and getting the answer wrong can forfeit everything, which is why we ask about it at the very start of every case.
What you can actually recover in Texas
You deserve a straight answer about money, including what this kind of case can and cannot get back. The good news is that your hard financial losses are fully protected.
Texas places no cap on economic damages. Every past and future medical bill, every lost paycheck, and every dollar of long-term care you will need can be pursued in full.
The limits fall on everything else.
Your physical pain, your suffering, and the parts of your life you can no longer enjoy are capped at $250,000 under Section 74.301, no matter how severe the harm.
That figure has not changed since lawmakers set it in 2003, and it was never tied to inflation. A $250,000 cap written more than two decades ago is worth far less in today’s dollars.
A laborer who loses the use of both hands faces the same cap as someone left with a small scar. Rules like that fall hardest on ordinary working people, and closing that gap is exactly the kind of fight we take on.
Call us at 325-225-0143 and we will walk through what your losses add up to in real numbers.
Why we take these fights when other firms won’t
By now it is clear why a lot of lawyers quietly turn malpractice cases away. The deadlines are unforgiving, qualified experts are expensive, and the other side is built to outlast you.
We see it differently. A hospital with a self-insured fund and a team of defense lawyers, betting that an injured family will give up, is exactly the kind of opponent we want across the table.
That comes from experience, not bravado. Managing partner Russell Lorfing is a former federal prosecutor in Lubbock, and our attorneys bring more than 75 years of combined experience and over 500 jury trials, with offices in Abilene, Lubbock, Midland, and San Angelo.
It also means insurance companies know which firms actually try cases and which only settle. We are trial lawyers first, and that reputation changes the value of every offer the other side puts on the table.
Like our other personal injury cases, we handle malpractice claims on a contingency basis, so there is no fee unless we recover for you. When a large institution is counting on a West Texas family to run out of time, beating that clock is the whole job.
For the firm: add two or three real, verifiable Keith & Lorfing results here. We left this space empty rather than invent outcomes, since fabricated case results would break Texas attorney advertising rules and undercut the trust this page is built to earn.
How the fight actually plays out
If your case clears the early deadlines, it moves into discovery, the stage where the real evidence finally comes out. Defendant doctors give sworn testimony, both sides present their experts, and the full medical record is laid open.
Experience makes the difference here. Questioning the doctor who caused the harm is often the turning point of a case, and it goes well only when the lawyer doing it has been there many times before.
Most Texas malpractice cases settle during this stage, once the other side sees what a jury would likely do. The cases that do not settle go to trial, and trial is the ground we know best.
One thing you can do today
You do not have to sit and wait while the deadlines run. You can look up a provider’s license and any public disciplinary history through the Texas Medical Board’s Look Up a License tool, a free and official state resource.
A prior board action will not win your case on its own, and a clean record will not sink it. Even so, it is real information, and bringing what you find to your first call helps us assess your situation faster.
Don’t let the clock decide your case for you
Texas malpractice law rewards families who act early and punishes those who wait. The notice letters, the two-year limit, the 120-day report, and the six-month government deadline can all expire in silence, and once they do, even a strong case is gone for good.
We have spent our careers standing between West Texas families and the institutions hoping they will give up. Bring us your story, and we will tell you the truth about it, including whether we believe you have a case worth pursuing and what winning it will take.
Schedule a free consultation or call 325-225-0143. There is no fee unless we win.
Decide Your Case for You
Frequently asked questions
What actually counts as malpractice in Texas?
A bad result is not automatically malpractice, since even careful medicine carries real risk. A claim exists when a provider falls below the standard a competent peer would have met, and that failure causes a real injury. Proving that link is usually the hardest part, and it almost always requires a qualified medical expert.
How much can I really recover?
Your economic losses, such as medical bills, lost income, and future care, are not capped and can be significant in a serious case. Pain and suffering is capped at $250,000 against all doctors combined, with limited additional amounts when a hospital shares the blame. We will give you an honest estimate of the real-world value before you commit to anything.
I only just found out. Is it too late?
It might not be, but it is not worth guessing. Texas usually starts the clock on the date of the mistake rather than the day you learned of it, and the 10-year repose deadline is an absolute wall. Call us as soon as you suspect something, and we will tell you where you stand.
What if a public or county hospital was involved?
Then your most urgent deadline may be six months instead of two years, and the grounds for suing are narrower. This is one of the fastest ways a West Texas claim is lost, so we check it first.
What if the malpractice took a life?
A surviving spouse, children, or parents may bring a wrongful death claim, and the estate may bring a survival action. Both still follow the same notice and expert report rules, with a separate damages cap that applies when a death is involved.
