We Recovered the Full $30,000 Policy Limit for a Pickup Driver Hit by a Car Leaving a Richardson Apartment Complex, Without a Lawsuit

A Sunday Night on Spring Valley Road

Two sources tell the story of that night: the officer’s report and the pictures of our client’s pickup. In the report, Unit 1 is the car that came out of the complex, and Unit 2 is his Silverado. Page 2 of the police report holds the officer’s written account of the crash, which begins this way, word for word:

The complex sits on the north side of the street. To head east, the car had to cross the westbound lanes and swing into the eastbound side, where he was in the left lane, next to the median. The officer’s sketch on the same page shows the car still angled across his lane, partway through its turn, with the front left corner of his pickup against the car’s right front side.

Both drivers gave the officer an account that night, and the two accounts match. The police report sets them down one after the other:

Each vehicle carried a driver and a front seat passenger, and the report codes all four as belted, shoulder and lap. In his pickup, more than one airbag went off at both front seats. In the car, the only airbag coded as deployed was a side bag at the front passenger seat, the side his pickup struck.

Dispatch took the call at 9:51 p.m., and the officer was on scene seven minutes later. Both vehicles were towed away. The road reopened at 10:48, and the officer cleared the scene three minutes after that.

What the Officer Wrote Down

Our certified copy of the report carries the TxDOT records custodian’s signature from September 25, 2023, just over a week after the crash. The table covers the entries his claim leaned on; for every other box on the form, see our crash report decoder.

Our attorneys went through the report line by line, the way they work through every crash report on a new file, testing each entry against the rest of the evidence. They looked at fault first: the factor column, the officer’s conclusion and, just as important, the other driver’s own statement, quoted above, that she turned left out of the complex. A code is the officer’s opinion; a driver’s own words about what she did are harder for an insurer to argue with.

Next they set the officer’s sketch and the damage ratings below beside the photos of the pickup. All three put the impact at his front left corner and the car’s right front side, so the report’s account of how the vehicles met is backed by the damage itself. Last, they checked the boxes that decide which rules apply, starting with the private property box. It was left unmarked, which placed the crash on the public street, where the driveway rule in section 03 governs.

Each meaning is TxDOT’s own, taken from the CR-100 manual officers follow when they fill out the form. The report is linked below with names, addresses, contact, license and insurance details, identification numbers and some report entries removed, as a line printed across the top of each page states.

The Driver Pulling Out Had to Yield

Texas law puts this duty on the driver coming out. Transportation Code § 545.155 requires a driver about to enter or cross a road from an alley, a building, or a private road or driveway to give way to vehicles approaching on that road. A city street counts, because the same subtitle defines a highway or street as any publicly maintained way open to vehicles (§ 541.302).

Factor 34 is the report’s shorthand for that failure, and the officer’s written account in the police report ends with this conclusion, again copied exactly:

The report lists no citation for either driver, and a civil claim does not depend on one. What counts is whether the evidence shows a driver broke a duty like the one in § 545.155. A crash report records an officer’s opinion, and an insurer is free to dispute it; this one put the cause on the driver who pulled out, while the value of the claim still had to come from his medical records.

Our founder, Josh Alexander, has written that the error he runs into most often in parking lot cases is someone who believes no rules apply on private property, so there can be no claim. A driveway exit onto a public street leaves even less room for that doubt, because the yield duty sits in the statute itself. Left turns add risks of their own, and our Texas left turn crash index measures them across the state.

How Often Richardson Reports Name a Driveway Exit

To see how common this kind of crash is in Richardson, we searched TxDOT’s CRIS crash database on October 5, 2026, for reportable crashes in the city where the investigating officer named factor 34 as contributing to the crash for one or more drivers. Each crash counts once even when two drivers had the factor, the city is the one the officer wrote on the report, and the factor is the officer’s opinion rather than a finding by any court. A crash that never leaves a parking lot or private drive is generally not reportable, so these counts cover drivers who made it onto the public street.

The yearly count climbed from 47 in 2021 to 90 in 2024 and held there in 2025, at 89; that year, about 1 in every 20 reportable crashes in Richardson carried the factor. The September 2023 crash on Spring Valley Road is one of the 81 counted for its year. For the statewide picture, our Texas parking, driveway and backing crash index sorts every driveway crash in the state by what officers said went wrong.

A Herniated Disc and Months of Care

His medical records pick up in early October 2023, when he saw a chiropractor and a pain management doctor on the same day. He described pain in his neck and lower back, pain across his chest wall, pain in his left hand between the ring and little fingers, and pain in his right knee. The lower back pain ran down into his buttock and the neck pain out into his shoulder; his hand felt numb, and both arms tingled.

The two providers found the same picture on exam: muscle spasm and tender knots along his spine, from the neck down to the low back, less motion than normal, and nerve tests that brought on his pain. The pain doctor also noted weakness in his right thigh and started him on an anti inflammatory, a muscle relaxant and a cooling gel. Three days later, an MRI of his neck found a 1 millimeter herniated disc at C5-6, between the fifth and sixth vertebrae of the neck.

His chiropractor’s plan called for three to four visits a week for four to six weeks. Over 30 visits, the sessions combined electrical stimulation, heat, ultrasound and manual therapy, and later added traction and spinal adjustments. At a follow up exam in early November, every complaint was improving, and his hand and chest had returned to normal.

His lower back took longer. On November 30, the pain doctor injected the facet joints on both sides of his lower spine, at the L5-S1 and L4-5 levels, the small joints that link each vertebra to the next. On December 11 he reported 60 percent improvement that had lasted about a week. By late December his pain was easing, and the pain doctor recommended a second round of the same injections. In January 2024 his chiropractor released him to keep up his exercises at home, almost four months after the crash.

Our herniated disc page follows another client’s disc injury from the first signs through treatment, if you want a fuller picture of what these injuries involve.

Why the Claim Stopped at $30,000

The driver who pulled out carried a liability policy that paid at most $30,000 for any one injured person, the lowest per person amount Texas allows. Transportation Code § 601.072 puts the required minimum for a single collision at $30,000 per injured or killed person, and our guide to Texas minimum car insurance covers the rest of the 30/60/25 rule. Another claim of ours ended at the same ceiling: our San Antonio rotator cuff result also stopped at a $30,000 limit, before suit.

His medical bills show how fast a minimum policy runs out. These are the amounts each provider billed, as listed in his file; the records show no payments against them.

The injection session alone was billed at $10,780.80. The second round his pain doctor recommended was estimated at another $12,030.80, and the bills already stood above the $30,000 limit before it was ever scheduled.

A policy limits settlement means the insurer paid everything its policy promised for one injured person. When an injury is worth more than that, our page on underinsured at fault drivers and who pays the rest shows where else to look, and learning the limit in the first place is its own task, covered in our guide to tracking down another driver’s policy limits.

What We Did on His Claim

His part was getting treatment and keeping his appointments. Ours was the rest: the report, the records, the insurer and every phone call in between.

From our founder

“For years, I have asked the same questions in Texas courtrooms: What happened? Who is responsible? And what insurance is available to cover the harm? … Our role is to investigate the facts, identify the available coverage, and press for the recovery the evidence supports.”

Josh Alexander, Founder and Managing Attorney, in our guide The Other Driver Left, Lied, or Had No Insurance

On this claim, the police report answered his first two questions. The third answer was the policy limit described above, and it set the ceiling for everything that followed.

His case manager

Each client here is assigned one case manager by name, reachable directly by call or text, who updates the client on the file every 14 days or sooner. His case manager followed his treatment as it happened and gathered the records and bills behind it from five providers: the chiropractor, the pain management clinic, the imaging center, the radiologist who read his scans and the pharmacy. With the photos of his pickup, his file runs to 144 pages, and every detail of his care on this page comes from those records.

The attorney’s review

A senior attorney led the claim. With the coverage capped, the work was showing that his documented injuries and treatment called for every dollar of the limit.

No lawsuit needed

Once his treatment was documented, we presented the claim to the insurer for the driver who pulled out, and it paid the full limit. Because no suit was ever filed, there were no depositions to sit through and no court dates to wait on. He owed us nothing up front, either; the firm carried the costs of the claim until it settled.

$30,000, Every Dollar of the Policy

The $30,000 is the gross settlement. The firm’s fee, the costs of the claim and any medical balances payable from the recovery come out of it before our client receives the rest. Every result reflects its own crash, its own injuries and its own insurance, and this one does not promise or predict any other outcome.

Attorney Review

Reviewed by: Josh Alexander, Founder and Managing Attorney

Published and reviewed on October 5, 2026

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