Served by Certified Mail in a Crash You Only Witnessed

Attorney Answer

Do not treat this as junk mail, and do not decide it is invalid because the envelope looked homemade. Whether service was proper is a technical question that turns on how the papers were sent and what the file shows, and the appearance of the envelope is not the test. The dangerous move is ignoring it: if either of you was named as a defendant and no answer is filed by the deadline, a judgment can be entered against you by default even though you had nothing to do with the crash.

The first thing to establish is what you were actually sent. A citation is the document that tells a named party a lawsuit has been filed against them and that they must respond. A subpoena is the document that commands a witness to give testimony or produce records. They look similar to a non-lawyer and they carry completely different obligations. The first page of each set of papers will name the parties and say which one you are; read that carefully. The rules on how a citation may be served, and on what makes service defective, come from the Texas Rules of Civil Procedure rather than from a statute, and a lawyer needs to see the actual papers and envelopes to answer your question.

The second thing to understand is that your insurer's conclusion does not bind a court. An adjuster's determination that your car was not involved settles the insurer's coverage position, not the lawsuit. In a Texas case responsibility is decided under chapter 33 of the Civil Practice and Remedies Code: under § 33.003 the trier of fact assigns whole-number percentages of responsibility to each claimant, each defendant, each settling person and each designated responsible third party. Section 33.013(a) then provides that "Except as provided in Subsection (b), a liable defendant is liable to a claimant only for the percentage of the damages found by the trier of fact equal to that defendant's percentage of responsibility with respect to the personal injury, property damage, death, or other harm for which the damages are allowed." Subsection (b) is a narrow exception, for a defendant more than 50 percent responsible or one acting in concert in certain intentional crimes. A party found zero percent responsible owes nothing. But that finding has to be made in the case, which means someone has to appear and make it.

It is also normal for this to arrive long after the event. Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 16.003(a) allows two years from the day the cause of action accrues for injury and property damage claims, so suits are routinely filed near the end of that period and served afterward. Nothing about the delay suggests anything is wrong.

What you can do

1. Read the first page of each set of papers and note whether each of you is named as a defendant or identified as a witness, the court and county, the cause number, and the date each envelope was delivered.

2. Keep the envelopes, the certified mail receipts and the delivery cards exactly as they are, in a safe place. How and when delivery happened may turn out to matter, and those items cannot be recreated.

3. Send both sets of papers to your auto insurer today, in writing, and keep proof that you sent them. Ask the insurer to confirm in writing whether it will provide a defense.

4. Do not contact the plaintiff or the plaintiff's lawyer directly, and do not write out an account of what you saw for anyone other than your own lawyer or your insurer.

5. Speak to a Texas attorney this week and take the papers and the envelopes with you. Ask specifically whether service was valid, what the deadline to respond is, and whether responding could waive an objection to the service itself. Do not calculate the deadline yourself.

6. Most lawyers offer a brief initial call at no cost, and a few minutes on your specific facts is worth more than any general guidance, including this page.

⏱ Time limits apply. The deadline that matters right now is the one to respond to the citation, and it comes from the court's rules and the citation itself rather than from a statute. Treat it as the most urgent item in the file. Separately, Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 16.003(a) allows two years from accrual for the underlying claim, which is why a suit can surface long after a crash. Which dates apply to you depends on the papers in your hand, so have a Texas attorney read them now rather than after the response period passes.