Was The Other Driver Texting and Driving?

This video features William Privette, a Personal Injury attorney based in Texas.

Attorney William Privette | 888-981-1283 | Free Consult

If you were involved in a car accident, you may be wondering: was the other driver texting and driving? How can you find out?

William Privette is a personal injury attorney with the law firm Herrman & Herrman, P.L.L.C., which has offices in Corpus Christi, San Antonio, and the Rio Grande Valley. In this Quick Question, he explains that an attorney can obtain the phone records of the other driver to find out if they were using their cell phone at the time of the crash.

To learn more, contact the attorney directly by calling 888-981-1283 or by submitting a contact form on this page. The consultation is free and confidential, and you owe no out-of-pocket attorney fees.

Texting while driving is considered one of the most dangerous types of driver distraction.

The CDC categorizes driver distractions in three ways; visual, manual, and cognitive. The reason texting while driving is considered one of the most if not the most dangerous type of driver distraction is that it falls under all three categories. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), every day in the U.S. roughly 9 people are killed and more than 1,000 people are injured in crashes reported to have involved a distracted driver.

With vehicles easily traveling the length of a football field or more in the time it takes to send a simple text, it’s not difficult to see how accidents can occur. Anything that takes a driver’s attention away from the road could cause them to fail to see or fail to avoid an obstacle in time to avoid a collision. If you were injured in an accident with a car you believe was operated by someone texting while driving, there are steps you can take to prove it.

To reliably discern that someone was texting while driving, a driver’s phone records can be subpoenaed by power of the court.

The first step to legally discerning whether the driver who caused the accident was texting at the time, you will need to begin by filing a personal injury claim against them. This process is something a car accident attorney can help you with at no out-of-pocket cost; most car accident attorneys work on a contingency fee basis, which means their clients don’t pay unless they win. Damages that can be compensated in a successful car accident lawsuit may include the cost of medical bills, lost wages, pain and suffering, and more.

If you believe that the other party was texting while driving you can list that suspicion as one of the areas you wish to investigate in the course of the lawsuit; this is referred to as a “discovery question” and can be requested of the court in order to have the driver’s phone records subpoenaed for review. If the evidence reveals that the driver was, in fact, texting while driving at the time of the accident, they will most likely be considered partially or even fully liable for the accident, depending on the state and other circumstances surrounding the accident.

To learn more, contact William Privette directly by calling 888-981-1283 or by submitting a contact form on this page. The consultation is free and confidential, and you owe no out-of-pocket attorney fees.

Video Transcript:

Leslie Rhode:

How can I find out if the driver who hit me was texting? We asked Texas attorney William Privette in this AskTheLawyers.com Quick Question.

William Privette:

The short answer to that is, the only way you can truly tell with a matter of certainty if the other driver was texting is by getting their phone records through subpoena power of the court. And so if you're in court, if you file a lawsuit against the adverse party, you can send discovery questions and ask the court for subpoena power to gather those records for you.

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