A $223,379 Bexar County Verdict in an Uninsured-Motorist Crash

On June 4, 2016, Reynaldo Sanchez caused a car collision in San Antonio that injured Jesus Inclan. Sanchez carried no liability insurance. The crash is logged under drunk driving (DUI) on TopVerdict's verdict ranking, and a jury later found that Sanchez had acted with gross negligence, the standard Texas reserves for conduct that goes beyond ordinary carelessness.

Inclan's injuries ran to medical expenses, past and future pain and mental anguish, loss of earning capacity, and physical impairment. Because the driver who hit him was uninsured, Inclan turned to the uninsured motorist coverage on his own Allstate policy and sent the company a $50,000 demand. Allstate answered with $10,000, then made three more offers, the last of them $14,000. Inclan turned them all down.

Thomas Crosley of Crosley Law, working with Amber Winer-Gebhart, sued both Sanchez and Allstate in the 45th District Court of Bexar County in May 2017. Instead of an ordinary breach-of-contract claim, the firm sought a declaratory judgment under the Texas Uniform Declaratory Judgments Act, a route that also opened the door to recovering attorney's fees from the insurer. When Allstate was asked to admit that Sanchez was negligent, it refused, even as the evidence pointed one way.

At trial in 2018, that position collapsed. After Inclan rested his case, Allstate stipulated that Sanchez was "solely at fault for causing the accident." The jury awarded $73,379.25 in compensatory damages against Sanchez and added $150,000 in exemplary damages for gross negligence, a combined $223,379.25. That figure placed the case 48th on TopVerdict's list of the top 50 Texas personal injury verdicts of 2018. The jury also awarded $50,000 in uninsured motorist benefits and $69,025 in attorney's fees against Allstate.

After the verdict, the trial court added $14,315.50 in attorney's fees as a discovery sanction, finding that Allstate should not have denied Sanchez's liability when the proof was so clear. Allstate moved for a new trial, lost, and appealed.

The case was transferred to the Thirteenth Court of Appeals in Corpus Christi-Edinburg under a docket-equalization order. On January 23, 2020, that court upheld both the declaratory relief and the attorney's fees awarded under the Declaratory Judgments Act, agreeing with the reasoning other Texas courts had applied in similar uninsured motorist disputes. It sustained only one of Allstate's points, modifying the judgment to remove the $14,315.50 discovery-sanction fees. The rest of the award stood. The Supreme Court of Texas denied Allstate's petition for review on May 21, 2021, and denied rehearing that September.