Dram Shop and Bar Sexual Assault Lawyer in Dallas
If you were sexually assaulted after a bar kept serving the person who hurt you, you don’t have to convince us. We believe you. Texas law can hold that bar responsible for what its own service made possible, and that’s a claim we bring for survivors.
A fierce, female-owned plaintiffs’ firm. Over 20 years of trial work on the cases other firms send somewhere else.
How Texas Dram Shop Law Works for Survivors
“Dram shop” is an old word for a bar, and Texas uses it as the name for a specific rule. A business licensed to sell alcohol can be sued when it serves someone who is already visibly drunk and that person’s drunkenness causes harm. The rule lives in Chapter 2 of the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Code.
Two things have to be true. First, it had to be apparent to whoever was serving that the customer was, in the statute’s words, “obviously intoxicated to the extent that he presented a clear danger to himself and others.” Second, that intoxication has to be a proximate cause of the harm you suffered. Proximate cause is a legal term that means the drinking is a real part of why this happened to you, not a coincidence sitting next to it.
The defendant in a dram shop case is the bar, restaurant, club, or venue that poured the drinks. It is not the person who assaulted you. That distinction does more work than it looks like it does. A licensed establishment carries liquor liability insurance, and an individual assailant usually has nothing worth collecting. A civil case against a business is also built around what the business did and failed to do, which means the case doesn’t rest on you standing alone against the person who hurt you.
One night at a bar often supports more than one claim. If the assault happened in the parking lot, a back hallway, or a corner no employee ever walked past, the property owner may also be liable under premises liability for failing to provide adequate security. Amy Carter built Carter Law Group out of decades of complex product and mass tort litigation, and that background is why the firm takes cases that stack theories together: sexual assault plus premises liability plus dram shop, all out of the same set of facts.
When a Bar Is Legally Responsible for an Assault
These cases come out of ordinary nights out. If any of the following sounds close to yours, it’s worth a conversation, even if you’re not sure the bar did anything wrong.
Slurring, stumbling, already cut off somewhere earlier in the night, and served anyway. If staff could see how drunk that person was and poured another one, the bar owns a share of what happened next.
Some of these cases turn on the survivor's intoxication, not the assailant's. If a bar served you well past the point where you could say no or get yourself home, we look hard at whether that service caused it.
Parking lots, side alleys, and back hallways are where a lot of these assaults happen. That adds a premises liability claim about lighting, cameras, and security staffing on top of the dram shop claim.
When the person who assaulted you worked there and had been drinking on the job, the business is answering for its service, its hiring, and its supervision at the same time.
Texas has a separate rule for minors. An adult who knowingly serves a minor, or knowingly lets a minor be served, can be liable for the damage that minor's intoxication causes.
Weddings, work parties, and rented event spaces still run on somebody's liquor license. The venue, the caterer, or the contracted bar service can be the defendant when service went too far.
If this sounds like what happened to you, tell us about it. The consultation is free, there’s no obligation, and you decide what happens next.
What to Do After a Sexual Assault at a Bar
You’re not behind, and you haven’t ruined anything by waiting or by not remembering all of it. Read this when you have room for it. Whatever you can still do from this list will help, and the parts you can’t do are not fatal to a case.
01
Get somewhere safe and call 911 if you can
Your safety comes before evidence and before anything legal. If you're in danger, call 911. A police report helps a civil case later because it locks in the date, the place, and the names while they're fresh. But a civil claim against a bar doesn't depend on a criminal case existing, so if you didn't call or didn't want to, that isn't the end of anything.
02
Get medical care, and ask for a SANE exam
Go to an emergency room, and if you can, one with a sexual assault nurse examiner on staff. People call them SANE nurses. They're trained specifically to care for survivors and to document injuries the right way. Getting seen is about your health first. It also creates a medical record with dates and findings in it that nobody can argue away two years later.
03
Write down what you remember about the bar
The details that matter here are about the bar and the service, not only about the assault itself. Where you were sitting. Which bartender was working. How many rounds went to the person who hurt you, and how fast. Whether anyone cut them off. Who else saw it. What time you got there and what time you left. Put it in your phone the same night if you can, because service details are the first thing memory loses and the thing a dram shop case is built on.
04
Ask the bar in writing to keep its video
Surveillance video doesn't sit on a bar's system forever, and tab records live in a point-of-sale system that gets cleared out on a schedule nobody announces. Email the manager and ask them to preserve the video, the receipts and tabs, and the shift schedule for that night. Email rather than a phone call, so you have your own copy of the request. A lawyer can send that for you, and the sooner it goes out the more of it survives.
05
Talk to a lawyer before you sign anything
If the bar, the venue, or an insurance adjuster comes to you with paperwork, a check, or a request for a recorded statement, don't sign or record anything first. Early offers get made before anyone has looked at what the case is actually worth. Asking us first costs you nothing.
How Carter Law Group Builds a Case Against a Bar
01
You tell us what happened, in as much or as little detail as you can manage that day. We don't ask you to prove your account to get through the door. What we're listening for is who else had a hand in it.
Amy reviews every lead the firm gets, every morning. On the cases we take, she runs the first full interview personally, sets expectations with you, and stays on the strategy from there.
02
One night can produce a dram shop claim, a premises liability claim over bad security, and sometimes an employment claim on top of that if you worked there. We plead what the facts support instead of picking whichever theory is easiest.
03
Surveillance footage, tabs and point-of-sale data, staffing and shift records, prior incidents at that address, and the seller-training certificates the bar will hold up as a defense. Heather Davis runs the pre-suit side of this, including the demand.
04
If the bar's insurer will resolve it fairly, we resolve it. If not, Kassi Yukevich takes it into litigation. Most civil cases settle, and we still build every one as though a jury is going to hear it.
05
YEARS TO FILE A TEXAS PI CLAIM
Deadlines That Apply to a Dallas Bar Assault Case
Texas gives you two years to file most personal injury claims, counted from the date of the injury. That two-year rule is the default for a dram shop claim against a bar.
Claims that come out of a sexual assault get longer. Texas sets a five-year deadline for civil claims arising from the sexual assault or aggravated sexual assault of an adult, and a thirty-year deadline for claims arising from the sexual assault or abuse of a child. The statute ties the deadline to the conduct that caused the injury, not to which defendant you’re suing. Which of those deadlines a court applies to a claim against the bar depends on how the case is pleaded and what the facts show. That’s an argument we would much rather make early than late.
There’s also a provision for survivors who don’t know the name of the person who assaulted them. A suit can be filed against a John or Jane Doe defendant, which stops the clock, and the real name gets added once it’s known.
The legal deadline usually isn’t the one that decides these cases, though. The practical one arrives much sooner. Surveillance video gets recorded over. Point-of-sale records get purged. Bartenders and security staff move on, and nobody remembers a Tuesday night two years back. The strongest dram shop cases are the ones where somebody asked for the records while the records still existed. If you think you might be close to a deadline, or you have no idea whether you are, call us. Working that out is our job, not yours.
What Working With Us Costs You Out of Pocket
Nothing, on a case like this. We take sexual assault cases on contingency: no consultation fee, no retainer, and no hourly bills while your case is open. We front the cost of building and filing it and recover that from a settlement or verdict, not from you along the way. If we don’t win, you owe us no fee. The firm does billable work for clients who want it, but that isn’t how these cases run.
Why Survivors Call Us Instead of Someone Else
A female-led, trauma-informed team
Amy Carter owns the firm, every attorney here is a woman, and so is most of the staff. Our intake doesn't ask you to convince anybody of what happened before you get representation. Survivors tell us that combination is why they called. So do the men.
We actually try cases to verdict
Four cases to verdict in the last two calendar years, in courtrooms in more than one state. An insurer prices a case differently when the firm across the table has recently put one in front of a jury and is willing to do it again.
We find every claim in one set of facts
Amy spent decades on pharmaceutical and product cases that ran on genetics, engineering, and medicine. That's why this firm takes cases other lawyers turn down as too complicated, including the ones where one night produces three claims against three defendants.
Meet the Attorneys Who Handle These Cases
Three attorneys touch a case like this, and you’ll know all three by name. Amy runs intake and strategy, Heather runs the work before suit is filed, and Kassi runs the litigation. Nobody hands you to a paralegal and disappears.
Amy founded the firm in 2019 after decades trying pharmaceutical, product liability, and mass tort cases. She reads every lead that comes in and interviews every client the firm accepts.
Heather's interest in sexual assault cases is what pulled the firm into this practice. She handles the pre-suit work: the demand, the negotiation, and the strategy before anything gets filed.
Kassi runs litigation. Harvard Law, then counsel to a United States senator, then the country's leading voting rights firm. She is the firm's primary trial second chair on complex cases.
What Clients Say About Carter Law Group
Common Questions About Suing a Bar in Texas
Who is the defendant in a dram shop sexual assault case?
The business that served the alcohol. That’s the bar, restaurant, club, or venue holding the liquor license, and its insurer. The person who assaulted you is a separate track, usually a criminal one, and in most cases has nothing worth recovering. Your civil case is about what the business did while it was making money that night.
Do I have to press criminal charges to file a civil case?
No. They’re two different things. A criminal case belongs to the state, a prosecutor files it, and it goes after the person who assaulted you. A civil dram shop case belongs to you, you file it, and it goes after the business. You can bring one without the other, and a case a prosecutor declined can still be a strong civil claim.
Does it hurt my case if I had been drinking that night?
It doesn’t end it. Being drunk isn’t consent and it isn’t fault. Texas does reduce what you recover by the share of responsibility a jury assigns to you, and being assigned more than half can bar recovery altogether, so expect the bar’s lawyers to push that number as high as they can. We plan for that argument from the first week. It is not a reason to stay quiet.
How do you prove the bar knew the person was too drunk?
With the bar’s own records and the people who were standing there. Tabs and point-of-sale data show how much went to that person and how quickly. Video shows what a bartender could see from where they were standing. Servers, security, and other customers tend to remember the loud, sloppy ones. The legal test is whether the intoxication was apparent to whoever was serving, which turns on what was visible, not on what the bartender later says they thought.
What if the bar says all of its staff was TABC certified?
Expect that argument. Texas gives employers a safe harbor: an employee’s conduct isn’t attributed to the employer if the employer required employees to attend a commission-approved seller training program, the employee actually attended it, and the employer didn’t directly or indirectly encourage breaking the law. All three have to be true, which turns the defense into a records fight about the specific server working that specific night.
Will I have to tell a room full of strangers what happened?
Probably not. Most civil cases resolve without a trial, through negotiation or mediation, and plenty of survivors never testify publicly. If a case does head for trial, you’ll know it a long way out and we prepare you for it. Nobody springs that on you. Whether to try a case is your call, and we’ll tell you plainly what we think.
Can I bring a claim if the assault happened years ago?
Maybe, so don’t assume you’re too late. Texas gives claims arising from sexual assault a longer window than ordinary injury claims, and there are provisions that stop the clock in certain situations. Whether yours is still open depends on how old you were, the conduct involved, and how the claim gets framed. That’s a short phone call, and it costs you nothing to make it.
Your Case May Involve More Than One Claim
One night can produce more than one claim, and those theories live on different pages of this site. If one of these is closer to your situation, start there.
Where We Represent Survivors in North Texas
We take these cases across Dallas-Fort Worth. If you were assaulted at a bar anywhere in the metroplex, distance isn’t the problem, and most of the work happens remotely anyway.
We Believe You. Tell Us What Happened to You.
You don’t have to know whether you have a case, and you don’t need the whole night in order. Tell us what you remember and let us work out who is responsible for it. The consultation is free, there’s no obligation, and nothing comes out of your pocket.
Our Dallas office is at 351 W. Jefferson Blvd., Suite 503. By appointment only.
