Austin Negligent Security Lawyer

When you’re assaulted, robbed, or attacked on someone else’s property — an apartment complex, a parking garage, a bar, a hotel — it’s natural to think of the attacker as the only person responsible. But if the property owner knew crime like this was a real risk and didn’t do anything about it — broken gates, no lighting, no cameras, no security staff where there should have been — they can share legal responsibility for what happened to you. That’s a negligent security claim, and it’s a distinct type of premises liability case with its own legal test.

The Key Question: Was the Crime Foreseeable?

A property owner in Texas only owes a duty to protect visitors from a third party’s criminal act if the crime was foreseeable — meaning the owner knew or reasonably should have known it could happen. The Texas Supreme Court laid out the controlling test in Timberwalk Apartments, Partners, Inc. v. Cain, and courts weigh five factors when deciding whether a crime was foreseeable enough to create a duty:

1. Proximity — how close prior crimes happened to the property
2. Recency — how recently those crimes occurred
3. Frequency — how often crime has happened there
4. Similarity — how closely prior crimes resemble what happened to you
5. Publicity — whether prior crimes were publicized in a way the owner should have known about

These factors work together, not as a checklist — the more similar a prior crime is to what happened to you, the less frequency is needed to establish that the owner should have seen it coming. This is why building a negligent security case starts with digging into the property’s crime history: police reports, prior 911 calls, incident logs, and even local news coverage of past incidents at the same location.

Where These Cases Usually Come From

• Apartment and condo complexes — assaults in parking lots, stairwells, or common areas due to broken gates, missing lighting, or unsecured entry points
• Parking garages — a common site for robbery and assault when lighting, cameras, or attendant coverage is inadequate
• Bars and nightclubs — especially where a venue has a known history of fights or hasn’t provided adequate security staff for its capacity
• Hotels and motels — inadequate door locks, unmonitored entrances, or failure to screen who has access to guest floors

Who Can Be Held Responsible

Depending on the facts, a negligent security claim can name the property owner, the management company that actually controls day-to-day decisions like lighting, locks, and staffing, the business tenant operating on the property (like the bar itself), and sometimes a security company that was hired to protect the property but performed inadequately. Sorting out which of these parties actually controlled the security decisions that failed is a core part of building the case.

Building Your Case

A strong negligent security case requires real investigation, quickly: police reports and 911 call logs for the property (not just the incident that hurt you, but the property’s history), any security footage before it’s overwritten or deleted, maintenance and repair records for gates, locks, and lighting, and lease or property management contracts that show who was actually responsible for security decisions. Evidence like this disappears fast — footage gets recorded over, records get discarded — which is why acting quickly after an attack matters.

Why The Traub Law Office?

Negligent security cases are contested hard, because insurers know foreseeability is the whole ballgame — if they can argue the crime wasn’t foreseeable, they can defeat the claim entirely. We build these cases around real evidence of a property’s crime history and the specific security failures that let it happen again. We take these cases on contingency: no fee unless we recover money for you.

If you were injured in an assault or attack on someone else’s property in Austin, call the Traub Law Office at (512) 246-9191 for a free, confidential consultation.