DFW Injury Lawyers advertises service in both English and Spanish, a detail that shows up on nearly every page of the firm's site. Co-founder Pedro "Peter" de la Cerda, who is fluent in Spanish, is a big part of why that's more than a line in the firm's marketing, and his path to the firm runs through a decade of mass tort litigation most clients calling the firm today never hear about.

A Dallas Native Who Studied Psychology First

De la Cerda is a native of Dallas, raised in what he's described as a tight-knit community that valued faith, hard work, and helping the less fortunate. He earned his bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Texas at Austin in three years rather than the typical four, then went on to Texas Tech University School of Law, graduating with honors and serving on the Texas Tech Law Review. He also holds an MBA from Texas Tech's Rawls College of Business and is a member of Beta Gamma Sigma, the business honor society reserved for top-performing students at accredited business schools. That combination, a psychology degree completed ahead of schedule and a law degree paired with a business degree, points to someone who came to both people and the mechanics of running a firm with more preparation than most attorneys bring to either. The psychology background in particular carries over into client work in ways that don't show up on a resume: clients calling a personal injury firm are often doing so in the middle of a genuinely difficult period, dealing with pain, lost income, and the stress of dealing with an insurance adjuster for the first time, and an attorney who understands something about how people process that kind of stress is better positioned to communicate with them clearly than one who treats the case purely as a legal file.

Defending the Other Side First

Like his co-founder, de la Cerda didn't start out representing injured people. He began his legal career defending physicians, hospitals, nurses, trucking companies, and manufacturers in personal injury, medical malpractice, and products liability cases. He's said he moved to plaintiff's work after seeing people who were genuinely injured and deserved fair compensation being met with the same defense playbook he'd helped build, a shift that put him on the other side of the same kinds of cases he used to defend. After earning his law license in 2004, he spent the following years learning that playbook from the inside before deciding to use what he'd learned on behalf of injured clients instead.

A Decade Building a Mass Tort Practice

In 2008, de la Cerda and law school classmate Kevin Edwards launched Edwards and de la Cerda out of a small windowless office, each clearing roughly $9,000 in their first year. For the next decade, the two built a practice around product liability and toxic tort litigation, mass claims brought against manufacturers whose products or chemical exposures allegedly caused widespread harm to large numbers of people, while serving as of counsel on personal injury matters for other firms. The firm's mass tort work during this period included pelvic mesh litigation, over a surgical implant linked to chronic pain and complications, that resulted in roughly $73 million in settlements, and IVC filter litigation, over a blood clot filter device that in some patients fractured or migrated after implantation, which settled for approximately $33 million. Attorney Advertising: past results do not guarantee or predict a similar outcome in any future case.

Relaunching as DFW Injury Lawyers

In 2021, de la Cerda and Edwards relaunched the practice as DFW Injury Lawyers, shifting its focus toward the single-event personal injury cases the firm is known for today, including car accidents, truck accidents, motorcycle accidents, rideshare accidents, and wrongful death claims. De la Cerda is licensed in Texas since 2004, California since 2007, and, as of 2024, Arizona, with admissions to multiple federal district courts across both states, including the Eastern, Northern, Western, and Southern Districts of Texas and the Central, Eastern, Northern, and Southern Districts of California, along with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals since 2021. That breadth of federal admission across two states reflects the mass tort years, when litigation against national manufacturers regularly meant appearing in courts far outside Texas.

Toxic Tort Experience Still Shapes Case Selection

That mass tort background isn't purely historical. Toxic tort and product liability cases require identifying a defect or hazard, tracing it back to a manufacturer's design or manufacturing process, and proving the defendant knew or should have known about the risk, skills that translate directly into cases DFW Injury Lawyers still takes today involving defective vehicle parts, dangerous premises conditions, or other hazardous defects that contributed to a client's injury. An attorney whose primary experience is single-event car accident litigation doesn't always have the same instinct for spotting a product defect buried inside what looks, on the surface, like an ordinary crash. De la Cerda's decade in mass tort litigation gives him that instinct, along with direct experience taking cases through the multidistrict litigation process rather than only reading about how it works.

Why Bilingual Representation Changes a Case

For the firm's Spanish-speaking clients specifically, having a bilingual co-founder handling cases directly, rather than routing everything through a translator, changes how a client experiences a case from the first phone call through to its resolution. Details can get lost or softened in translation, particularly medical terminology describing an injury or the specific language of a settlement offer, and a client working through an interpreter at every step is at a structural disadvantage compared to one who can ask a direct question and get a direct answer in the language they're most comfortable in. De la Cerda's role in the firm formalizes that access rather than leaving it to whichever staff member happens to speak Spanish on a given day.

Rideshare Cases Add Another Layer

Among the case types DFW Injury Lawyers handles, rideshare accidents tend to be more complicated than a standard two-car collision, and it's an area where de la Cerda's product liability and mass claims background is useful. A rideshare driver's insurance coverage can shift depending on whether the app was off, on but waiting for a ride request, or actively transporting a passenger, which means the insurance company actually responsible for covering a claim isn't always obvious from the outset. Sorting out which policy applies, and whether the driver, the rideshare company, or another driver bears responsibility, requires the same kind of methodical fact-gathering that mass tort litigation demands before a single dollar ever changes hands.

A Growing Firm, Built the Second Time Around

Since the 2021 relaunch, DFW Injury Lawyers has grown to roughly 40 staff members across five DFW-area offices, in Dallas, Fort Worth, Arlington, Oak Cliff, and Lancaster, and reports more than $500 million recovered for injured clients. Attorney Advertising: past results do not guarantee or predict a similar outcome in any future case. De la Cerda's MBA and background in business administration have factored into that growth directly; scaling a firm from a two-person, windowless startup into a 40-person operation with five physical locations involves the same operational planning problems as running any other growing business, on top of the legal work itself. The firm handles car accidents, truck accidents, motorcycle accidents, rideshare accidents, and wrongful death claims on a No Win, No Fee basis, meaning clients pay nothing upfront and owe a fee only if the firm recovers compensation, with free consultations and 24/7 availability advertised for new clients.

Recognition Alongside a Growing Practice

De la Cerda has been a Super Lawyers selection every year since 2018, following an earlier run as a Super Lawyers Rising Star from 2014 through 2017. He was named to the National Trial Lawyers' Top 40 Under 40 from 2015 through 2017, was recognized among Texas's Top 100 Up-and-Coming Rising Stars in 2017, and holds membership in the Million Dollar Advocates Forum, an organization limited to attorneys who have personally won a verdict or settlement of $1 million or more, a bar that excludes most practicing personal injury attorneys regardless of how long they've been in practice.