We have a standing rule in our office at Bison Law Firm: we don't represent people who've been involved in accidents.
Yes, you read that right. A personal injury firm right here in Canadian County — one that represents injured people and nothing else — does not represent people who've been injured in an accident.
Confused? Perplexed?
This may sound like nerdy lawyer talk, and I'll admit it probably is. But any honest personal injury attorney will tell you the same thing: you cannot make a successful injury claim against a person or their liability insurance if what happened was nothing more than an accident. To bring a liability claim, one thing has to be true from the very start. Someone else has to be at fault.
Accidents happen. When they do, nobody else is to blame. When I dropped my iPhone in the swimming pool last weekend, that was an accident. The only person at fault was the guy holding the phone, and I can't sue myself.
Car wrecks are different. If every driver on the road operated their vehicle in a reasonable, responsible, and careful manner, we would not have car wrecks. But that isn't what happens. Someone runs a red light. Someone rolls through a stop sign. Someone changes lanes without looking, or follows too closely, or spends the two seconds before impact looking at a phone instead of the road. Every one of those scenarios — and nearly every other cause of a collision — involves a person doing something they shouldn't have been doing. In the legal world, we call that behavior… negligence.
Are there rare exceptions? Of course. A sudden and genuinely unforeseeable medical emergency. A defective part that fails without warning. A deer that comes out of the ditch at exactly the wrong moment. But notice something about that short list: "unavoidable accident" is a defense argument. It's what the other side says when it wants a jury to believe nobody could have done anything differently.
Which brings me to why this is more than a vocabulary preference.
Pay attention to how often you hear that word after a wreck… accident. The insurance adjuster who calls you will ask about "your accident." It's printed across the top of the police report. Defense lawyers say it in front of juries every day, over and over, until it starts to sound like the truth. And every time it gets used, it carries a quiet suggestion underneath it: this was just one of those things. Nobody could help it. Nobody is really to blame.
But, somebody was to blame. That’s the entire reason you have a claim in the first place.
So if you or a loved one has been injured by someone else, and it wasn't your fault, Bison Law Firm would be honored to represent you. But know this going in — you will never hear us call what happened to you… an accident.
A Word About This Post
This post is for general education and isn't legal advice about any specific situation. If you've been hurt in a crash and have questions about your rights, our team is happy to talk with you about the specific facts of your case.