Blackburn Romey represents injury clients across Huntington County, and personal injury and wrongful death law is all we do. If you were hurt in a crash, at work, or on someone else’s property here, a free consultation is the place to start. It is where you talk through what happened and what your options may be.
A Huntington County claim is run from our Fort Wayne personal injury lawyer practice, the nearest of our seven offices.
Among the attorneys who take these cases, Chris Blackburn has trial experience in Huntington County. He earned his bachelor’s degree in economics from Huntington University in 2005, so his tie to the county long predates the case. Founding partner Tom Blackburn has practiced personal injury law since 1985.
Huntington County residents come to us after several different kinds of harm, and a claim can start from any of them. Car crashes are one of them: a rear-end collision on a rural highway, a left-turn crash at an intersection, a multi-vehicle pileup in bad weather. Our car accident work covers each of those. Truck crashes bring a different set of problems: a commercial carrier and its insurer, additional parties who could share fault, and evidence that a trucking company can lose or overwrite if it is not preserved. Driver logs, maintenance records and dash cam footage are often central to a truck accident case.
Injuries also happen off the road. A fall on a business’s uneven walkway, equipment that fails on a job site, an accident on land someone else controls. Each of these can support a claim if another party’s carelessness caused the harm. We handle the range because Huntington County families do not always know, when they first call, which category their situation falls into. That is a question we help answer, not one you need to arrive with already settled.
Huntington County is served by two courts of record. Huntington Circuit Court and Huntington Superior Court both sit in the city of Huntington, and together they make up Indiana’s 56th Judicial Circuit. Which of the two hears a case is not left to a rotation or decided by the clerk.
Under Local Rule LR 35-00-16 in the county’s own local rules: “Except as otherwise specifically set out in this Rule, civil cases of all sorts, including domestic relations cases, shall be assigned to whichever court the attorney or the self-represented litigant filing the case designates to the clerk.” Personal injury cases are not among the exceptions that rule sets out, so in plain terms the attorney or the self-represented litigant filing the case picks the court.
Huntington County recorded 1,233 total collisions in 2024, the 35th highest count among Indiana’s 92 counties, according to Indiana Crash Facts 2024, published by the Indiana Criminal Justice Institute with the IU Public Policy Institute. Most of those, 1,041, involved property damage only, but 186 were injury collisions and 6 were fatal. In all, 1,940 people were involved in the county’s 2024 collisions. If one of those collisions was yours, the county totals will not tell you whether you have a claim; the facts of your own crash will, and a free consultation is where we look at them.
One figure stands well apart from the rest. Huntington County was among the five counties with the highest work-zone collision rates in Indiana in 2024, at 59.2 per 1,000 total collisions against a county mean of 17.5 — more than three times the mean. The report cautions that “Because work zone locations shift constantly throughout the state, the counties with the highest work zone collision rates tend to vary from year to year.” A work-zone crash can involve more parties than the two drivers. The contractor running the site, the signage and lane markings in place that day, or the agency responsible for the closure can all become part of the liability question. That is a different kind of claim than an ordinary collision, because the question becomes who controlled the site that day rather than who was driving.
A claim that may involve a government body carries a step that other claims do not. The two years is not the first deadline where a government defendant is involved. Where an injury claim is a tort claim against a governmental defendant under Indiana’s Tort Claims Act, notice comes first: a claim against a political subdivision (a county, township, city, town, school corporation, state educational institution, city or county hospital, or another entity in the definition at IC 34-6-2.1-155) is barred unless notice is filed with its governing body (and, in the cases the statute specifies, with the Indiana political subdivision risk management commission) within 180 days after the loss occurs (IC 34-13-3-8), and a claim against the state is barred unless notice is filed with the attorney general or the state agency involved within 270 days after the loss occurs (IC 34-13-3-6). The notice must be in writing and delivered in person or by registered or certified mail. Both windows are far shorter than the two-year lawsuit deadline, and the Act has narrow exceptions of its own — so if any government body may be involved, speak to a lawyer well before the notice window closes, and do not assume a missed window has ended the claim without asking.
Not every serious Huntington County crash happens in a work zone, and six of the county’s 2024 collisions were fatal. Where a fatal crash was caused by another party’s carelessness, a wrongful death action under IC 34-23-1-1 has to be filed within two years, and where a government body may be involved the notice windows above come first. Our wrongful death practice exists for exactly that situation.
Two years for most claims, running from when your claim arises rather than automatically from the crash. IC 34-11-2-4(a) requires an action for injury to be “commenced within two (2) years after the cause of action accrues.” It is not the first deadline where a government body is involved: under Indiana’s Tort Claims Act the notice windows above come first, and both are far shorter. Meanwhile, gather what already exists — medical records and bills, the police report if one was made, and any letters from an insurance company.
Those limits are not the end of the claim. For an ordinary passenger vehicle, Indiana requires a driver to carry $25,000 in bodily injury coverage for the injury or death of one person (IC 9-25-4-5), though recovery vehicles carry higher minimums (IC 9-25-4-6), so a serious injury can outrun the at-fault driver’s policy quickly.
Your own policy may fill the gap. On a standard Indiana auto policy the insurer has to make uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage available. Unless you rejected it in writing, that coverage must be provided in limits at least equal to your own bodily injury liability limits — and no insurer may sell or provide underinsured coverage for less than $50,000 (IC 27-7-5-2(a)).
Yes. Chris Blackburn has trial experience in Huntington County. He also holds a 2005 economics degree from Huntington University, so his tie to the county long predates the case.
Possibly more than the other driver. Huntington County had one of Indiana’s highest work zone collision rates in 2024. A work zone crash can involve the contractor running the site, the signage and lane markings in place that day, or the agency responsible for the closure. Those are questions an ordinary collision does not usually raise.
Not in the way you might expect. Huntington Circuit Court and Huntington Superior Court both sit in the city of Huntington. Under the county’s own local rule, the attorney or the self-represented litigant filing the case designates which of the two hears it.
Where another party’s carelessness caused a fatal crash, it can support a wrongful death claim. Where we represent a family in one, the work runs like any Huntington County matter.
Often, yes. Property damage only crashes made up 84.4% of Huntington County’s collisions in 2024, but no visible injury yet is not the same as no claim worth having. There can still be more to sort out than the repair bill, so a call is worth making either way.
Blackburn Romey takes injury and wrongful death cases from Huntington County, worked out of the Fort Wayne office.
The consultation is free and confidential. We will look at what happened and give you a straight answer about whether there is a claim worth bringing.
Call 833-366-6595 or contact us to start that conversation. Personal injury and wrongful death law is all we do.
Personal Injury & Wrongful Death is all we do
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