Lafayette Drunk Driving Accident Lawyer

If a drunk driver injured you in Lafayette, Indiana, the civil claim that follows is yours, and when it is brought here it goes to Tippecanoe County’s own courts. Where the crash killed someone in your family, who brings it changes. That claim runs on its own track from the OWI case the State brings against the driver. The criminal case answers to the State. The civil claim is where your medical bills, your lost income and what the crash did to your family are accounted for.

This page is about crashes where alcohol was involved. For a crash of any other kind in this city, see our Lafayette car accident page, and for claims anywhere in the state, our car accident lawyer practice. Call 833-366-6595 for a free, confidential consultation about what happened to you.

What an Injury Only Practice Means for a Lafayette Claim

It means personal injury and wrongful death law is the whole of the work rather than one file among several kinds. Blackburn Romey does not take other sorts of case and fit an injury claim around them.

Founding partner Tom Blackburn has practiced personal injury law since 1985.

No web page can tell you what a claim like yours is worth, because that turns on the medical records and on the facts of the crash. What a first conversation can do is look at what happened and give you a straight answer about whether there is a claim worth bringing.

Who Chooses the Court in a Tippecanoe County Injury Case?

The party who files it. A civil injury claim from a Lafayette crash is filed as a civil tort case, and Tippecanoe County’s local rules say a matter of that kind “may be filed in Tippecanoe Circuit Court, Tippecanoe Superior Court No. 1, or Tippecanoe Superior Court No. 2 unless the court assignment is otherwise determined by statute or rule.”

The word the rule uses is “may”. No rotation, no lottery and no ratio divides these cases among the three courts, so the choice sits with whoever brings the case.

The choice is real, but it is bounded. The subsection reaches only three of the county’s seven courts of record: Superior Courts Nos. 3, 4, 5 and 6 are not eligible for a civil tort under it. The rules are current, and their title page reads “Effective January 1, 2026”.

One piece of local geography goes with that choice. Every Tippecanoe Circuit and Superior Court sits in Lafayette. None sits in West Lafayette.

How Often Does Alcohol Appear in Tippecanoe County’s Crash Records?

Less often than the county’s overall crash volume might suggest, and the label counts something narrower than fault. A collision is counted as alcohol-impaired when at least one driver involved had a blood alcohol test result at or above 0.08 g/dL, and driver results greater than 0.59 g/dL are not included as impaired. The state’s own county profiles put it plainly: the term “does not mean that a crash or fatality was caused by alcohol impairment, only that an alcohol-impaired driver was involved in the crash.”

In 2024 the county recorded 6,560 collisions of every kind, the sixth-highest county total in Indiana that year, and 99 of those collisions were alcohol-impaired, 1.5% of the county’s total against a statewide share of 1.7%. None of the 19 fatal collisions the county recorded that year were alcohol-impaired (Indiana Crash Facts 2024).

Indiana County Profiles 2023, the publication quoted above, records Lafayette itself at 3,224 collisions in 2023, 69 of them alcohol-impaired, or 2.1%, with West Lafayette counted on a separate line. Tippecanoe County as a whole recorded 6,434 collisions that year, 129 of them alcohol-impaired, or 2.0%. Figures like these describe a city and a county over a single year. They settle nothing about an individual claim, which turns on the evidence from that particular crash.

Who Besides the Driver Can Be Held Responsible?

Sometimes the bar, the restaurant or the host who put the drink in front of the driver. A bar, restaurant or private host who served the driver can also be responsible, but only if they actually knew the driver was visibly intoxicated when they served them, and that intoxication was a proximate cause (a direct legal cause) of the injuries you are claiming for (IC 7.1-5-10-15.5).

Your own share of fault comes into it as well. Indiana compares fault in a claim against another driver, but not in a tort claim against a governmental entity or a public employee under Indiana’s Tort Claims Act, where the comparative fault chapter does not apply at all (IC 34-51-2-2). Where it does apply, your own share of fault reduces what you recover (IC 34-51-2-5), and only a share greater than everyone else’s combined bars the claim entirely (IC 34-51-2-6(a)).

Sorting out who is responsible, and in what share, is most of the work in an injury case. Our page on how liability is established walks through the proof that decides it.

What Happens When the Drunk Driver’s Coverage Runs Out?

Your own policy is the next place to look, and the claim changes shape at that point.

Before the driver’s coverage is exhausted, the counterpart is the drunk driver’s insurer, and the ceiling on what it pays is the policy the driver bought. 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, so a serious injury can outrun the drunk driver’s policy quickly (IC 9-25-4-5). Recovery vehicles carry higher minimums under section 6 (IC 9-25-4-6).

After that ceiling is reached, the counterpart changes. 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)).

The scope of that duty is worth being precise about. A floor on what an insurer may sell or provide is not the same thing as coverage you are certain to hold, and your own declarations page is what settles which coverages you carry. Whatever they turn out to be, what the claim has to stretch across is the whole of the loss, from hospital care and rehabilitation to income nobody could earn while recovering, and our page on the damages a claim can cover sets out those categories.

How Long You Have to File, and What the Claim Has to Account For

Indiana gives you two years from when your claim arises to file an injury lawsuit (IC 34-11-2-4(a)). For most crash injuries that means two years from the day of the crash, and our page on Indiana’s filing deadline goes further into how that rule works. That two-year deadline is not the only one, and it is not the first one where a government body may be a defendant — the section below sets out the notice rule that comes first.

From the week of the crash, two years sounds generous. It is shorter than it sounds. Crash reports, test results and the accounts of people who saw what happened are all easiest to secure while the events are recent, and an insurer that hears from nobody for a year has had a year to build its own version of the file.

If the crash killed someone in your family, what follows is a wrongful death claim rather than an injury claim of your own, and it is a distinct claim with its own rules.

Either way, the claim has to account for everything the crash cost and not only what has already been billed. Care still to come and earnings still to be lost belong in it too, which is one reason the value of a claim is rarely clear in the first few weeks.

What If a Government Vehicle or a Public Road Was Involved?

Then a much shorter deadline comes first, and it is a notice deadline rather than a filing one. The two years is not the first deadline where a government defendant is involved — a city, county or township vehicle, a state agency, or a road authority whose maintenance is in question. 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(a)). 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(a)). The notice must be in writing and delivered in person or by registered or certified mail (IC 34-13-3-12).

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.

Questions People Ask After a Drunk Driving Crash in Lafayette

These are the questions that turn on Tippecanoe County’s own rules and figures rather than the general car accident questions answered elsewhere on this site. If yours is not among them, call 833-366-6595.

Where to Start After a Drunk Driving Crash in Lafayette

A free, confidential consultation is the place to start. 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. Our Lafayette personal injury practice covers the wider range of injury claims this city sends us, and we also serve clients in Fort Wayne, Merrillville, South Bend, Indianapolis, Terre Haute, and Evansville.