This page was written, edited, and reviewed & approved by Rusty Smith following our comprehensive editorial guidelines. Rusty Smith, the Founding Attorney, has 25 years of legal experience as a personal injury attorney. Our last Published date shows when this page was last updated & reviewed.
Shared fault stops a recovery in this state only when your share of the blame is larger than everyone else’s combined. Insurance adjusters know that every percentage point they assign to you lowers what they pay. A number that arrives by phone during your first week of treatment can shape the claim for months afterward, long before anyone knows what your care will cost.
Being blamed for part of a crash is not the same as being barred from recovering for it, and state law draws that line more narrowly than most people assume. At Smith Barkett Law Group, our attorneys treat a fault percentage as a starting position to be tested against evidence rather than a fixed conclusion. You can ask our team to look at the blame an insurer has already assigned to you.
Two short statutes carry most of the weight in a shared fault dispute. One decides whether you recover at all, and the other decides how much.
Under Title 23, Section 13 of the Oklahoma Statutes, your own negligence does not bar a recovery unless it is of greater degree than the negligence of the party who caused your harm. When more than one party is responsible, the comparison runs against their combined negligence instead.
The phrase “of greater degree than” does real work in that sentence. If a jury assigns you exactly half the blame (50%), your negligence is equal to the other side’s rather than greater, so the claim survives at a 50% reduced amount.
Recovery stops once your share crosses above that midpoint. At 51%, your negligence is greater than the other party’s 49%, and the statute ends the claim.
Sources that describe the rule as barring recovery at 50% or more have it backward. The law measures whether your fault is greater than the other side’s, not whether it reaches a fixed number.
A crash with two or more responsible parties changes the arithmetic in your favor. Your negligence is weighed against the combined negligence of all contributors, not against each party separately.
Consider a collision in which you carry 40% of the fault, another driver carries 35%, and a trucking company carries 25%. Your 40% is below their combined 60%, so the claim proceeds even though you hold the largest single share.
Clearing that line does not leave your compensation untouched. Section 14 of the same title requires that the amount of the recovery be diminished in proportion to your own contributory negligence.
The reduction is arithmetic rather than judgment. A jury that values your losses at $250,000 and assigns you 35% of the fault produces a recoverable figure of $162,500.
That percentage reaches every category of loss the award covers:
A single percentage point can therefore be worth thousands of dollars, which explains why insurers argue fault so hard.
Section 15 of that same title changed how responsibility gets collected. For claims accruing on or after November 1, 2011, liability is several only, and each responsible party owes just the damages allocated to it.
The practical effect appears when one party cannot pay. If a trucking company carries 25% of the fault and has no available insurance, the remaining defendants do not absorb that share on your behalf.
Claims brought by or on behalf of the state fall outside this rule. Everyone else works within it, which makes identifying every responsible party early a matter of real financial consequence.
If an adjuster has already assigned a number to your share of the blame, Smith Barkett Law Group can review how that figure was calculated. Call 918-582-6900 to talk through what the percentage actually rests on.
Some arguments an insurer might like to make are unavailable here. Two rules limit what a defense can present to a jury or use to discount a claim.
Seat Belt Evidence Exclusion: Title 47, Section 12-420 provides that seat belt use or nonuse shall not be submitted into evidence in a civil suit (subject to a narrow exception involving young children). The Oklahoma Supreme Court has affirmed that a person will not be penalized in a civil proceeding for choosing not to wear a seat belt, by reason of fault.
No Cap on Noneconomic Damages: In Beason v. I.E. Miller Services, Inc., the state supreme court struck down the statutory cap on noneconomic damages as an unconstitutional special law, leaving no ceiling on what a jury may award for pain and suffering. Your fault percentage still reduces that figure, but it cannot hit the cap the courts removed from the law.
No single person decides your share of the blame, and the first number you hear is rarely the last. Fault passes through several hands before it becomes final.
A fault percentage usually travels through the following stages:
Only the last two stages carry legal force, meaning an earlier number is an opening position rather than a ruling.
Fault arguments turn on documentation rather than assertion. Our attorneys look for material that fixes the physical facts before memories fade and records disappear.
Several kinds of evidence carry particular weight:
Each item either supports the percentage assigned to you or gives us grounds to challenge it.
A fault argument never happens if the claim arrives late. Filing deadlines operate independently of blame, and missing one ends the matter regardless of how strong your evidence is.
Several deadlines apply depending on who caused the harm:
A government defendant compresses the timeline sharply, which matters when a road defect or a public vehicle contributed to the crash.
Injured people across the state ask these questions once an insurer raises their share of the blame.
Yes. An equal split (50/50)leaves your negligence equal to the other party’s rather than greater, so the claim survives, and the award is reduced by half.
No. State law bars seat belt use or nonuse from being submitted into evidence in a civil suit. An adjuster who discounts your claim on that basis relies on something a court would exclude.
A jury does so through a special verdict, assigning a percentage to each party. Until that point, every figure is a negotiating position rather than a decision.
Your share gets measured against the combined negligence of all responsible parties, not against each one individually. Each party then owes only the damages allocated to it.
Yes. The same proportional reduction applies, and the personal representative must bring the action within 2 years of the death.
No. The statutory cap on noneconomic damages was struck down as unconstitutional, so a jury may award what the evidence supports.
If an insurer has assigned you a share of the blame, that percentage is a position it must support with evidence. Our founding partners bring more than 75 years of combined litigation experience to injury claims, and we handle these matters from offices in Tulsa and Muskogee. We take injury cases on a contingency fee basis, so representation costs nothing up front.
Our attorneys examine how a fault percentage was calculated, what evidence supports it, and what the record actually shows. Where the number is wrong, we build the case for a different allocation and document the losses the reduction would touch.
A free case evaluation costs you nothing and puts that percentage in front of people who argue these questions for a living. Call our team at 918-582-6900 or reach us through our contact page to discuss how shared fault may affect what you can pursue.
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