Polchinski & Smith LLP

Focus and practice areas

Injury claims make up the whole of the work at Polchinski & Smith LLP, an Oklahoma City firm that also trades under the name Polchinski & Smith Personal Injury Lawyers. The site lists car, truck and motorcycle crashes, bicycle and pedestrian collisions, slip and fall claims, workplace injuries handled through workers' compensation, and wrongful death. DUI crashes appear as a category of accident matter.

That set covers the main routes an Oklahoman takes into civil injury litigation. Traffic cases dominate the list, which matches the volume of such claims in a state built around highway travel. Premises claims and job injuries fill out the rest.

The firm says it handles matters for clients in Oklahoma City and elsewhere in the state, naming Tulsa, Norman, Edmond, Broken Arrow, Lawton, Stillwater, Moore and Enid. A single office covers that reach. In my opinion, the geographic list tells a prospective client something useful about how far the firm expects to travel for a case.

What a claimant meets first

Most Oklahoma injury claims start with an insurance adjuster rather than a courtroom. The adjuster opens a file, requests medical records and a recorded statement, and eventually puts a number on the claim. A lawyer's early work goes into collecting records, building the liability evidence, and judging whether the offer covers future treatment.

Oklahoma applies a modified comparative negligence rule. A claimant whose share of fault reaches or passes fifty percent recovers nothing, and any recovery below that line drops by the claimant's percentage. Fault apportionment therefore carries real money, and much of the argument in a crash case is about who did what in the seconds beforehand.

How the team is built

Three attorneys appear under the firm's attorney section: Andrew Polchinski, Houston M. Smith and Ryan Polchinski. Two of the three names sit in the firm's own title. The pages supplied to this directory carry no titles, law schools or admission dates for any of them.

A three-lawyer roster puts a small number of hands on each file. In practice that means the attorney who takes an initial call has a decent chance of being the one who later argues the claim value with the carrier. Client comments about Ryan Polchinski describe step-by-step explanations of what to do and when, which fits a firm at that size.

The firm registers as Polchinski & Smith LLP, and it markets under the longer consumer-facing name. Both appear on the site. The LLP form is the one that matters for service of process and for any court filing.

Contact practices the site describes

The firm offers free strategy sessions and says the office takes calls around the clock. Both are common in injury practice, where the useful window after a crash is short. Vehicles get repaired or scrapped, and surveillance footage from a nearby business often overwrites itself within days.

As a reviewer, I read the round-the-clock availability as a practical response to that timing problem. An injured person leaving an emergency room at two in the morning has questions that keep until business hours only in theory.

What the practice areas involve

Motor vehicle and pedestrian claims

Crash claims in Oklahoma run on police reports, medical records and the policy limits available. Oklahoma requires liability coverage of 25,000 dollars per person, an amount that a hospital stay can exhaust quickly. Uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage on the injured person's own policy often becomes the second source a lawyer pursues, and those claims are argued against the claimant's own insurer.

Pedestrian and bicycle cases raise the fault question sharply. Drivers routinely assert that a pedestrian left a crosswalk or that a cyclist rode outside a lane. Evidence in these files tends to come from intersection cameras and the physical damage pattern on the vehicle.

Slip and fall

Premises cases turn on notice. A claimant generally has to show the property owner knew about the hazard or should have found it through reasonable inspection. Store incident reports and cleaning logs carry that argument, and both have a habit of disappearing if nobody demands them early.

Oklahoma courts have also considered whether a hazard was open and obvious, a defense that shifts responsibility toward the person who walked into it. Photographs taken the same day tend to matter more than testimony given months later.

Workers' compensation

Oklahoma routes job injuries through an administrative system with its own commission. Benefits cover medical treatment and a portion of lost wages, and the employer's insurer generally controls the choice of treating physician. Disputes go before an administrative law judge.

Some workplace injuries also produce a claim against a party outside the employment relationship: a subcontractor on the same site, a driver who hit a delivery worker, a manufacturer of failed equipment. Those third-party claims proceed in district court alongside the compensation file. A firm that handles both, as this one says it does, can look at an injury from the two angles at once.

Wrongful death

Oklahoma's wrongful death statute directs the claim through a personal representative of the estate, with damages distributed among surviving spouse, children and next of kin under a statutory scheme. Probate steps therefore sit in front of the injury case. Grief compensation for a spouse and children has its own line in the statute, separate from lost financial support.

What the record shows

The firm states that it was formed to represent people injured by negligence, including those hurt in vehicle crashes and on the job. That purpose statement is the closest thing the site offers to a history. No founding year appears anywhere on the pages reviewed.

In 2025 the firm announced a 1,000 dollar scholarship for higher education students, aimed at those committed to protecting the rights of injured people. Scholarship programs of that size are a familiar piece of small-firm outreach. This one at least names a purpose consistent with the work the firm does.

One housekeeping detail deserves a mention for anyone using directory data. The visible about page gives Suite 510 at the firm's Northwest Expressway building, while the structured data embedded in the site gives Suite 710. This directory follows the visible page. A visitor should confirm the suite before turning up.

Public feedback

Comments from people the firm has represented cluster around two things: attention to the client's medical treatment and clear explanation of the steps ahead. One writer described an attorney pressing to make sure treatment the client was entitled to actually happened. Another described being walked through what to do and when representation would be needed.

Those observations concern how the firm handles a case while it is running, which is the more useful signal in an injury practice anyway. Case values depend on injuries and coverage limits that no lawyer controls. Communication is within a firm's control, and client remarks about this firm point consistently at it.

Reading the listing

Polchinski & Smith LLP presents a defined scope of work backed by named attorneys, and works a stated service area covering much of the state from one Oklahoma City office. The site names its people, which many firms of this size skip. The absence of biographical detail for those attorneys means a prospective client will need to ask about experience directly.

Anyone considering the firm has an obvious set of questions for that first conversation: who will handle the file day to day, and what the realistic timeline looks like for a claim in the client's category of injury. The free strategy session the firm offers is the place to put them.

My assessment: this is a small injury firm with a clearly bounded practice and a public roster. Oklahoma's comparative fault rule and low mandatory coverage limits give early legal involvement real value here. The suite number discrepancy is the one item on the site that needs correcting.