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Updated 2025. By Jared J. Pehrson | Impact Legal Car Accident Attorneys.
If you were hurt in a Tempe car accident, you have two immediate problems: your injuries, and the insurance company that already wants a recorded statement. This page walks you through Arizona law that applies to your claim, the roads and intersections where Tempe crashes actually happen, and how our team handles cases from investigation through trial when needed. Attorney Jared J. Pehrson handles Tempe cases personally, on a contingency-fee basis (no attorney’s fees unless we recover).
Free case review: (602) 345-1818 or contact us online.
Tempe packs a major research university, two major freeways, a dense entertainment district, and a light rail line into about 40 square miles. That mix produces a specific and predictable pattern of crashes.
The Loop 202 Red Mountain Freeway runs along Tempe’s northern and eastern edges, connecting Mesa, Scottsdale, and the East Valley. Interstate 10 cuts through south Tempe as the primary east-west route to Phoenix and Tucson. Where they meet, at the I-10 Broadway Curve, you get a crash-prone stretches of highway in Arizona. ADOT crash data consistently shows Maricopa County accounts for the majority of Arizona’s roughly 120,000 annual reported crashes, and the Broadway Curve is a repeat contributor. Rear-end collisions and multi-vehicle pileups happen daily in stop-and-go rush-hour traffic.
Arizona State University’s Tempe campus enrolls more than 80,000 students. The streets around campus, University Drive, Apache Boulevard, Rural Road, and Mill Avenue, carry a mix that most Phoenix-area roads don’t: cars, buses, bikes, e-scooters, and heavy pedestrian traffic all competing for the same intersections. Class-change hours produce spikes of conflict points, and distracted driving near campus is a documented contributor to collisions each semester.
Sun Devil Stadium football games funnel tens of thousands of fans into Tempe over a few hours. Add Ironman Arizona, the Tempe Festival of the Arts, Fourth of July at Tempe Town Lake, and the concert and bar traffic on Mill Avenue, and you get repeated windows of gridlock plus a higher-than-normal share of impaired drivers.
Valley Metro light rail expansion, road-widening projects, and new development along Apache Boulevard and University Drive mean lanes shift, detours change, and unfamiliar drivers get confused. The light rail tracks themselves add a hazard: illegal turns across tracks and failure to yield to trains cause preventable crashes every year.
A few spots come up over and over in crash data:
Our team handles the full range of collisions Tempe produces. The most common patterns:
If your crash involved a commercial truck or a motorcycle, we handle those too: Phoenix truck accidents and Phoenix motorcycle accidents.
Tempe crashes run from parking-lot fender-benders to high-speed freeway wrecks. The injuries we see most often:
Many Tempe accident victims receive initial treatment at Tempe St. Luke’s Medical Center (part of the Abrazo health system). Emergency care stabilizes patients, but real recovery, physical therapy, orthopedic follow-up, neurology, often runs for months or years. We document current and future treatment costs when building the claim.
Three statutes drive most Tempe car accident claims: the filing deadline, the fault rule, and the state’s minimum insurance requirements.
Under A.R.S. § 12-542, you have two years from the date of the accident to file a personal injury lawsuit in Arizona. Miss it and the court will dismiss the case. Two years sounds like a lot until you factor in the time needed to complete medical treatment, gather records, preserve evidence, and negotiate with the insurer. See our full explainer on Arizona’s two-year filing deadline.
Special rule for government defendants. If your crash involved a City of Tempe vehicle, an ASU vehicle (ASU is a state entity), or a road-condition claim against a public entity, A.R.S. § 12-821.01 requires a notice of claim within 180 days of the incident. That deadline is much shorter than the two-year statute, and missing it typically bars the claim entirely.
Arizona reduces damages in proportion to the claimant’s percentage of fault. That’s what A.R.S. § 12-2505 means in plain English. If you share some responsibility for the crash, you can still recover, but your recovery is reduced by whatever percentage of fault is assigned to you.
The math: Total damages × (100% minus your fault percentage) = recovery.
Example: your total damages come to $100,000 and a jury assigns you 30% of the fault. Your recovery is $70,000. Assign you 20% and your recovery is $80,000.
This matters because insurance adjusters try to push the plaintiff’s fault percentage up. Every point of fault they can shift to you comes straight off your recovery. Our full walkthrough is here: Arizona’s comparative negligence rule.
For policies issued or renewed on or after July 1, 2020, Arizona’s minimum liability limits are 25/50/15:
Those are the floors under A.R.S. § 28-4009. Plenty of drivers carry only the minimums, which is why serious-injury cases so often run into insufficient-coverage problems and shift to UM/UIM (below).
This is the question most people don’t think to ask until it matters. Under A.R.S. § 20-259.01, Arizona insurers must offer uninsured motorist (UM) and underinsured motorist (UIM) coverage. Consumers can reject it, but the rejection has to be in writing. Many Arizona drivers carry UM/UIM without remembering they do.
Uninsured motorist (UM) applies when the at-fault driver has no insurance or is a hit-and-run.
Underinsured motorist (UIM) applies when the at-fault driver’s coverage exists but isn’t enough to cover your damages. If the other driver carried the 25/50/15 minimum and your medical bills alone are $80,000, UIM fills the gap up to your policy limit.
We review your own auto policy on every case to identify UM/UIM, med-pay, and any stacking options across household vehicles. It’s routine for a case to have more available coverage than the client initially realizes.
Arizona law lets accident victims recover the full range of losses caused by another party’s negligence. Categories:
Economic damages are the quantifiable financial losses: medical bills (past and future), lost wages, loss of earning capacity, property damage, out-of-pocket costs. These get documented with records, invoices, and expert opinion where future care or lost earnings are involved.
Non-economic damages cover pain and suffering, emotional distress, loss of enjoyment of life, and similar harm. Here’s what most people don’t realize: the Arizona Constitution (Art. II § 31 and Art. XVIII § 6) prohibits statutory caps on damages for personal injury or wrongful death. Arizona is unusual in this respect. Many states cap non-economic damages by statute; Arizona’s constitution takes that option off the table for the legislature.
Punitive damages are separate from economic and non-economic damages and are only available in specific situations: DUI accidents, road rage, intentional misconduct, and gross negligence. They’re not on the table in a routine negligence case.
What your specific claim is worth depends on injury severity, treatment history, liability proof, available insurance, and how well the damages are documented. Our pain and suffering framework page walks through the factors.
What you do in the first few hours and days affects the case for the next two years. In order:
Honest answer: it depends on when you finish medical treatment and how hard the insurer fights.
A minor soft-tissue case with clean liability and a cooperative adjuster can wrap in 3 to 6 months from the date treatment concludes. A serious-injury case, especially one involving surgery, future care, or contested liability, more commonly takes 12 to 24 months. If the case has to be filed in Maricopa County Superior Court because the insurer will not offer fair value, add roughly another 12 to 18 months from filing to trial or trial-eve settlement.
Two rules of thumb worth knowing:
When you hire our team, Jared handles your case personally. That’s the whole point of the firm. Our process:
You talk directly to Jared throughout. Not an intake person, not a case manager.
Two years from the date of the accident under A.R.S. § 12-542. Property damage claims also carry a two-year deadline. If a government entity is involved (City of Tempe, ASU as a state entity, road-condition claim), a 180-day notice of claim is required under A.R.S. § 12-821.01. That government deadline is easy to miss and hard to save.
You can still recover. Arizona reduces damages in proportion to your percentage of fault under A.R.S. § 12-2505. If your total damages are $100,000 and you’re assigned 30% of the fault, your recovery is $70,000. Insurers push hard to inflate the plaintiff’s fault percentage because every point comes off the recovery. We push back with the evidence.
Yes, and same day if possible. Adrenaline masks pain for hours. Concussions, internal bleeding, and disc injuries often show up 24 to 72 hours later. A same-day medical record creates a documented link between the crash and the injury. A gap of days or weeks between the crash and first treatment is the single most common argument insurers use to devalue a claim.
No. You are generally not required to give a recorded statement to the other driver’s insurer. They are not on your side, and adjusters are trained to ask questions that produce quotes they can use against you later. You should talk to an attorney before agreeing to any interview or statement. Your own insurer is a different question, most policies contain a cooperation clause, and the scope of what you have to provide depends on the specific policy language.
Rideshare cases are more complex than typical crashes because coverage depends on the driver’s status at the moment of the collision: app off, app on but no passenger, en route to pickup, or carrying a passenger. Uber and Lyft both carry commercial policies (up to $1 million in liability) that apply during active rides. Our Uber accident and Lyft accident pages walk through the coverage layers.
ASU is an Arizona state entity, which changes two things. First, if the claim is against ASU (an ASU-owned vehicle, an ASU employee acting in the course of employment, or a property-condition claim on campus), you must file a notice of claim within 180 days under A.R.S. § 12-821.01. Second, sovereign immunity and public-entity procedural rules apply. If the at-fault party is another private driver who happened to be on campus, it’s a standard claim against that driver’s insurance.
Often, yes. Under A.R.S. § 20-259.01, Arizona insurers must offer UM/UIM coverage. If you didn’t reject it in writing, you likely have it. UM applies when the at-fault driver has no insurance (including hit-and-runs). UIM applies when their coverage is not enough to cover your damages. We review your own policy on every case to identify UM/UIM and any other applicable coverage.
Almost never without a lawyer reviewing it first. First offers are structured to close the file cheaply and quickly, usually before you know the full cost of your medical care and often before treatment is complete. Once you sign a release, the claim is done, you cannot reopen it if your injury turns out to be worse than it looked at week two. Let us review any offer before you respond.
If you were hurt in a car accident in Tempe, on I-10, Loop 202, Mill Avenue, University Drive, Baseline Road, or anywhere else in the city, we are ready to help. Free case review, no attorney’s fees unless we recover. You talk to Jared, not a call center.
Free case review: (602) 345-1818 or contact us online.
Serving Tempe and the Phoenix metro, including Phoenix, Scottsdale, Mesa, Chandler, and Gilbert.
By Jared J. Pehrson | Impact Legal Car Accident Attorneys
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