Personal Injury Lawyers in Conway, SC

Conway has been the seat of Horry County government since 1801, and the courthouse downtown still draws the county’s legal business into a town that has otherwise reinvented itself twice over. First came the timber and tobacco trade that built the brick storefronts still standing along Main Street, and more recently Coastal Carolina University, whose enrollment growth has pulled thousands of students and employees into a city of roughly 27,000 people. The Waccamaw River curls along downtown’s eastern edge, where a wooden Riverwalk connects the historic district to newer development, while the western and southern parts of the city have filled in with the subdivisions and strip retail that come with steady population growth.

Highway 501 and the Sixteenth Avenue Bottleneck

Highway 501 is Conway’s connection to Myrtle Beach and the Grand Strand, and the stretch running from Carolina Forest Boulevard through Conway to Lake Busbee has been singled out by transportation officials as a crash corridor, with rear-end and head-on collisions common during the heavy seasonal traffic that builds every spring and summer. Within that stretch, the intersection of US 501 and Sixteenth Avenue has recorded more crashes than any other location in the city — a problem tied largely to vehicles turning east off Sixteenth Avenue and merging directly into the southbound lane, made worse by a curve in the roadway just south of the intersection that limits how far ahead drivers can see. SC-544, known locally as Dick Pond Road, brings a steady stream of commuter traffic in from Socastee, and Church Street through the historic downtown carries far more daily traffic than its narrow, decades-old layout was designed to handle.

The 51% Bar: A Little Fault Is Fine, Too Much Is Fatal

South Carolina courts apply modified comparative negligence, a rule the state Supreme Court laid out in Nelson v. Concrete Supply Co. Under it, a Conway claimant found 30% at fault for a $100,000 loss still collects $70,000. Push that number to 51%, though, and the claimant collects nothing at all, regardless of how serious the injury or how careless the other driver was. Congested merge points like the Sixteenth Avenue interchange are exactly where insurers look to build that kind of fault argument, since a single contested lane change can become the entire case.

Three Years to Sue, Sooner if the County or SCDOT Is Involved

S.C. Code Ann. § 15-3-530(5) gives most Conway claimants three years from the date of injury to file suit. That deadline moves up sharply, though, when a government entity caused the harm — a Horry County vehicle, a defective SCDOT signal on Highway 501, or a hazard on a city-maintained stretch of Church Street. The South Carolina Tort Claims Act requires a written notice of claim well inside the three-year window in those cases, and skipping that step can end a claim long before the general deadline would otherwise matter.

Insurance Minimums Against Seasonal Traffic

• 25/50/25 is the statewide floor. S.C. Code Ann. § 38-77-140 requires $25,000 per person and $50,000 per accident in bodily injury coverage, plus $25,000 in property damage coverage — limits that a serious wreck on the Highway 501 corridor can exceed without much trouble.
• Uninsured motorist coverage is automatic. Every South Carolina policy includes UM coverage at those same minimum limits, often the real source of recovery when the at-fault driver carries no insurance.
• Underinsured motorist coverage has to be purchased separately. Drivers who want protection against a driver whose limits fall short of a serious injury need to add UIM coverage to their own policy before a crash happens.

Where a Conway Case Gets Filed

As the Horry County seat, Conway hosts the county courthouse itself, and most civil injury claims proceed through the Court of Common Pleas there, part of South Carolina’s Fifteenth Judicial Circuit alongside Georgetown County. Cases that qualify for federal jurisdiction instead fall within the Florence Division of the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina.

Finding the Right Lawyer in Conway

The Lawyer Atlas is a directory, not a law firm, and nothing on this page is legal advice about a specific situation. Look for a Conway attorney who knows the Sixteenth Avenue merge and the rest of the Highway 501 corridor well enough to reconstruct a disputed lane change, who moves fast on a Tort Claims Act notice when the county or SCDOT is involved, and who takes South Carolina’s 51% fault bar seriously from the first phone call. Most Conway personal injury lawyers offer a free consultation and work on contingency, so getting that first assessment costs nothing.