A History Lesson – How To Become a Bike Lawyer…
The 1st shot below is from the Late 1980s – Pre-Dawn on the Saturday before Mother’s Day… getting ready to depart Columbus with 4 or 5,000 other early risers…
IYKYK
There I was – a young 30-something newbie lawyer in my Bike Nashbar shorts and big Bell helmet. Mesh gloves – Beta? brand cycling shoes. Riding a Schwinn Le Tour Luxe…
My riding buddy Terry was a high school classmate who was living Cincinnati at the time. Terry rode a LOT and was/is a STRONG rider- I was…not…
Terry had done TOSRV many times & put me in the loop for the process. Back then you had to ask them to send you the entry materials ahead of time. There was a magic date [in February maybe?] when they were mailed out. You had to open your mail, fill out the forms, write your check, stick everything in an envelope and mail it back THE SAME DAY or you most likely would get closed out! TOSRV in teh late 1980s was drawing 6-7000 riders!
Terry & I got in that year… he & I did some weekend riding together to prep for the 200-mile TOSRV weekend, including a very memorable long hilly ride from Cincinnati to Hueston Woods where I developed one of Magas’s Bike Rules to Live By… which is “Be WARY of any unfamiliar road that has the word “HILL” in the name…”
T & I got lost on our way north into Butler County and ended up on US 27, where you do NOT want to be on a bike – we were searching for a route on our [paper] map and saw that “Bunker Hill Road” was close &. was pretty much a straight shot parallel to 27 that should get us close to where we wanted to go- it started off nice enough but… whoa… Up we went – I’m sure, in retrospect, that it wasn’t THAT bad and I was just tired, but I vaguely recall teetering along at 6-7mph moving back and forth in a snaky S-pattern using my Granny Gear to climb up and up … whew…
TOSRV weather was good that year – mostly sunny & warm but a bit of a headwind both days- in early May in Ohio you never know what you’re going to get- sun, rain, hail, thunder… it even SNOWED on my birthday [5/21] one year while I was pitching in a high school baseball game… For TOSRV that year the 100 miles down to Portsmouth were pretty smooth- at one point we tucked in behind two dudes on a tandem who were MOVING … we called one Tree Trunks based on what we saw of his calves… The way back was tougher for me … I ran out of water 10-15 miles from the end and it was a hot headwind kind of day – I was drained at the end but felt really good that I did it-
I rode my bike all over as a kid – When I was about 5 we lived in Cleveland on a fairly quiet street off E. 185th. Dad got me a bike – I practiced with training wheels a bit & then he gave me a shove and off I went…down the street a short distance and then right into a tree! That tree isn’t there on Mohican Ave any more, so I drew it in for you…
Thankfully, I improved my bike handling. When we moved to Euclid, a Cleveland suburb, my brother and I both rode and Dad would lead us on sidewalk rides out of our neighborhood and out a few miles and back… what a BLAST of FREEDOM that was…
We didn’t have a lot of extra money to buy multiple cars so even at 16+ I rode a good bit – I had saved up my pennies [literally] and purchased a Schwinn Continental was I was 16 or so. [there is a 10,000 word essay on this purchase that I am working on] I rode that bike all over Mansfield, Ohio… I didn’t really need it [or have a place to store it] while I was in college from 1975-79- there was no riding around the very hilly UC campus – I used it a LOT during the summers though…
Around 1977 my best high school buddy, Jim Black, and I decided it would be cool to ride our bikes in freaking CANADA… The next few photos below are from this trip -we mapped out a route that had us take the Pelee Islander across Lake Erie and we spent several days hanging out on those Southern Canadian beaches… what a trip- I told the long version of this story to Jim’s family at his funeral in December…
I took my bike to law school and rode to classes from 1979-82, which saved on parking costs for sure at Ohio State! It was far quicker to ride a few miles & lock the bike next to the entrance than to drive a couple miles in heavy traffic and then fight to find parking and walk… I was getting to be very Bike-Oriented back then…
My old Schwinn Continental got stolen during my 3rd year of law school – by then I had bought my very first car- an orange Gremlin – and I didn’t replace the Bike for some years…
After law school I started my career by working with the Twelfth Appellate District of Ohio for the Honorable Judge Richard N. Koehler. I drove an hour or so to Middletown every day- put 36,000 miles on a new car. After my clerkship I found a job with a small suburban law firm on Cincinnati’s west side. Once I had my 1st “real” job at a law firm I decided to get back into cycling and bought a Puch road bike. I started riding with the Cincinnati Cycle Club in the early-mid1980s…
A short time into my Cycle Club experience I received the [paper] newsletter in the mail & there was a blurb from the Board…”HELP- We need a lawyer- we lost our corporate charter and need help getting it back!!!”
I was a trial lawyer, not a business lawyer, and I really didn’t know exactly what that meant, but I called in to help. Turns out the Club did not do the one thing all Non-profits have to do in Ohio… file a “Statement of Continuing Existence” which is a 1-page form you file with the state to, well, let the state know that your non-profit is still in existence… after 5 years of not filing the form, the State of Ohio canceled the CCC’s charter…
I called the Secretary of State’s office to see about getting it back..what do we have to do? Pay a fine? Fill out some forms? No, they said… the Cincinnati MOTORcycle Club was now out there & their name was too close to ours …soooo… if we wanted to be the Cincinnati CYCLE club we now had to get their permission to use our own name!
I did some digging … turns out the Cincinnati Motorcycle Club typically hung out at a bar in Cheviot called Stormy’s … it was just a few miles from my office and I drove by it every day. It was one of those prototypical Biker Bars…where the Harleys are lined up out front all day and night… there was a sign on the door that said NO COLORS…which seemed a bit, odd… but I learned that this mean no BIKER GANG colors were to be flown inside…
And that’s how Baby Lawyer Steve ended up stopping by Stormy’s in his new 3-piece blue wool suit and his shiny new briefcase one day for a meeting with the President of the Motorcycle gang…er…Club… I had the forms ready for his signature stating it was OK for us to keep our name… he gave me a hard time but signed … and that was that… The CCC had its name back- a name that was taken when the Club was founded back in ’80… that would be EIGHTEEN EIGHTY – 1880!
After this I started looking at some bicycle LAW issues… one club member had gotten a ticket for drunk driving on his BIKE… he hired me … but not to fight the ticket, he pleaded No Contest to that…rather he hired me because the State of Ohio had assessed SIX POINTS to his DRIVER’s license for an infraction on his bicycle…
That didn’t seem fair, but there wasn’t a lot, or any, law on this… I did some digging then filed a Motion with the trial judge asking for an order that would require the BMV to remove the points. The court agreed and signed the order. I served it on the BMV in Columbus and the points came off.
I wrote about this situation in the club newsletter and started writing a regular monthly column on bike law stuff – then got a few more calls, more about crashes and injuries… I handled a few cases – took a few to trial or arbitration – wrote a little more – then got a wrongful death case involving a young 15 yr old boy.
This was a tricky case. The boy had been riding with a younger buddy on a rural road. Our boy was to the left while his younger friend was riding on the white line. A car came up from behind that was driven by an older high school boy who recognized our client’s son from the football team…he came up fast and then HONKED the horn at the last minute, apparently because he thought it would be fun to try to scare the 2 younger boys… it worked – they moved to split up – the surviving boy went right, into the ditch, and our boy went left…where he was hit by the car and killed…
The driver wasn’t really all that forthcoming about the details to police as he was when we deposed him a few years later. A State Trooper investigating the crash took the bike and lined it up perpendicular to the car- he told Mom that the bike’s damage lined up perfectly with damage on the car and “therefore” he concluded that our boy was riding directly across the lane when he got hit, blaming the crash entirely on the dead boy… Mom didn’t think this seemed right – I forget how she ended up coming to me but several attorneys had turned her down…
By this time I had written a good bit about bike law and bike crash cases – I had handled quite a few injury cases and was now well versed on the Bike law. I had tried some cases to verdict, but never a death case. I hired an expert, a bicycle crash reconstruction expert from North Carolina. He was an Ironman rider and engineer who specialized then, and now, in reconstructing bicycle crash cases. He took one look at the rear wheel and concluded the boy had been struck from behind – the bike had been at a slight angle to the front of the car and at impact it had slapped around very quickly due to the high speed of the car – and that impact had left those marks on the hood and the bike which the State Trooper saw… and misinterpreted.
On cross examination at trial, the State Trooper actually conceded that our expert was probably right… that was about as close to a Perry Mason moment as I’ve gotten during cross examination in the middle of a trial – shortly after, 2+ weeks into the trial, we got the case settled… from there I’ve gone on to handle 100s of bike crash cases ranging from mild to wild -» slight injuries to brain damage and death cases … but those early decisions to buy a bike and start riding as a baby lawyer and to help out the cycle club and to start writing about bike stuff was the beginning of the Turning Point in my Bike Law career…
By the time Terry & I were riding TOSRV in the late 1980s I was pretty well established in the Bicycle Law community – a couple years later, in January 1992, I bought my very first computer [356 SX with a HUGE 100MB hard drive] from an ad in Computer Shopper, the yellow pages of computer shopping – I signed on to AOL and had to pick a screen name/email address…I picked “BikeLawyer@aol.com” and it was ON… that would be MY internet moniker until I switched to BikeLawyer@ME.com and finally Steve@OhioBikeLawyer.com in 2024.
I started sending my monthly Bike Law 101 columns to other cycling clubs around the state. Eventually I was asked to write for BIKE OHIO, a monthly newspaper type publication that was in every bike shop in the state. My Column eventually got picked up by BIKE USA, the LAW’s national publication. I wrote every other month for BIKE USA and also for Adventure Cycling’s annual Yellow Pages –
Oddly enough AOL turned out to be a big cycling collaborator as the AOL Bike rooms were extremely active! There was, and IS today, a large segment of the “serious” cycling community that is very tech and computer savvy. I made a lot of connections to other riders, lawyers and experts from around the country during those early computer days of waiting for a 2400 baud modem to connect… I wrote about one situation where a high school kid in California wrote an anti-cycling piece in the school newspaper which circulated through the BIKE room because teh Dad of another kid at the school had seen it. Within a day or so the school received emails and letters from all over the WORLD chastising it for publishing such trash… It was an early lesson on the Power of the InterWebs!!
Eventually I was asked to contribute to a couple of Bike Law books. In 2006 or so I contributed multiple chapters to Bob Mionske’s book “Bicycle Law & Practice” – this book remains, to me, the VERY BEST bike law book available for riders and lawyers alike! I’m trying to talk Bob into publishing a new edition… the Forward by Lance didn’t…age … well…
I worked for a few different firms along my legal career path- a small suburban firm – a statewide “Back of the Yellow Pages” aggressive Plaintiff’s firm – in-house trial counsel for an insurance company – insurance defense lawyer for an aggressive insurance defense law firm. All the while I kept quietly working on the bike cases…
In the early 2000s I got more involved with LAW, which then became LAB, and I attended a few National Bike Summits in DC. These are fascinating events when cyclists from all over the USA show up in DC wearing our Bike pins and descending on Capitol Hill to TALK BIKE with national legislators. I HIGHLY recommend attending if you can!
Finally, in 2009, after I had been practicing for some 37 years, and had been handling bike cases every year for about 30, I opened my own Solo office. I had my own website – www.OhioBikeLawyer.com – and focused on the 2 wheeled stuff almost exclusively … it has morphed into a Solo/Virtual office these days. We maintain an office presence for meetings but 90% of thew work can be done via Zoom and the InterBlogs. I STILL love getting out and meeting folks though… this past week I spoke at a Bike Swap Meet up in Columbus… they had some 300+ people attend… what a BLAST!
I have continued writing but also started speaking to LAWYERS and JUDGES a decade ago or so- I developed my own bike seminar which I call BIKE LAW 101 – I’ve given this class in Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Cincinnati and over the INterWeb & into ZOOM Land… it has morphed into a 3 hour class that is STILL not quite long enough… we are adding some new stuff this year based on a couple cases we worked on over the past few years… using GPS/Garmin data to develop a recreation of a crash – tapping into Phone data- Security footage- Ring Doorbell cams – city cameras- anything to PROVE what happened…
Today about 85% of my work is BIKE cases all over the state. I’ve been called in to help on cases in Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania as well as locally in Kentucky and Indiana. While we do other types of cases – legal malpractice, typical car crash stuff, general litigation – our bread and butter is representing CYCLISTS – protecting the rights of those who ride –
I’ve done over 500 bike crash cases – right now we have bike cases percolating in something like a dozen different counties in Ohio – from Toledo to Cleveland to Youngstown to Mansfield to Columbus to Cincinnati to Bellefontaine to Marietta… we been to more than 40 of Ohio’s 88 counties on bike cases… and it is the most rewarding work I’ve done!
So there you go -from getting pushed at age 5 in Cleveland to riding around Mansfield as a kid – to bike touring in College – riding for transportation throughout law school – riding TOSRV as a young professional – and riding for LIFE today… my life has revolved around [oh I see what you did there] cycling…
Ride LEGAL – Ride Safe – and RIDE THE BIKE!
© 2025.
