I. The Calendar Question Came Before the Merits
On January 29, 2026, the Oklahoma Court of Civil Appeals decided Williams v. McFeeters and The Davey Tree Expert Co., 2026 OK CIV APP 9. The appeal arose from a negligence action following a 2019 vehicle collision. The plaintiff filed an initial petition in July 2021, voluntarily dismissed it without prejudice in 2023, and refiled within a year under 12 O.S. § 100. The defendants argued that the first petition had already missed the two-year negligence deadline, which would make the later refiling unavailable. The trial court dismissed the case. The Court of Civil Appeals reversed and remanded because it held that a sixty-one-day period covered by the Oklahoma courts’ COVID-19 emergency orders could not be counted against the limitations calculation. The opinion did not decide whether either defendant was negligent, whether the driver was acting within the scope of employment, or what injuries the plaintiff sustained. It resolved a threshold calendar question. That limited posture is the reason the decision matters: a case can be lost or preserved before any factfinder reaches fault, causation, or damages.
II. A Limitations Period Is a Calculation, Not a General Impression
For the negligence claim in Williams, the court identified the two-year period in 12 O.S. § 95(A)(3). An ordinary calculation would begin with the legally relevant event or accrual date, determine the governing period, and count forward according to applicable rules. The Court of Civil Appeals explained that, absent the emergency orders, the initial July 2021 petition would have fallen outside the ordinary two-year span identified in the opinion. But a deadline is not accurately calculated by looking only at the start date and a calendar anniversary. Statutory text, orders that affect time, the particular cause of action, the procedural position of the case, and any legally recognized suspension or extension may each change the answer. The work is exacting because the conclusion can turn on a handful of days. A lawyer who identifies the correct statute but omits a binding court order has not completed the calculation. Equally, a person who remembers that courts paused operations during the pandemic has not established that every deadline in every case was extended in the same way. Williams is useful precisely because it ties a specific limitations question to the operative language of the Oklahoma emergency orders and the prior interpretation of that language.
III. The Emergency Orders Took Time Off the Clock
The governing sequence began with emergency orders issued by the Oklahoma Supreme Court and Court of Criminal Appeals during the COVID-19 state of disaster. The earlier orders suspended deadlines and extended limitations periods in civil cases through May 15, 2020. The third order, identified in the opinion as Supreme Court Administrative Directive No. 2020-36 and published as Third Emergency Joint Order Regarding the COVID-19 State of Disaster, 2020 OK 23, made the method express. It said that the period from March 16 through May 15, 2020, during which rules, procedures, and deadlines were suspended, would be treated as a tolling period. May 16 would be the first day counted in determining the remaining time to act; the entire original time period was not renewed. Those details matter. The order did not announce a fresh limitations period beginning in May. It suspended the count during the identified interval and then resumed the count with whatever time remained. In Williams, the Court of Civil Appeals counted that interval as sixty-one days and held that it could not be charged against the plaintiff’s limitations period.
IV. McBee Supplied the Interpretive Framework
The Court of Civil Appeals did not treat the 2020 orders as a vague background event. It relied on McBee v. Shanahan Home Design, LLC, 2021 OK 60, where the Oklahoma Supreme Court considered the same third emergency order in the context of a deadline to complete service of process. McBee held that the order tolled the summons deadline and calculated the remaining days after the pause ended. It described the orders as treating all deadlines between March 16 and May 15 as tolled because of the emergency health crisis. Williams applied that reasoning to the two-year negligence limitation in section 95(A)(3). The difference in procedural setting is important. McBee involved service after a petition was filed; Williams involved the timeliness of the original petition itself. The later court’s holding was therefore not simply that one service deadline received extra time. It was that the same tolling period applied when calculating the negligence limitations period at issue in that appeal. Lawyers should read both decisions for their actual holdings and compare the case at hand to the deadline each one addresses.
V. A Refiled Case Depends on What Happened First
Section 100 appeared in Williams because the plaintiff had voluntarily dismissed the first action without prejudice and then filed another action within one year. The dispute was not resolved by looking at the second filing date alone. The defendants’ position was that the first petition had been untimely, meaning the saving provision could not preserve the refiled case. The Court of Civil Appeals disagreed after adding the tolling period to the initial calculation. This sequence carries a practical lesson without creating a shortcut: a later filing may depend on whether an earlier filing was timely, how it ended, and whether the statutory conditions for a new action are actually met. A notation that a case was “dismissed without prejudice” is not a universal answer. Neither is a date one year later. The prior petition, dismissal order, docket, service history, and applicable statute must be read together. Williams does not turn section 100 into an automatic second chance; it demonstrates why the first calendar must be reconstructed before anyone assumes the second calendar controls.
VI. Deadline Analysis Needs a Fact Record, Not a Memory
There is a human reason this issue arises. After a serious collision, a family may be managing treatment, employment disruption, insurance calls, repairs, and the immediate task of getting through the next week. A paper calendar is often not a litigation calendar. The date of an injury may be known, but later questions can involve when a claim accrued, which defendants are involved, whether a government entity has a separate notice requirement, whether a different statute applies to a medical or employment claim, whether a prior case was filed, and what court order governed the relevant period. The responsible practice is to obtain and preserve the actual documents: the crash report or incident materials, medical records needed to establish chronology, insurance correspondence, court dockets, filed petitions, dismissal orders, service returns, and orders affecting deadlines. The objective is not to manufacture a tolling argument. It is to calculate the real deadline from verified documents and controlling law. A missed date cannot be repaired by a better narrative. A timely case, however, should not be abandoned because an ordinary anniversary count ignored a binding rule that took time off the clock.
VII. The Holding Has Boundaries
Williams should be read with the same discipline the court used. Its holding concerns the 2020 emergency period in an Oklahoma negligence action governed by the limitation provision the court identified. It does not decide the merits of the underlying collision, prove employer responsibility, determine damages, or answer every deadline question that can arise in a personal-injury matter. The court reviewed a dismissal de novo and accepted the challenged pleading’s allegations and reasonable inferences for that procedural purpose. That standard is not a finding that the allegations will be proved. Nor should the decision be converted into a promise that any case connected to the pandemic receives the same calculation. A deadline can depend on the claim, the statute, the court, the procedural posture, and later authority. The safest statement of the rule is the Court of Civil Appeals’ own: the sixty-one days from March 16 through May 15, 2020 cannot be counted against the applicable statute of limitations under Oklahoma law in the circumstances it decided. Before relying on that rule in a live matter, counsel should verify the current text, later treatment, and the specific deadline at issue.
VIII. Precision Protects Both the Case and the Client
The durable lesson of Williams is not optimism about tolling. It is precision about time. A serious injury case requires a calendar that records the governing event, the claim being evaluated, the ordinary limitations period, any documented suspension, every filing, every dismissal, every service deadline, and every separate statutory notice or repose issue that could affect a right. The same discipline protects defendants from stale claims and protects injured people from losing valid claims through a calculation that is incomplete. In Williams, the Court of Civil Appeals reversed a dismissal because the sixty-one-day pause changed the initial filing analysis. The opinion did not lessen the importance of acting promptly; it shows why prompt, competent review matters before a deadline becomes an argument. This article provides general legal information, not legal advice or a prediction about any case. Hicks Law Firm evaluates Oklahoma injury matters from the actual record, applicable deadlines, parties, evidence, and governing law. Past results do not guarantee future outcomes.
If a serious injury may support a claim, preserve the incident records, medical chronology, insurance information, and any prior court papers while the timeline can still be verified. Contact Hicks Law Firm at (405) 759-0515 or through the contact page. Do not send confidential details until an attorney-client relationship has been established. Every matter depends on its own facts, defendants, records, and deadlines.