Craig E. Johnson
Attorney at Law · Bakersfield, California · Admitted 1989
More than thirty-five years on the same side of the courtroom.
There are lawyers who handle personal injury cases among other things. Craig Johnson has handled personal injury cases and nothing else for more than three decades, in the same city, for the same kind of client.
He was born and raised in Southern California. Before law school he served a church mission in Ecuador, where he learned the Spanish he still uses with clients every week — the detail those clients most often mention when they refer someone. He earned his law degree at the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University in 1988, passed the California Bar the same year, and was admitted to practice in 1989.
Learning the defense side first
His career began at Borton, Petrini & Conron in Bakersfield — a firm founded in 1899 and among the oldest in California. The work was heavy: large-loss oil and gas matters, energy litigation, and mass casualty claims. It was an unusual place for a young lawyer to start, and it turned out to be the most useful training available.
He spent three years watching how the other side prepares a file — how an insurer values a claim, where it looks for weakness, what it takes seriously, and what it quietly ignores. Every negotiation he has run since has been informed by having sat in that chair.
His own practice, since 1992
In 1992 he opened the Law Offices of Craig E. Johnson and narrowed his work to a single field: representing people who were injured by someone else's negligence. He has stayed there ever since. Thousands of claims have come through in the years since — car and motorcycle collisions, falls, dog attacks, unsafe property, and the wrongful death cases that are hardest on everyone involved.
The practice has stayed deliberately small. When you call, the lawyer who evaluates your case is the lawyer who negotiates it, and the one who would try it.
How he works
Colleagues describe him first as a negotiator. That reputation is earned less by charm than by preparation and by a settled willingness to say no. Adjusters learn quickly that a low offer will not end the conversation and that he is comfortable filing suit, taking depositions, and putting the case in front of a jury. Competitive by temperament, he does not treat a case as resolved simply because resolving it would be easier.
The other half of the job is the part clients feel: being told the truth about the case, in their own language, by someone who has seen this before and is not guessing.
A life built in the same city
He started here when a complaint was filed by driving downtown, walking the papers into the clerk's office, and waiting while they were stamped. He has practiced through the arrival of every piece of technology that changed how this is done, and through the recessions and the pandemic that changed how a case gets tried. None of it moved him out of Bakersfield.
In those same decades he raised five children in this city and became a grandfather. Away from work he plays pickleball and follows BYU sports. It is the same disposition either way: a claim worth having is rarely a claim resolved quickly, and the client is owed someone who will still be here when it is.
Of counsel
Craig also works with Stephen B. Austin, admitted to the California Bar in 1974 — fifteen years before Craig Johnson, and more than half a century of California practice. Between them the two attorneys have held bar licenses for eighty-nine years.
Meet both attorneys →Bring the case to someone who has seen it before.
There is no charge for the first conversation, and no fee unless we recover.