California Personal Injury Lawyer

What you actually have to prove

Almost every injury claim in California is a negligence claim, and negligence has four parts. Miss one and the claim fails, no matter how badly you were hurt.

1. Duty. The other person owed you a duty to act with reasonable care. Drivers owe it to everyone else on the road. Property owners owe it to people they allow onto their property. This part is rarely the fight.
2. Breach. They failed to use that care. They ran the light, they drove tired, they left a spill on the floor for an hour.
3. Causation. The breach is what caused your injury. This is where defense lawyers spend most of their energy, especially if you had a prior injury to the same body part or there is a gap between the crash and your first doctor visit.
4. Damages. You suffered real, provable harm: medical treatment, lost income, physical pain, a shoulder that no longer lifts over your head.

The standard of proof is a preponderance of the evidence, which means more likely than not. This is not a criminal case and nobody has to prove anything beyond a reasonable doubt. If the evidence tips even slightly in your favor on each element, you have carried your burden.

Being partly at fault does not end your claim

California is a pure comparative fault state. The California Supreme Court adopted that rule in Li v. Yellow Cab Co. in 1975, and it is one of the more claimant-friendly fault rules in the country. Your recovery is reduced by your own percentage of fault, but it is not wiped out by it.

A simple example. Your damages are assessed at $100,000, and a jury decides you were 30 percent responsible because you were speeding when the other driver turned left in front of you. You recover $70,000. In a state with a modified comparative fault rule, being more than half at fault would bar you completely. In California it does not. Even a claimant found 80 percent at fault recovers the remaining 20 percent.

The deadlines, and the one that surprises people

For most California personal injury claims you have two years from the date of the injury to file a lawsuit. That is Code of Civil Procedure section 335.1. Property damage, such as the repair bill on your car, gets three years under section 338. These are deadlines to file suit in court, not deadlines to notify an insurance company, and an open claim with an adjuster does nothing to stop the clock.

The deadline that catches people out is the one for claims against a government entity. If your injury involves a city bus, a county road, a public hospital, a school district, a pothole, a badly designed intersection, or a government employee driving on the job, you generally have only six months to file a written administrative claim with that entity under Government Code section 911.2. Miss that window and the court case is usually over before it starts.

• Most injury claims: two years from the date of injury (CCP 335.1).
• Property damage: three years (CCP 338).
• Against a public entity: six months for the administrative claim (Gov. Code 911.2), then generally six months to sue after a written rejection.
• Injured children: the two-year clock is tolled while the person is under 18 (CCP 352), so it typically runs from the 18th birthday. Claims against public entities and medical malpractice claims follow different rules.
• Medical malpractice: one year from discovery and no more than three years from the injury (CCP 340.5).

None of these are reasons to wait. Evidence disappears far faster than the deadline runs. Surveillance video gets overwritten in days, skid marks wash away, vehicles get repaired or sold, and witnesses change phone numbers.

What compensation actually covers

California sorts damages into two categories, plus a rare third.

Economic damages

The costs with a paper trail. Ambulance and emergency room charges, surgery, imaging, physical therapy, injections, prescriptions, assistive equipment, mileage to appointments, and the future care a doctor says you will need. Then the income side: wages you lost while out of work, paid time off you had to burn, and reduced earning capacity if you cannot return to the work you did before. A framer who can no longer climb a ladder has an earning capacity claim even if he eventually finds a desk job.

Non-economic damages

The harm that has no receipt. Physical pain, disrupted sleep, the anxiety that shows up at intersections, scarring, and the activities you have given up. California does not cap non-economic damages in ordinary negligence cases. There is also no formula for them, despite what the internet says about multipliers. Their value comes from how specifically they can be documented, which is why we ask clients what they have actually stopped doing rather than asking them to rate pain from one to ten.

Punitive damages

Rare, and not available for ordinary carelessness. Civil Code section 3294 requires clear and convincing evidence of oppression, fraud or malice, which in practice means conduct like a drunk driver with prior convictions, or a company that knew about a hazard and chose to leave it. Punitive damages are also generally not covered by insurance, which affects whether pursuing them actually puts money in a client's pocket.

How a case moves, start to finish

Most claims resolve without a trial. That is not a sign of a weak case; it is how civil litigation is designed to work. The path generally looks like this.

1. Intake and investigation. We obtain the police or incident report, identify every insurance policy that might apply, send preservation letters for video and vehicle data, and photograph the scene and the vehicles before anything changes.
2. Treatment. Nothing can be valued until your doctors know where you are going to end up. Pushing a case to settlement while you are still treating is the most common way claims get underpaid.
3. Demand. Once you reach a stable point, we assemble the records, bills, wage documentation and your own account of how this changed your life, and send a demand to the insurer.
4. Negotiation. Offers, counteroffers, and a decision point that is always yours to make.
5. Lawsuit. If the offer does not reflect the case, we file before the statute runs. Filing is not the same as going to trial; many cases settle once the insurer sees what discovery produces.
6. Discovery, depositions and expert work. Both sides get to look at everything. This is usually when a defense medical examination happens.
7. Mediation or arbitration, and trial if it still does not resolve.

What this costs you

We take injury cases on contingency. The attorney fee is a percentage of what is recovered, so if there is no recovery there is no attorney fee. Case costs are a separate category: filing fees, record charges, deposition transcripts, expert witnesses. We advance those while the case is open rather than billing you as they come up.

California requires all of this in writing. Business and Professions Code section 6147 says a contingency fee agreement must state the fee rate, explain how costs affect your recovery, and state that the rate is not set by law and is negotiable between you and the firm. Read that agreement, and ask what your net recovery looks like under a realistic settlement number before you sign. Any lawyer unwilling to walk you through that math is telling you something.

The things that quietly cost people money

• Giving a recorded statement to the other driver's insurer. You have no obligation to do it, and its purpose is not to help you.
• Gaps in treatment. If you stop going to appointments for six weeks, the defense will argue you recovered six weeks ago. If you cannot afford care or cannot get time off work, say so, so that it is documented.
• Posting on social media. A photo of you at a birthday party becomes proof you are fine, with no context about what you paid for it the next day.
• Accepting a fast offer before you know your diagnosis. The first offer frequently arrives before the MRI does.
• Signing a broad medical authorization. A blanket release hands over your entire medical history, not the records relevant to this injury.
• Assuming a minor-looking crash means a minor injury. Herniated discs and concussions do not care how much damage the bumper took.