Personal Injury attorneys in Los Angeles

About Personal Injury matters in Los Angeles

Personal injury covers claims where someone else's carelessness caused you physical harm — traffic collisions, falls on badly maintained property, dog bites, defective products. The legal question is rarely whether you were hurt. It is whether the other side owed you a duty of care, whether they fell short of it, and whether that failure is what caused the specific injury you are claiming.

California runs on comparative fault, which means a claim is not defeated because you were partly responsible. Your share of the blame reduces what you recover rather than eliminating it. That is why insurers invest so much effort in establishing that you contributed — a percentage argued in the first weeks can be worth more than anything argued later.

Deadlines are the single most common way a good claim dies. Most California personal injury claims run on a two-year limitation period from the date of injury, but claims against a city, county or other public entity require a formal claim to be presented far sooner than that. If a government vehicle, a public road or a public building is involved, treat the timetable as urgent rather than ordinary.

Almost all Los Angeles personal injury firms work on contingency, so the consultation itself costs nothing. What varies between firms is the percentage, whether it rises if the case is filed or goes to trial, and how case costs — experts, records, filing fees — are handled if the claim does not succeed. Those terms are in the retainer, and they are worth reading before you sign.