California Personal Injury Attorneys

Business and Professions Code section 6147 sets the floor, and it is more specific than most people expect. The contract has to be in writing, signed by both the lawyer and the client, and you get a duplicate copy at the moment you sign. It has to state the agreed contingency rate. It has to explain how costs and disbursements will affect both that rate and what you take home. It has to spell out what else, if anything, you could be billed for outside the contingency work. And unless the case falls under section 6146, it has to say plainly that the fee is not set by law and is negotiable between attorney and client. Leave any of that out and section 6147 makes the agreement voidable at the client's option.

Under Code of Civil Procedure section 998, either side can serve a written offer to let judgment be taken on stated terms, up to 10 days before trial starts. It is not an ordinary settlement letter. Turn down a defendant's offer, go to trial and fail to beat it, and the cost rules in section 998 turn against you for everything after the offer date. The pressure runs the other way too. Civil Code section 3291 says that where the plaintiff makes the section 998 offer, the defendant does not accept it, and the plaintiff then obtains a more favorable judgment, the damages carry interest at 10 percent a year from the date of that offer. Section 998 was last amended by Senate Bill 577, effective January 2025.

It depends entirely on who you are suing, and getting that wrong ends claims. Code of Civil Procedure section 335.1 gives two years from the injury to sue for assault, battery, injury to a person, or a death caused by someone else's wrongful act or neglect. That is the deadline most people have heard of. Government Code section 911.2 is the one that catches people out. If the defendant is a public entity, a city, a county, a school district, a transit district, a state department, a written claim has to be presented within six months of the date the cause of action accrued, before any lawsuit exists at all. One year for most other causes of action. Work out who the defendant is first. The deadline follows from that.

Proposition 51 split them in two in 1986, and that split still governs. Civil Code section 1431.2 keeps economic damages joint and several, so objectively verifiable money losses, medical bills, loss of past and future earnings, burial costs, the cost of substitute domestic services, can be collected in full from any liable defendant. Non-economic damages work differently. For pain, suffering, inconvenience, mental suffering, disfigurement and loss of consortium, each defendant is severally liable only. The court allocates a percentage of fault to each one and enters a separate judgment against that defendant for that share. A defendant found twenty percent responsible pays twenty percent of the non-economic figure and no part of anyone else's.

In most cases it does. Civil Code section 3333.4, added by Proposition 213 in 1996, bars non-economic losses for pain, suffering, inconvenience, physical impairment and disfigurement in any action for damages arising out of the operation or use of a motor vehicle, where the injured person owned an uninsured vehicle involved in the crash or cannot establish the financial responsibility California law requires. The same bar applies to a driver convicted of an offense under Vehicle Code section 23152 or 23153. Economic losses survive untouched. Medical treatment, lost earnings and vehicle damage remain recoverable. Subdivision (c) also carves out an exception: an uninsured owner hurt by a motorist who is convicted of driving under the influence keeps the right to non-economic damages.

Three years, and the clock starts at filing rather than at the injury. Code of Civil Procedure section 583.210 says the summons and complaint shall be served on a defendant within three years after the action is commenced against that defendant, and an action is commenced when the complaint is filed. Proof of service then has to be filed within 60 days after the service deadline passes. People treat the two-year filing deadline in section 335.1 as the only date that matters. It is not. A complaint filed on time and then left unserved can still be dismissed. Where a defendant is hard to locate, the practical answer is to start skip tracing early rather than near the end of the three years.

Code of Civil Procedure section 377.60 lists them, and the list is narrower than most families assume. First in line are the surviving spouse, domestic partner, children and the issue of deceased children, or, where no issue survives, whoever would inherit by intestate succession. The decedent's personal representative can assert the claim on their behalf. A second group can sue if they were financially dependent on the decedent: a putative spouse, that spouse's children, stepchildren, parents, or the legal guardians where the parents have died. A minor also qualifies if they lived in the decedent's household for the 180 days before the death and depended on the decedent for at least half their support.

Clear and convincing evidence of oppression, fraud or malice. Civil Code section 3294 uses that standard, which sits above the ordinary preponderance test the rest of a negligence case runs on. The section defines its own terms. Malice covers conduct intended to injure the plaintiff, and also despicable conduct carried on with a willful and conscious disregard of the rights or safety of others. Oppression is despicable conduct subjecting someone to cruel and unjust hardship in conscious disregard of their rights. Ordinary carelessness does not reach either. Where the defendant is a company, subdivision (b) adds a second hurdle: the advance knowledge, authorization or ratification has to be on the part of an officer, director or managing agent.