A serious injury can affect nearly every part of your life. Medical treatment, time away from work, mounting expenses, and pressure from insurance companies can begin almost immediately. A personal injury claim is about establishing who was responsible, documenting the full impact of the injury, and pursuing fair compensation for what you have lost.
Margossian Law represents injured people across California at every stage of that work: investigating what happened, preserving evidence before it degrades, documenting the medical and financial consequences, negotiating with the insurer, and filing suit where a claim will not resolve without it.
Matters the Firm Handles
Personal injury covers any harm caused by another party’s failure to act with reasonable care. The most common circumstances are:
- Vehicle collisions: cars, trucks, motorcycles, bicycles, pedestrians, and rideshare vehicles
- Rear-end collisions and hit and run accidents, including uninsured motorist claims
- Unsafe property, including slip, trip, and fall injuries and inadequate building security
- Dog bites and animal attacks
- Burn injuries, spinal injuries, and traumatic brain injury
- Catastrophic injuries with long-term care and lost earning capacity
- Wrongful death claims brought by surviving family members
What You Have to Prove
A California negligence claim has four parts, and all four have to hold. The other party owed you a duty of reasonable care. They breached that duty. The breach caused your injury. And the injury produced losses the law recognizes.
Most disputes are not really about the first two. They are about causation and value: whether the collision caused this particular disc herniation, or whether the treatment was reasonable and necessary. That is why medical documentation, gathered early and consistently, tends to matter more to the outcome than the accident report does.
Being Partly at Fault Does Not End Your Claim
California follows pure comparative negligence. If you are found partly responsible, your recovery is reduced by your percentage of fault, but it is not eliminated, even at a high percentage. A driver found 30 percent at fault can still recover 70 percent of their damages.
This matters because insurers routinely raise partial fault early, sometimes to discourage a claim entirely. Being partly to blame is a reason to get advice, not a reason to walk away.
What a Claim Can Recover
California recognizes both economic losses, which have receipts, and non-economic losses, which do not:
- Medical treatment already received and treatment reasonably expected in future
- Lost income, and reduced ability to earn a living going forward
- Property damaged in the incident
- Pain, suffering, disfigurement, and loss of enjoyment of life
- Loss of consortium, claimed by a spouse or domestic partner
Deadlines Are Shorter Than Most People Expect
The general deadline to file a personal injury lawsuit in California is two years from the date of injury. There are meaningful exceptions in both directions, and one in particular catches people out: a claim against a city, county, the state, or another public entity generally requires a written claim within six months, long before the two-year window closes.
Missing the applicable deadline usually ends the claim regardless of its merits. If any part of your situation might involve a government entity, a public transit vehicle, or a road maintained by a public agency, it is worth confirming which deadline applies early rather than late.
6 months
To present a claim against a public entity
2 years
To file suit in most other cases