A rear-end crash that leaves someone sore for two weeks and a T-bone that leaves someone with a brain injury no early scan picked up are both car accidents. Lay the medical records, the insurance policy and the question of fault side by side, and they have almost nothing in common. That gap is what this book is about.
Before I represented injured people, I spent about six years at a civil litigation firm. A lot of it was business suing business, and part of it was insurance coverage work: reading policies, figuring out where and when they applied, and working out what the insurance company was obligated to do. That background shapes how I explain a claim. An insurance company is a business with a process, and once you understand the process, the rules, the deadlines and the incentives on every side, a claim stops feeling like a mystery.
This book is built from the episodes of Personal Injury Law Uncovered, and I think of it as the conversation I would have with you at a first meeting, laid out so you can turn to the part that matches what happened to you. The first five chapters apply to nearly every claim, the next six take one kind of case at a time, and the last walks through a car accident claim step by step.
My firm handles cases from offices in San Diego, Encinitas, Costa Mesa, La Mesa, Oceanside, Victorville and La Quinta, and the rules in these pages are California rules. Where I use a legal term, I explain it. Where the answer depends on the facts, I say so, because a confident answer that turns out to be wrong for your case is worse than no answer at all.
None of this is meant to make anyone feel behind for not knowing it. Nobody learns how coverage and medical records fit together until they need to. Nothing here is legal advice for your situation. If something in these pages sounds like what happened to you, the next step is a conversation with a lawyer who will look at your records and your policy and walk you through where you stand.