How to File a Car Accident Claim in California, and the Mistakes That Cost People Their Case

Most of what goes wrong in a car accident claim happens before anyone thinks of it as a claim. It happens in the first hours and weeks: in a phone call that felt friendly, in a doctor's visit where someone admitted they were confused about what happened, in a few months of resting at home hoping the pain would pass. Each of those is what a reasonable person does without knowing how the pieces connect later on.

This chapter goes through the first steps in order: what to capture at the scene, what the emergency room can and can't see, who to talk to and who to hold off on, how an insurer approaches a claim, and the California deadlines that apply. The general advice about what to do after an accident is easy to find. What's here is the part I see people miss, and why each piece matters months later, when the claim is being priced.

If you're badly hurt, call an ambulance and let everything else wait. If you're able to document the scene, the first thing to get is the other driver's insurance information. We see this go wrong a lot. People forget to ask, or the other driver leaves, or flees. When that happens, a photo of the license plate is what I want more than anything else, because with a plate we can track down who it is.

So when you photograph the vehicles, get the plates in the shots. A photo of the plate makes it very hard for a driver to take off and later claim they weren't involved.

Everything else at the scene can wait, including the arguments about who was at fault and any call to an insurance company. Talk to a lawyer before you talk to any insurer.

Go to an emergency room, or at least an urgent care, then follow up with your primary care doctor and don't wait. Being told to go home and rest is not being told to stop seeing doctors. An ER is built to catch emergencies like a bleed or a fracture, not every injury that surfaces later; Chapter 3 explains the rest and how treatment gaps are read.

Be careful, too, with what goes into the chart. A doctor asks how the accident happened, and a shaken-up patient answers, "I was in a car accident, but I don't really remember how it happened." The insurance company can later use that sentence to suggest you ran the red light. And if you're still in pain, say so at every visit.

Many people assume their own insurer is there to help them. Often it has money at stake too. If you carry uninsured or underinsured motorist coverage, UM/UIM, your own insurance company may be on the hook for some amount, which gives it some of the same incentives as the other driver's insurer not to pay. You can be on what looks like the same team and not be. The only thing you need to do with your own company before you have a lawyer is report the claim and report that you were injured.

The calls will come anyway. An adjuster will be as friendly as possible, want to make sure you're okay, and ask you to stay in touch. Those calls exist to gather information, and you can let them go to voicemail. Something as ordinary as saying your back is a little sore but you're fine gets recorded, and a year later the part that matters to the other side is "I'm okay," set beside your claim that you were injured.

Treatment updates are another place claims get lost. Someone calls an insurer, mentions they're going to physical therapy, and hears that the company will pay for all of it if they just sign a piece of paper. Then they've signed their claim away. Or the insurer says it will cover all the medical bills, and when the bills arrive, it doesn't want to pay all of them. Once the scene is documented, your job is to get treatment and do everything you can to get better. The bills and the updates are the lawyer's job.

An insurer evaluating a claim looks for reasons to offer less or to deny it. Fault is the first: in a head-on collision, if they can say you were over the double yellow, the offer may be zero, however serious the injuries. Gaps in treatment are the most common reason, and they're why I keep returning to follow-up care. Delay is another. If a company expects to pay eventually but can stretch a case out for three years, the money sits in an account earning interest in the meantime, and some people get frustrated enough to settle for less. Even simple rear-end cases that should be paid promptly end up in litigation, and some reach trial. None of this requires a villain. It's the economics of the business, and because it's predictable, it can be planned for.

Settling early is the one mistake that can't be fixed later. "I just wanna get this over with" is a feeling I understand completely. But if you settle before anyone knows whether you'll need a specialist, imaging or surgery a year from now, we're shooting in the dark, and the claim is much more likely to be undervalued, by the insurance company and sometimes by the injured person too.

A claim's value follows the treatment more than the property damage, as Chapter 2 explains.

For a standard California injury claim, such as a normal auto accident, the statute of limitations is two years (California Code of Civil Procedure section 335.1). When a government vehicle is involved, the first deadline is much shorter. If a Caltrans truck or a city vehicle hits you, a claim generally has to be presented to the public entity within six months (Government Code section 911.2), and if nothing is done in that window, you can lose the claim. The same short window applies when someone is hurt on public property, such as a city sidewalk or a government building, which Chapter 9 covers.

I see what happens when people don't know this. Someone gets hurt, treated for seven, eight or nine months, decides they're injured badly enough to pursue a claim, and learns the six-month window has closed and the government claim may be lost. A person can be left with a lifelong injury and no compensation for it, only because nobody contacted a lawyer soon enough. It isn't always obvious who owns a piece of property, either, or whether a city or the state is involved, which is one more reason to get those questions answered early.

Filing the case itself is a car accident attorney's responsibility. Most of the cases my office files go to San Diego Superior Court, and wherever a case is filed, it has to be filed inside the deadline, even if that means filing quickly to preserve it.