Archives: 2026

After a fender-bender, most people do three things: make sure everyone is okay, swap insurance information, and call their insurance company. California adds a fourth step that a lot of drivers have never heard of, and skipping it can get your license suspended. If anyone was hurt, or anyone's car or property took more than $1,000 in damage, you have to report a car accident to the DMV yourself, on a form called the SR-1, within 10 days. It doesn't matter who caused the crash. It doesn't matter that a police officer wrote a report or that your insurance company [...]

When someone dies because of another person's carelessness, the family is left with grief first and legal questions much later. One of those questions catches many families off guard: who in the family actually has the right to hold the responsible person accountable? California answers that with a statute, not with how close you were to the person who died. The right to bring a wrongful death lawsuit in California belongs to a specific list of people in Code of Civil Procedure section 377.60, and that list is built largely on the state's inheritance rules. The results can feel arbitrary. [...]

Most car accident claims start with a simple step: you go after the driver who caused the crash, and their insurance company pays. A hit and run takes that step away. The person responsible is gone, and unless someone finds them, there is nobody to send the bill to. That doesn't mean there's no money. It means the money comes from somewhere else, usually your own insurance, and California attaches strict conditions to it. After a hit and run in California, whether you get paid tends to come down to three things: whether the other car actually touched you, whether [...]

A truck crash is not just a bigger car crash. The law that governs it is different, the insurance behind it is different, and most importantly, the evidence that decides it does not belong to you. It belongs to the trucking company. And a good deal of that evidence sits on a federal clock that starts running the moment the crash happens. That is the part almost nobody tells injured people. Knowing what to do after a truck accident in California is partly about the obvious things, getting medical care and calling the police. But it is also about a [...]

You were hurt in a crash that wasn't your fault, you have no health insurance, and the at-fault driver's insurance company is not paying your bills. Meanwhile you need an MRI, maybe surgery, and the pain is not waiting for a settlement. It is one of the most frightening positions an injured person can be in, and it stops a lot of people from getting care they badly need. Here is the reassuring part. California gives uninsured accident victims real, legal ways to get medical treatment after a car accident and to pay for it later, out of the eventual [...]

California is one of the most dangerous places in the country to be on foot. In 2023 alone, 1,106 pedestrians were killed on California roads, roughly 27% of all traffic deaths in a state where walking is a small fraction of the trips people take. Los Angeles sits at the center of it. If you were hit while crossing the street, you are not a statistic to us, but the numbers explain why these cases are fought so hard. This guide explains how a pedestrian accident settlement in California is actually valued, the crosswalk and fault rules that decide who [...]