Thirty thousand dollars. That is the number you were given, and the reason it is the number has almost nothing to do with what happened to you, or to the person you may have lost.

California's minimum bodily injury coverage is $30,000 per person. If the driver who hit you bought the minimum, that is the edge of their insurance company's exposure, and an adjuster will get there fast and then go quiet, whether this is a serious injury case or a wrongful death case. It is not an assessment of what happened. It is the boundary of a contract you were never a party to.

So the useful question is not whether $30,000 is all that carrier will pay. It almost certainly is. The question is whether that carrier is the only place money can come from, and in Los Angeles, often it is not. A public agency responsible for the road can be a second defendant with no policy limit at all.

The Road Can Be a Second Defendant

A policy limit is a contractual cap on one insurer's obligation. It does not cap what your case is worth, it does not bind anyone else who contributed to the crash, and California lets an injured person recover from a public agency when the road itself was in a dangerous condition, the agency knew or should have known, and that condition helped cause the crash.

Suing the driver personally for the rest rarely produces real money. Someone who carries the state minimum usually does not have $300,000 sitting around for a judgment to attach to. The realistic sources are your own underinsured motorist coverage if you carry it, another private defendant such as the driver's employer, and in a meaningful number of Los Angeles crashes, the public agency responsible for the road. That last one is the least known and the most often missed, because nobody in the first two weeks after a crash has any reason to raise it.

Here is the question that can turn a $30,000 case into a different one: where did it happen? Four questions decide whether that applies to you:

• Could you see oncoming traffic, or did a tree, a hedge, a parked truck, or the angle of the approach block your view?
• Was there a protected left turn arrow, or did the light feel too short to clear?
• Were the lane lines and crosswalk faded, a sign missing, the street lighting out?
• Has this happened to other people at the same spot?

There is also a shortcut on the question of whether the city knew. Los Angeles publishes a High Injury Network, its designation of the roughly 6% of city streets responsible for about 70% of traffic deaths and severe injuries. A crash on one of those streets means the city had already flagged it, which is the hardest part of the case arriving pre-documented.

None of that is a conclusion. It is a reason to look, and the review below looks at the type of collision at each corner, not just the count: a cluster of broadside and head-on crashes points to a sight-line or signal problem, while a cluster of rear-end crashes usually points to traffic volume instead.

A local attorney, not a remote firm

The Son of a Traffic Engineer

My father spent his career as a traffic engineer for the City of Los Angeles. He taught me what to look for at an intersection and what actually makes one dangerous. Send me your crash and I will take a second look at the corner to see if there is a viable claim against the city.

Arya Firoozmand, Esq.

Founding Partner · UCLA Law, '14

My father was a traffic engineer for the City of Los Angeles. I use what he taught me to take a second look at your crash.

Find Your Intersection

Look Up Where You Were Hurt

We track crash and injury data for 361 intersections across the Valley and the Westside, including the type of each collision, not just the count. These four are on the city's High Injury Network:

Saticoy St & Woodman Ave

Valley Glen. 7 crashes, 12 people injured, three crashes hurting three or more at once.

Devonshire St & Reseda Blvd

Northridge. 6 crashes, 9 people injured, one killed.

Foothill Blvd & Hubbard St

Sylmar. 6 crashes, 8 people injured.

Laurel Canyon Blvd & Oxnard St

Valley Village. 6 crashes, 6 people injured.

Not your corner? Search 5,784 crashes

Why a Small Share of Fault Can Pay the Whole Medical Bill

Here is the part that surprises people, including people who have already hired a lawyer.

California splits damages into two kinds and treats them differently. Economic damages, meaning medical bills, lost earnings and future care, are joint and several. Any defendant found liable can be pursued for the entire amount. Non-economic damages, meaning pain and suffering, are divided strictly by each defendant's percentage of fault.

So a city found 15% responsible for a crash does not owe 15% of your medical bills. It can be liable for all of them, because medical bills are not apportioned. The 15% only limits its share of the pain and suffering.

That is why a case against a public agency is worth investigating even when it looks weak. For someone holding $340,000 in bills against a $30,000 policy, a 15% case is not a long shot. It is the difference between covering the bills and not.

One honest qualifier. Your own share of fault, if any, comes off the total first. A client who was 20% responsible recovers 100% of 80% of the economic damages, not 100% of them.

Which Agency, and the Deadline Nobody Mentions

If a public agency might be involved, the clock is much shorter than the two years you may have heard about for ordinary injury cases. California gives you six months from the date of the crash to present a written claim to the right agency. Miss it and the claim is usually gone, whatever the merits.

Presenting it to the wrong office does not count, and the routing is genuinely confusing:

• A City of Los Angeles surface street goes to the Los Angeles City Clerk.
• A freeway, a state highway, or an on ramp or off ramp is Caltrans territory, but a claim over $12,500 does not go to Caltrans. It goes to the Government Claims Program at the Department of General Services in West Sacramento, with a $25 filing fee that can be waived.
• Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Culver City, Calabasas and the other independent cities each have their own clerk.
• An unincorporated area such as Marina del Rey is the County of Los Angeles.

Mail a $400,000 ramp claim to Caltrans instead of the state's claims program and you can watch six months run out believing you filed on time.

The Honest Limits

Cases against a city are stronger than cases involving a freeway, and it is worth knowing why before you get your hopes up about a ramp.

A public agency is protected when the thing you are complaining about was part of an approved engineering design. A freeway interchange is the clearest example there is: approved plans, licensed engineers, deliberate geometry. The items on the list above are different, because they are maintenance and operations failures. Nobody approved a plan to let the paint wear off or the streetlight stay dark. That is why surface street cases are the stronger theory.

Freeway cases are harder, not hopeless. An agency can still be liable for failing to warn about a concealed hazard even where the design itself is protected, and because medical bills are not apportioned, even a modest share of fault reaches the whole bill.

What nobody can promise you is an outcome. These cases turn on notice, on immunity, and on engineering testimony, and some of them do not work. What we can tell you is whether yours is worth investigating, inside the six months, while the evidence at the intersection still looks the way it did.

Where to Go From Here

Depending on which part of this is your situation:

• Your bills are far larger than the policy, and you want the arithmetic.
• The offer arrived fast and felt like an insult.
• Your own lawyer has told you this is the ceiling.
• You cannot work, and the settlement will not cover a year.
• You already suspect the intersection.
• Everyone local says that corner is bad.
• You keep hearing about other crashes in the same place.

We handle these cases and we have taken one to a $6,000,000 settlement against a government entity. If you are inside six months and your bills are a multiple of the offer, the investigation costs you nothing and the deadline is not negotiable. Tell us where it happened and we will tell you honestly whether there is a second defendant worth chasing.