My Lawyer Says $30,000 Is the Most I Can Get. Ask Them About the City Too.
Start with the uncomfortable part: your lawyer is very likely right about the thing you asked them.
If the question was whether the driver's insurance will pay more than $30,000, the answer is no, and no amount of advocacy changes it. What follows is California law, and the Los Angeles version of it. A policy limit is a contract between that driver and their insurer, written before you existed as far as that contract is concerned. In California $30,000 is the minimum bodily injury coverage per person, so a driver carrying the minimum has exactly that much and not a dollar more. A lawyer who tells you so is being straight with you.
This article is about a different question, one that frequently never gets asked in a case like yours, and which has nothing to do with your lawyer's competence.
Two Different Questions
The first question is how much insurance exists on the other driver. That is answered by reading a declarations page, takes about a minute, and the answer is almost always final.
The second question is whether anyone besides that driver contributed to the crash. That one is not answered by reading anything. It is answered by investigating the place where it happened, and it costs real time and money to do: photographs, maintenance records, signal timing data, the collision history at that location, and usually a traffic engineer's opinion.
Most injury practices run on volume, and volume is incompatible with spending four figures investigating a $30,000 case. That is not dishonesty. It is arithmetic. A firm carrying hundreds of files cannot open an engineering investigation on each one, so the default is to confirm the policy limit, collect, and close.
The result is that the second question goes unasked in exactly the cases where the answer matters most, which are the ones where the injuries vastly exceed the available insurance. Cases like yours.
A Public Agency Has No Policy Limit
A city or a state agency does not carry $30,000 in coverage. It does not carry a policy at all. California lets an injured person recover from a public agency when its property was in a dangerous condition, the agency knew or should have known, and the condition helped cause the injury.
And the damages rule makes even a weak case against an agency valuable. California treats medical bills, lost earnings and future care as joint and several, meaning any liable defendant can be pursued for all of those damages regardless of its share of fault. Pain and suffering is the only category split by percentage.
So an agency found 15% responsible does not owe 15% of your bills. It can owe all of them. If you are carrying $300,000 in medical expenses against a $30,000 policy, a 15% case is not a technicality. It is the difference between being made whole and not.
How to Raise It With Your Own Lawyer
You do not need a new firm to ask this, and you should ask your current one first. They have the file, the photographs and the police report, and they are the person already obligated to act in your interest.
Go through these about the place where it happened:
- Was it hard to see oncoming traffic because of a tree, hedge, sign, parked truck, or the angle of the approach.
- Was there no protected left turn arrow where the volume plainly called for one, or was the green too short to clear the intersection.
- Were the lane lines or crosswalk worn away, a sign missing or turned, the street lighting out.
- Have other crashes happened in the same spot.
Bring real numbers to that conversation rather than a hunch:
A Second Look, by a Traffic Engineer's Standard
My father was a City of Los Angeles traffic engineer, and he taught me what actually makes an intersection dangerous. Whether or not you keep your current lawyer, I can take a second look at your corner and tell you honestly if there is a claim against the city.
Bring Your Lawyer Real Numbers, Not a Hunch
Four corners from our own data, as an example of what to bring to the conversation:
Saticoy St & Woodman Ave
Valley Glen. 7 crashes, 12 people injured, three of them hurting three or more people at once.
Devonshire St & Reseda Blvd
Northridge. 6 crashes, 9 people injured, one killed.
Nordhoff St & Reseda Blvd
Northridge. 8 crashes, 7 people injured.
Foothill Blvd & Hubbard St
Sylmar. 6 crashes, 8 people injured.
No tracked intersection matches that search.
Not your corner? Search the full crash record
Then ask two specific questions, because they are the ones that produce an actual answer rather than reassurance:
"Have we investigated whether the public agency responsible for this road shares liability, and if not, is it because we have ruled it out or because we have not looked?"
"Has a government claim been presented, and if not, how much of the six months is left?"
The second one is the urgent one. A claim against a public agency in California has to be presented in writing within six months of the crash, not the two years people associate with injury cases. If that window is closing, it is the only thing in your case that cannot be fixed later.
If the Answer Is That They Looked and There Is Nothing
Then believe them, and the $30,000 probably is the ceiling. Plenty of crashes are entirely one driver's fault at a road that was in perfectly reasonable condition, and in those cases the honest work left is negotiating your medical liens down so more of the money reaches you.
There are also real limits on these claims that a good lawyer will cite, and they are not excuses. A public agency is protected where the complaint is essentially about an approved engineering design, which is why freeway interchange cases are much harder than surface street cases. Notice is a genuine hurdle: the agency has to have known, or the condition has to have existed long enough that it should have. And a minor or trivial defect does not qualify no matter how annoying it is.
What We Would and Would Not Tell You
We are a law firm, so read this with that in mind. We are not suggesting you leave the lawyer you have, and this is not a pitch to switch. Most of the time the right outcome here is that you ask your own attorney the two questions above and they handle it, which costs you nothing and keeps your case where it is.
What we would say is that the six month deadline does not pause while anyone thinks about it, and that nobody in this process is going to volunteer the question for you. If you want a read on whether the road is worth investigating in your case, we handle these cases and have taken one to a $6,000,000 settlement against a government entity. Send us the intersection and the date and you will get a straight answer you can take back to your own lawyer.
Talk to a UCLA-trained attorney directly.
