Filing Deadlines in California in Victorville, CA Two Years, Six Months and Shorter Clocks

The general injury period, and the separate one for the vehicle

Code of Civil Procedure 335.1 sets two years for an action for assault, battery, or injury to or the death of an individual caused by the wrongful act or neglect of another. Code of Civil Procedure 338 sets three years for several categories, including an action for taking, detaining or injuring goods or chattels, which is where damage to the vehicle sits. Those two periods run independently from the same crash. Settling the repair claim in the first month therefore extends nothing on the injury side, and a body shop check cashed in week three has no effect on the two-year date. Diary both dates separately, in writing, on the day you learn them.

The six-month clock where a public entity may be responsible

Where the claim involves a city, a county, a transportation agency or the state, the ordinary periods do not govern the first step. Government Code 911.2 gives a claimant six months from accrual, and no longer, to present a claim to the entity for death or for harm to a person or to personal property, while other categories of claim get a longer period. Once the entity delivers or mails written notice rejecting the claim, Government Code 945.6 permits suit only within six months of that date. Missing the presentation step generally forecloses the claim entirely, which is why roadway condition questions get identified in week one rather than year two.

Where a public entity claim comes from in a crash file

Government Code 835 is the provision that makes a roadway condition actionable, providing for liability where a dangerous condition of public property existed at the time of injury, proximately caused it, created a reasonably foreseeable risk of that kind of injury, and either was created by an employee's negligent or wrongful act within the scope of employment or the entity had actual or constructive notice long enough beforehand to have protected against it. In practice that covers missing striping, a shoulder drop-off, an obscured sign, a signal malfunction, or a known hazardous curve. It is precisely the category most likely to be discovered late, and it carries the shortest deadline in the file.

Minors are treated differently, with one exception

Code of Civil Procedure 352 tolls the running of a limitation period while a person entitled to bring an action is a minor, so the clock on a child's injury claim generally does not begin until the disability ends. That same section withholds the tolling where the defendant is a public entity or a public employee and the claim was one that had to be presented under the government claims statutes. A child hurt by a roadway condition therefore does not get the benefit of the tolling on the presentation requirement, which makes the six-month rule the controlling date in the very files where a family is least likely to be thinking about paperwork.

The uninsured motorist clock is its own animal

Insurance Code 11580.2 does not borrow the two-year injury period; it creates accrual conditions. No cause of action accrues on this coverage unless, within two years of the crash, the insured has filed suit against the uninsured motorist, has agreed with the insurer on the amount due under the policy, or has formally instituted arbitration by written notice sent certified mail with return receipt requested. Where the vehicle was never identified, the statute adds requirements at the front end too: actual physical contact, a report to the police department of the city where it happened or, in unincorporated territory, to the sheriff or the local Highway Patrol headquarters, within twenty-four hours, and a sworn statement to the insurer within thirty days.

The notice your insurer owes you about a deadline

State claims regulations impose a warning obligation, with a limit worth knowing. Under title 10, section 2695.7(f) of the California Code of Regulations, an insurer must give written notice of any limitation period on which it may rely to deny a claim, not less than sixty days before the expiration date, or immediately if the claim is first received inside that window. For a first-party uninsured motorist claimant the notice period is at least thirty days. The subsection does not apply to a claimant represented by counsel. Nobody should organize a file around receiving that letter, but its absence in an unrepresented file is worth noting.

The administrative filings that are not lawsuits

Two reporting duties sit on a shorter timescale and are easy to overlook. A written report of an injury or fatal collision goes to the Highway Patrol, or to a city police department where the crash occurred in an incorporated city, within twenty-four hours under Vehicle Code 20008 where that section applies. And a report to the state motor vehicles department is due within ten days whenever anyone is injured, however minor the injury, or killed, or when property damage exceeds one thousand dollars, and that filing is required in addition to any report made to a police agency or an insurer.