Los Angeles Personal Injury Lawyer

Where the case goes

Stanley Mosk, and the district rules that decide your courthouse

Los Angeles County Superior Court is the largest trial court in the country, and it is divided into districts. Which courthouse hears your case is not a matter of preference. It is governed by Los Angeles County Court Rule 2.3, which requires a personal injury action to be filed in the judicial district where the incident arose. A downtown collision generally belongs to the Central District at the Stanley Mosk Courthouse, 111 N. Hill Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012. A Van Nuys crash goes to the Van Nuys courthouse, a Santa Monica crash to the West District, a Long Beach crash to the South District, and so on.

How the court handles injury cases has changed, and it matters. For years, Central District personal injury cases were routed to the specialized Personal Injury Hub courts at the Spring Street Courthouse, 312 N. Spring Street, which handled pleadings and discovery motions on a common calendar and shipped cases out for trial. The court began moving away from that model in October 2022, and effective January 8, 2024, personal injury cases newly filed in the Central District are assigned for all purposes to Independent Calendar departments at the Stanley Mosk Courthouse. Cases already pending in a Spring Street PI Hub court before that date stayed there until they were tried or otherwise resolved, and those departments closed over the course of 2024. The practical difference is real. One judge now owns the case from complaint through verdict, motions are heard by the judge who will try it, and the way a case is framed at filing carries all the way to trial.

The local roads

Freeways, arterials, and the High Injury Network

Downtown sits at the knot where the 110, the 101, the 10, and the 5 all meet inside a few square miles. The Arroyo Seco Parkway stretch of the 110 north of downtown was built in 1940 and still has its original design: onramps with stop signs and merge lanes measured in feet rather than hundreds of yards, plus a 5-mph-posted curve series that regular commuters take faster. The 110 Harbor Freeway ramps at Third, Fourth, Sixth, and Ninth put drivers into dense surface traffic immediately. The 405 through the Sepulveda Pass and the 101 through downtown supply the rear-end and lane-change collisions that fill our intake calls.

The more dangerous injuries happen off the freeway. LADOT’s Vision Zero program identifies a High Injury Network, the streets where death and serious injury concentrate. According to LADOT, roughly 6 percent of the city’s approximately 6,500 street miles account for about 65 percent of deaths and severe injuries involving people walking and biking. Those streets are the wide, fast, multi-lane arterials that cross the city: Figueroa, Vermont, Western, Olympic, Venice, Sunset, Sepulveda, and long stretches of Wilshire. They are engineered for vehicle throughput and used heavily by people on foot, which is exactly the combination that produces catastrophic pedestrian cases.

Los Angeles also runs on rideshare in a way few American cities do. Around Crypto.com Arena and the Convention Center on an event night, along the Hollywood corridor after midnight, and in the LAX ride-app lot, an enormous share of the vehicles in motion are Uber and Lyft drivers on the clock. That changes the insurance analysis rather than the liability analysis.

California Public Utilities Code section 5433 imposes two different coverage requirements on a transportation network company, and they are easy to confuse. The first is liability coverage, which responds when the rideshare driver is the one at fault: once a driver has accepted a ride request, the company must carry primary liability coverage of $1,000,000 for death, personal injury, and property damage, and that continues until the ride is complete. The second is uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage, which is what responds when the driver who hurt you carries no insurance or not enough of it. SB 371 (Stats. 2025, ch. 314) amended section 5433 effective January 1, 2026 to set that UM and UIM coverage at $60,000 per person and $300,000 per incident. Read the scope carefully, because it is narrower than the liability requirement: the UM and UIM coverage runs only from the moment a passenger enters the vehicle until the passenger exits it. It is primary over any other uninsured or underinsured motorist coverage that might apply, and it is the company’s own obligation rather than the driver’s.

When the app is on but no ride has been accepted, far lower contingent limits apply. The first question in an LA rideshare case is therefore always which period the driver was in at the moment of impact, and whether a passenger was actually in the car, because those two facts decide which coverage is available and how much of it there is. The app data that answers them has to be preserved early. See our rideshare accident page for more.

On the medical side, LA County has one of the most developed trauma systems in the country. Los Angeles General Medical Center, the hospital most Angelenos still call LAC+USC, is a Level I trauma center and treats a very large share of the region’s trauma volume. Harbor-UCLA, Cedars-Sinai, and California Hospital Medical Center downtown round out the network. That is good for survival and complicated for claims: a severely injured client may pass through a trauma center, a rehabilitation facility, and half a dozen specialists, generating billing from entities that will each assert a lien on any recovery. Sorting and negotiating those liens is often the difference between a headline settlement number and what a client actually takes home.

First steps

What to do after an accident in Los Angeles

Find out who wrote the report. On the freeways it is the CHP, typically the Central Los Angeles, East LA, or West Valley area office depending on location. On surface streets inside the city it is LAPD, and LAPD divisions vary enormously in how fast a traffic collision report becomes available. In an unincorporated pocket it may be the Sheriff. Knowing the reporting agency on day one is what lets us start the records chase immediately instead of six weeks later.

Photograph everything, including the businesses on all four corners. Downtown and the arterials are saturated with private security cameras, parking structure cameras, storefront cameras, and city intersection equipment, and most of that footage overwrites itself within days or weeks. A preservation letter sent in the first week routinely produces video that would have been gone by the second. Get medical attention promptly and keep treating; gaps in care are the first thing a defense adjuster in this market will use. And if a rideshare, a delivery driver, a bus, or a commercial vehicle was involved, say so immediately, because those cases require notice to entities that are not on the police report.

Deadlines that end cases

The two deadlines to know

In a city where a single intersection can involve a city street, a county-maintained segment, a Metro bus, and a private driver, figuring out whether a six-month clock is running is the first thing that has to be done, not the last.

How we work here

Working with Wave Law Firm in Los Angeles

Our Southern California office is at 355 S. Grand Ave, Suite 2450, Los Angeles, CA 90071, on Bunker Hill and minutes from the Stanley Mosk Courthouse. LA traffic being what it is, we do not expect injured clients to fight their way downtown. We travel to you, whether that is in the Valley, on the Westside, in South LA, in the San Gabriel Valley, at the hospital, or anywhere else in California.

The consultation is free. We work on contingency, so there is no fee unless we win. The phone is answered 24 hours a day, and hablamos español. Paymon A. Khatibi has been licensed in California since 2012. Learn more about the firm and our results, or read about auto accidents, trucking accidents, slip and fall, medical malpractice, and wrongful death claims.

Los Angeles questions

Frequently asked

Which courthouse will my case be in?

Los Angeles County Court Rule 2.3 requires a personal injury action to be filed in the judicial district where the incident arose. Downtown and most Central District cases go to Stanley Mosk at 111 N. Hill Street; a Long Beach case goes to the South District, a Van Nuys case to the North Valley, and so on. Since January 8, 2024, newly filed Central District personal injury cases are assigned to an Independent Calendar department at Mosk for all purposes rather than to the old Spring Street PI Hub.

I was a passenger in an Uber. Whose insurance pays?

It depends on who was at fault, and the answer involves two separate policies that people mix up constantly. If someone’s negligence caused the crash and that person is insured, the company’s $1,000,000 primary liability coverage under Public Utilities Code section 5433 is in play, because you were in an accepted ride. If instead the at-fault driver had no insurance or nowhere near enough, what responds is the company’s uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage, which since January 1, 2026 is set at $60,000 per person and $300,000 per incident while a passenger is in the vehicle. That UM and UIM coverage comes first, ahead of any other such policy. Do not assume the $1,000,000 figure is what applies to an uninsured driver, because it is not. The other driver’s own policy is often in play too, and preserving the trip record early is what keeps all of these options open.

I tripped on a broken sidewalk in Los Angeles. Can I sue the city?

Possibly, but only if a written government claim is presented within six months under Government Code section 911.2. Sidewalk cases also turn on whether the defect was dangerous and whether the entity had notice of it, so photographs with a scale reference and the exact address matter enormously. Do not wait. Six months is the shortest deadline in this area of law.

The other driver had almost no insurance. Is that the end of it?

Often not. Minimum-limits and uninsured drivers are a recurring problem in Los Angeles, and the answer is usually to look beyond the at-fault driver: your own uninsured or underinsured motorist coverage, an employer’s policy if the driver was working, a commercial or rideshare policy, an umbrella policy, or a separate defendant such as a property owner or a public entity. Finding the coverage is part of the work.

Talk to a Los Angeles injury lawyer today

Free consultation, no fee unless we win, and someone answers the phone at any hour. If you cannot get downtown, we will come to you.