Pre-settlement funding in Los Angeles.

If you were hurt in Los Angeles County and your case is still open, a pre-settlement advance gets you money now against a portion of what the claim may eventually pay. It is a non-recourse purchase, not a loan — no credit check, no monthly payment, and nothing owed if the case recovers nothing. You need an attorney handling it on contingency.

Below is the part that is specific to Los Angeles. It is general information, not legal advice — we fund claims, we do not practise law. Everything here is a question for the attorney on your file.

Most California injury claims run on the two-year period in Code of Civil Procedure section 335.1. But where the defendant is a public entity, Government Code section 911.2 generally requires a written claim to be presented to that entity within six months.

Los Angeles is unusually exposed to this, because so many plausible defendants here are public bodies:

• LA Metro — buses and rail, one of the busiest transit systems in the country
• The City of Los Angeles — including dangerous-condition claims for roads and sidewalks
• The County of Los Angeles — including county facilities and vehicles
• LAUSD — the second-largest school district in the United States
• Any of the 80-plus other incorporated cities in the county, each its own public entity

If one of those is a defendant and the six-month presentation deadline passes, the claim can be over before a two-year calendar would have raised an eyebrow. Ask your attorney immediately whether a government claim applies to your case — there are relief procedures for late claims, but they are not something to rely on.

Los Angeles Superior Court is divided into judicial districts, each with its own courthouse or group of courthouses. Under the court's local rules, a case is generally filed in the district where the incident arose — not where you live and not where the defendant is based.

Two things follow from that. Your case may be heard in a courthouse nowhere near your home, which matters when you are attending hearings without a working car. And which district you land in affects timing, because caseloads differ across the county.

One correction worth making, because a number of otherwise-current guides still get it wrong: the downtown Spring Street courthouse's personal injury hub stopped accepting new personal injury filings in January 2024, and PI cases were redistributed. If a page tells you your LA injury case goes to the Spring Street PI hub, it is out of date.

The court publishes a Filing Court Locator — look yours up by ZIP code rather than city name, because several LA place names span more than one district and the city-name lookup can disagree with the ZIP lookup. Your attorney will have made this call already; the tool is there if you want to understand where your case sits.

The single most common question we get from LA callers is why nothing is happening. Usually nothing is wrong. Several things stack up here specifically:

• Volume. The county's court system is the largest in the country by caseload. Even efficiently-run departments have queues.
• Treatment timelines. Your attorney generally will not send a demand until your treatment stabilises, because valuing a claim before then means guessing. Months of physical therapy hold the whole file.
• Coverage fights. California has a persistently high share of uninsured and minimally-insured drivers, so LA claims frequently turn into a second claim against your own uninsured or underinsured motorist coverage — which your own insurer may contest as hard as the other side would.
• Lien resolution at the end. Even after a number is agreed, hospital liens, health plan reimbursement and any prior advances get resolved before you are paid. That stretch surprises almost everyone.

There is also a hard outer boundary: Code of Civil Procedure section 583.310 generally requires an action to be brought to trial within five years of filing. It is rarely the operative constraint, but it is the reason "it will take as long as it takes" is not quite true.

None of that is a reason to settle early for less. It is the reason funding exists — so the clock is the insurer's problem rather than yours.

Los Angeles County is one of the most linguistically diverse places in the country, and a large share of these conversations happen in Spanish, Armenian, Korean, Tagalog, Farsi or Mandarin. California's funding law is unusually strong here: if a funding contract was negotiated in a language other than English, you are entitled to the contract in both English and that language. Not a summary — the contract.

We take applications in English and Spanish. If we negotiate with you in Spanish, expect the agreement in Spanish as well as English. If you need another language, tell us when you call and we will arrange it rather than push you through in English.