Where a Los Angeles injury case actually gets filed.

We are a funding company, not a law firm. We publish this because we field the question constantly from people whose attorneys have already made the filing decision and who simply want to understand where their case sits. None of this is legal advice, and none of it should be used to decide anything about your own case. Venue is a genuinely technical question with exceptions layered on exceptions, and the attorney on your file is the only person who can answer it for you.

For about a decade, Los Angeles Superior Court ran new unlimited-jurisdiction personal injury cases through a small set of dedicated "PI hub" courtrooms, concentrated at the Spring Street courthouse downtown. A handful of judges handled pretrial for a very large share of the county's injury docket, and cases were sent out to an individual trial judge only at the end.

That model is gone. The court began moving away from it in October 2022, the Spring Street hub stopped taking new personal injury filings in January 2024, and on May 17, 2024 the court issued a general order formally reassigning personal injury cases — In re Assignment and Transfer of Personal Injury Cases, General Order 2024-GEN-003-00. It supersedes the parts of the 2022 PI hub standing order that had governed assignment, and it states the court's conclusion plainly: the Independent Calendar model is the better way to move these cases, and personal injury cases are to be assigned to Independent Calendar courtrooms and actively managed by the assigned judge.

The order rests on Government Code section 69508(a), California Rules of Court rule 10.603, and the court's own Local Rule 2.3, and it frames the change around meeting the civil disposition time goals in section 2.1 of the California Standards of Judicial Administration.

Independent Calendar — usually written IC — means one judge owns your case from beginning to end. That judge rules on the motions, sets the schedule, handles the discovery fights and tries the case if it gets there.

The practical differences from the hub model, as far as they affect a plaintiff waiting on money:

• One decision-maker instead of two. Under the hub system a case could be shaped by hub judges for years and then land in front of a trial judge who was seeing it for the first time. Now the judge setting the schedule is the judge who will try it.
• Scheduling is case-specific rather than queue-specific. Trial dates come from a judge managing a defined inventory, not from a central calendar absorbing an entire county's filings.
• The courthouse is usually closer to the incident. Cases sit in the district where the events happened rather than being pulled downtown.

What has not changed: this is still the busiest trial court in the country. A judge who owns your case still has a full docket, and the change in model is not a change in how quickly insurers negotiate.

The court publishes a Filing Court Locator. Two things about using it:

• Search by ZIP code, not by city name. Many Los Angeles County place names span more than one judicial district, and unincorporated areas often carry a mailing city that is not the city with jurisdiction. The ZIP lookup and the city lookup can return different answers, and the ZIP one is the one to trust.
• Use the ZIP where the incident happened — the intersection, the store, the property — not your home ZIP and not your attorney's.

A few routings in the county are genuinely counter-intuitive: some cities are served by a courthouse in a differently-named city, and a courthouse bearing a city's name does not always hear that city's civil injury cases. This is exactly why the lookup exists and why guessing from a map is unreliable.

None of this is a task you need to perform. Your attorney filed the case and knows where it is. The lookup is here for the far more common situation: you want to understand your own case without having to add a question to a list your lawyer is already slow to get through.

"Filed where the incident arose" is the working rule, not an absolute one. Several things move a case:

• Amount in controversy. California splits civil cases into limited and unlimited jurisdiction, and the track a case is on affects both procedure and where it is heard.
• Public entity defendants. If Metro, the City, the County or a school district is a defendant, the more urgent issue is not the courthouse — it is that a written claim generally has to be presented to that entity within six months under Government Code section 911.2, not the two years most people assume. We cover that on the Los Angeles page.
• Complex designation. Cases that qualify as complex are managed separately from the ordinary IC assignment.
• Transfer. A case filed in one district can be moved to another. Local Rule 2.3 governs both the filing and the transfer of actions between districts.
• Multiple incidents or multiple defendants in different districts, which is a judgment call rather than a lookup.

Every one of those is a question for your attorney. We list them so you can recognise when the simple answer does not apply to you, not so you can resolve it yourself.

Directly, very little. We do not fund based on which courthouse your case is in, and where a case is filed is not something we ask you to influence.

Indirectly, it is part of the same answer to the question people actually call us about, which is why is this taking so long. A case's district affects its queue. Its judge affects its schedule. Whether a public entity is involved affects the deadlines. All of it feeds the timeline, and the timeline is the reason pre-settlement funding exists: an advance on a portion of a pending claim, repaid from the recovery, with nothing owed if the case does not recover. It is a non-recourse purchase rather than a loan — no credit check, no monthly payments — and it requires an attorney handling your case on contingency.

Approval, amount and timing depend on the case, and we cannot promise any of them in advance.