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Car accidents, slip-and-falls, medical malpractice, dog bites, and injury claims — understand deadlines, how settlements and damages work, and when to get a lawyer.
An injury settlement is not a check that arrives intact. It is divided, usually in this order: the lawyer's contingency fee — commonly around a third, often more if the case went into litigation — then case costs like filing fees and expert reports, then medical liens. That last category surprises people most: health insurers, Medicare, and Medicaid generally have a legal right to be repaid out of a settlement for the treatment they covered, and hospitals in many states can file liens directly. What is left after all three is the injured person's recovery. None of this is hidden — fee agreements are written contracts, and lien amounts can often be negotiated down — but the arithmetic explains why two settlements with the same headline number can put very different amounts in someone's pocket.
Every state sets a statute of limitations for injury claims, and most people have heard of that one. Fewer know about the earlier deadlines nested inside it. Claims against a government body — a city bus, a public hospital, a pothole the county ignored — typically require a formal notice of claim on a much shorter clock, often six months or less. Insurance policies impose their own prompt-notice requirements. Claims for minors, and injuries discovered long after the fact, run on modified clocks that vary by state. The pattern to hold onto: the visible deadline is the last one, and the ones that expire first are the ones that catch people.
Injury cases are decided months later on evidence created in the first days. Prompt medical attention does double duty — it treats the injury and creates a contemporaneous record linking it to the incident, and gaps in treatment become arguments that the injury came from somewhere else. Photos of the scene, the hazard, and the vehicles; names of witnesses; the incident report at a store — all of it is easiest to capture immediately and hardest to reconstruct later. One more feature of those early days: the other side's insurance adjuster often calls quickly, asking for a recorded statement. There is generally no legal obligation to give one to the opposing insurer, and what is said in that call becomes part of the file.
How long you have to file suit for five common claim types — personal injury, property damage, written and oral contracts, and debt — in every state, in years, each cited to the statute. A blank means we haven't sourced that period yet.
General statutory information, not legal advice. The clock's start date and exceptions depend on the facts. Open the cited statute and confirm the current deadline for your state before you rely on it.
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