Claims against a government entity

Six months

You must present a written claim to the entity itself before any lawsuit. It is a precondition to suing, not a formality, and it has required contents — your details, the date, place and circumstances, a general description of the loss, the names of the employees involved if known, and the amount claimed.

What happens after you present it

1. Within 6 months

   Present the claim

   To the correct entity, in writing, with the required contents. Identifying the right entity is not always obvious — a road may be city, county or state, and a bus may be a joint powers authority.

2. 45 days

   The entity responds

   It may accept, reject, or do nothing. If it does nothing, the claim is deemed rejected by operation of law.

3. 6 months from written rejection

   File suit

   If a proper written rejection notice is served, suit must generally be filed within six months of it under Gov. Code § 945.6 — a second short deadline that catches people who survived the first.

If no written rejection notice is given, a longer period applies. Relying on that distinction without advice is a poor idea.

If the six months has passed

Not necessarily over, but you are now in repair mode.

An application for leave to present a late claim may be made within one year of the accrual of the cause of action under Government Code section 911.4. The grounds under section 911.6 include mistake, inadvertence, surprise or excusable neglect, and that the claimant was a minor or was physically or mentally incapacitated during the six months.

If the application is denied, a petition can be made to the court for relief. None of this is a plan; all of it is better than giving up.

Dangerous condition of public property

The most common public entity claim. The entity must have owned or controlled the property, the property must have been in a dangerous condition at the time, the condition must have created a reasonably foreseeable risk of the kind of injury that occurred, and the entity must have had actual or constructive notice of it in time to have protected against it.

Public entities also have statutory immunities private defendants do not, including design immunity for a feature approved in advance by a discretionary decision where there was substantial evidence of reasonableness. These are real defenses and they are the reason these claims are harder than claims against a driver.

Practical consequence: notice evidence is everything. Prior complaints, prior incidents at the same location, work orders, inspection records and how long the defect had been there. Photograph the defect immediately with a scale reference — these get repaired quickly once reported, and the repair itself is both good and evidentially awkward.

Related

• Check your deadline
• Bus and transit claims