Filing a Personal Injury Complaint Against the Government...

A personal injury complaint against the government works differently than other personal injury accident claims. Usually they just need your injury claim to fit into the bureaucratic governmental machine.

The first and probably the most important thing to take note of is that a personal injury complaint against the government will come with much tighter limitation statutes.

This means that where you might normally have one or two years to file your claim you'll now have as little as a month.

The timeframe differs from state to state. If you think you might have to file a personal injury accident claim against a government body then check into that timeline within a few days of the accident. (Look up the appropriate governmental office in your local yellow pages.)

Because there's little room for delay you should file a claim whenever you think there's any chance a government employee or property was negligent.

For example, if you're in a car accident and it's assumed that the other driver was at fault but it also happened that the accident was on a poorly maintained road, you should file. You don't want to discover too late that the road was to blame - you may wind up with nothing.

When you make a personal injury complaint against the government you must carefully investigate what division of the government you're filing against. Depending on where and how the accident happened, your claim may be against the state, city or county.

Whichever it is you should contact the clerk's office of that agency to find out what procedures they need you to follow. If you're really unsure about where your claim should go then file under all levels of government that might be at play - it'll be sorted out later.

Demand Letter Form...

You'll find that instead of a typical personal injury demand letter you'll have to fill out a specific form. The provided information won't differ much from what your demand letter would have said.

Be careful, if you fill out the form incorrectly you may run into problems. If you file at the last minute, for instance, but you made a mistake and the form is returned you may have problems re-filing because the deadline has past.

Similarly, if you file under the wrong government agency you may run out of time to correct your error. The bottom line here is to pay extra attention to the information and don't wait until the deadline approaches before filing!

Assuming everything else goes well you'll be contacted by a claims adjuster. Your dealings with this person will be the same as when you deal with an adjuster in a personal or commercial insurance claim.

Their Response...

Within a certain time frame - the government has a time limit to follow now just as you did - your claim will be agreed upon or denied. Most often it's denied.

This means you're now entitled to pursue a personal injury lawsuit against the government; and for some reason this seems to be the way they prefer to handle things. It doesn't mean you're going to court. Many agencies just require a lawsuit to be filed before negotiating a claim.

If you don't hear anything after filing your personal injury complaint and their own deadline for notifying you has passed then you may assume the claim has been denied and you can then file a lawsuit.

Always hire a personal injury lawyer when filing avformal lawsuit against the government.

Missing your final deadline is not always the end of the road. If you don't file your personal injury complaint by the state's specified deadline you can still try to make a claim.

In this case you'll have to start by convincing them there was a legitimate reason for your tardiness. Of course this isn't easy because there are no set rules for deciding what a good reason is. More than likely you'll be explaining why you didn't realize that the government agency was at fault until it was too late.

In the case that you can't convince them on your own, don't give up. You can still hire a lawyer, go to court and ask a judge to allow it.