Wrongful Death Lawyer Beverly Hills

When someone you love dies on Wilshire, Santa Monica Boulevard, or Olympic, the grief arrives with paperwork nobody prepared you for. Who can sue? Who pays the funeral bill? How long do you have? A wrongful death lawyer in Beverly Hills can answer those questions while your family focuses on each other. Moe Abdallah Law, P.C. handles fatal car, truck, motorcycle, pedestrian, bicycle, rideshare, bus, and hit-and-run crashes. Attorney Moe Abdallah takes your calls himself and updates you by call and text. No case manager stands between you and him. Some deadlines in a death case run only six months, and street video can be erased long before that. We can start protecting your family's rights today. The first conversation is free, we work on contingency, and you owe no fee unless we recover money for you. Call (323) 716-1992 any hour. Se habla Español.

Fatal crashes on Beverly Hills streets, with no freeway to blame

Beverly Hills has no direct access to the Interstate Highway System, according to the city's Local Road Safety Plan. Every trip through town runs on surface streets. The plan says roughly 150,000 to 200,000 people are in the city during the day, against about 33,000 residents. Commuters, shoppers, and visitors all squeeze onto a handful of arterials. From 2017 to 2022 the city counted 2,624 reported collisions. Fifty-two were fatal or severe-injury collisions, and seven of those were fatal. Almost half of the fatal and severe-injury collisions involved someone walking or biking. The California Office of Traffic Safety ranked Beverly Hills first among 93 similar-size cities in 2023 for pedestrian victims and for motorcycle victims, and first for speed-related fatal and injury collisions. Those rankings count victims, not blame, but they show this problem is not rare here. If your loved one was hit while walking, riding a bike, or riding a motorcycle, your family attorney should study those patterns and ask who was driving how fast. We build your case around what happened on that block, not around a generic script.

Wilshire, North Santa Monica, Olympic, and the intersections the city flags

The city's plan names the streets where collisions pile up. Wilshire Boulevard logged 359 collisions from 2017 to 2022, the most of any street in its table, with about 38,500 vehicles a day. North Santa Monica Boulevard has the highest weighted crash rate of any street in the plan, and the plan says pedestrian collisions cluster there. It also reports the city's highest concentration of bicycle collisions on that corridor. Olympic Boulevard recorded 302 collisions, and the plan notes a pattern of fatal and severe injury collisions on Olympic and North Santa Monica. At the intersection level, Cañon Dr. at North Santa Monica Boulevard has the highest weighted crash rate in the plan. Others near the top include Wilshire at North Santa Monica, Wilshire at South Santa Monica, Rexford Dr. at North Santa Monica, and Clifton Way at La Cienega Boulevard. Wilshire at La Cienega carries about 87,400 vehicles a day. A fatal crash at one of these spots usually sits near traffic signals, shops, and city or private cameras. Each can hold footage or timing records, and each overwrites on its own schedule.

The Beverly Hills Police report and your first weeks

Beverly Hills runs its own police department, so BHPD, at 464 N. Rexford Dr., handles a fatal crash inside city limits, not LAPD. The city's Traffic Collision Reports page says you can buy copies of collision reports online through LexisNexis. Other police records go through the BHPD Records Bureau, which the city lists at 310-285-2184, and the collision reports page lists 310-285-2187. The bureau is open Monday through Saturday from 7:30 am to 9:00 pm and Sunday from 8:00 am to 5:30 pm. Reports on a death take time, and early versions may leave out witnesses or get the sequence of events wrong. Do not wait for the final report to act. In the first weeks, write down every witness name you have, save photos and texts from your loved one's phone, keep the funeral and medical bills, and never give a recorded statement to an insurance adjuster. If a store or home near the crash has a camera, we send preservation letters fast. If a vehicle's black box or a rideshare app trip record might matter, we demand those too. Part of a death case is simply reaching the facts before the other side shapes them.

Who can file a wrongful death claim, and what is a survival claim?

California decides who can bring a wrongful death case in Code of Civil Procedure section 377.60. The surviving spouse or registered domestic partner and the children come first. Grandchildren can stand in for a child who has died. If the person who died left no children or other descendants, the people who would inherit under intestate succession, such as parents, may bring it. Certain dependents can also qualify, including a putative spouse, stepchildren, and parents who relied on the person who died. A minor who lived in the household for the previous 180 days and depended on the person for half or more of their support can file too. The court divides any award among the heirs under section 377.61. A separate survival action under sections 377.30 and 377.34 belongs to the personal representative or successor in interest. It recovers losses the person suffered before death, such as medical bills and lost earnings, and it can include punitive damages. A survival claimant must file a sworn declaration with a certified death certificate under section 377.32. Families often mix up the two claims, and that mistake can cost money. We sort out who holds which right at the start, so no one's claim is filed late or in the wrong name.

Two deadlines: two years for a driver, six months for a city

Most wrongful death suits against a private driver or company must be filed within two years under Code of Civil Procedure section 335.1. The clock ordinarily starts on the date of death. When a public entity is involved, the clock is far shorter. You must present a written government claim for a death within six months (Gov. Code section 911.2). For a claim against the City of Beverly Hills, the City Clerk's Office at 455 N. Rexford Dr., Room 290, accepts it, and the city's own claim form repeats the six-month rule. A crash tied to a state highway, a City of Los Angeles street, or LA County property needs a claim with that agency instead. If the six months pass, you can ask for leave to file a late claim, but you must apply within a reasonable time and no more than one year after the death (Gov. Code section 911.4). If the agency rejects your claim in writing, you then have six months to sue (Gov. Code section 945.6). Most families never meet these rules until it is almost too late. Call early, even if you are unsure a public agency is involved. We will check road design, signal timing, and who maintains the roadway.

Cedars-Sinai, the Stanley Mosk courthouse, and how Moe runs your case

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, at 8700 Beverly Blvd. in Los Angeles near Beverly Hills, has been a Level I adult trauma center since 1984. Hospital records from those final hours matter. They document injuries, treatment, and the cost of care that the survival claim can recover. The Beverly Hills Courthouse is on Burton Way, but Los Angeles Superior Court Rule 2.3 requires unlimited civil wrongful death and injury suits to be filed in the Central District at the Stanley Mosk Courthouse or in the North District in Antelope Valley. For a Beverly Hills family, that usually means Stanley Mosk at 111 N. Hill Street in downtown Los Angeles. Our office at 527 W 7th Street, Suite 924 is a short trip from there. Insurers will argue comparative fault. Under Li v. Yellow Cab Co. and Horwich v. Superior Court, your family can still recover if your loved one was partly at fault, though the award shrinks by that share. Low policy limits are common too, since California's minimum liability limits are $30,000 per person. Moe gathers the evidence, looks for every available policy, including uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage, and tells you plainly what your case looks like. Past results do not predict a similar outcome, but he once recovered a $100,000 policy-limit uninsured motorist payment for a woman other firms had turned down.

Talk to a Beverly Hills wrongful death lawyer

Call (323) 716-1992 for a free, no-obligation case review. You pay nothing unless we win, and we'll handle the insurance companies for you. Learn more about our wrongful death representation →

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