A car hits you while you are walking, and you would think the driver is clearly at fault. Often the law agrees. But the driver’s insurance company has one job, and it is not to be fair to you. Their job is to pay you as little as they can. The fastest way to do that is to make the crash your fault, even a little. In California, even a little can cost you thousands. The tool they use for this has a name. It is called comparative fault, and most hurt people never hear of it until it is used against them.
How comparative fault works in California
California uses a rule called pure comparative negligence. It sounds complicated, but it is not. Someone, a jury or an adjuster, decides how much of the crash was each person’s fault, and your payout drops by your share. Say your case is worth 100,000 dollars. If they pin 30 percent of the blame on you, you do not collect 100,000. You collect 70,000. The insurance company just saved itself 30,000, all by telling a story where you were partly to blame. Now you can see why they work so hard to tell it.
Here is the part that stings. California sets no cutoff, so even if the crash was mostly your fault, you can still recover something. That cuts both ways. The driver who hit you can be 90 percent at fault and still fight to push your share up to 40 or 50 percent. Each point they add to your side is money they get to keep.
The stories they tell to shift the blame
Adjusters do not invent wild lies. They take a small true detail and build a whole story on it, and on a busy LA street there is almost always a detail to grab. Watch for the ones they reach for most:
- You stepped off the curb a second before the light changed
- You were looking at your phone when the car came
- You crossed in the middle of the block, not at the corner
- You wore dark clothes at night
- You had a drink at dinner before you walked home
None of these mean the driver gets to hit you. A driver still has to watch the road and stop for people. But each detail is a seed, and a good adjuster grows it into the line they love: the pedestrian came out of nowhere. Your job, and your lawyer’s job, is to pull that story apart before it takes root.
What actually decides fault
The story the insurance company tells is not the same as the evidence. Real fault gets decided by what can be proven, and that is where a case is won or lost. The driver’s speed matters, and a nearby camera or a car’s black box can show it. The crosswalk signal matters, and the city keeps timing records. Where your body and the car came to rest matters, and the police diagram captures it. Witnesses matter most of all, and the person who saw the whole thing may have already walked away.
This kind of proof can beat a made-up story, but only if someone gathers it fast. Cameras record over their footage in days. Witnesses forget what they saw, and skid marks wash away in the next rain. The evidence that clears you is often the evidence that disappears first.
What to do so the blame does not stick
You cannot control the story the adjuster wants to tell, but you can take away the pieces they need to tell it. Call the police and make sure a report gets written, because that report is the first neutral account of what happened. Get the names and numbers of anyone who saw it, since a witness who backs you up is worth more than any argument you make later. If you can, photograph the crosswalk and where the car stopped, or ask someone to do it while you wait for help. Then get medical care the same day and tell them exactly how you were hit.
One move carries more weight than all the rest. Do not give a recorded statement to the driver’s insurance company before you talk to a lawyer. The adjuster on that call is friendly for a reason. They are trained to walk you into saying something that sounds like maybe it was partly my fault. They will use that one sentence to cut your check for months.
Do not let them decide your share for you
California gives you two years from the date you were hit to bring a claim. That window feels wide, but the evidence that protects you from the blame game starts vanishing in days. The sooner your side is locked down with real proof, the less room the insurance company has to shift the fault onto you.
If a car hit you while you were walking anywhere in Los Angeles, do not accept their version of events. The Law Offices of Howard Kornberg has spent decades taking apart these blame-the-victim stories for hurt pedestrians across LA. Call 310-474-5588 for a free review, and let us tell you what your case is really worth before an adjuster tells you what they wish it was.
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