Should a Personal Injury Firm Publish How Long a Case Takes

How long a case takes is asked almost as often as what it is worth, and it is answered worse. A firm that will not quote a number tends to say nothing at all, and a firm that will quote one tends to quote the fast version. Both are avoidable. The question has a genuinely useful answer that involves no prediction, and building it is one of the few pieces of content in this practice area where the accurate version is also the more persuasive one.

Two clocks, and readers reliably confuse them

In California an action for assault, battery, or injury to or the death of an individual caused by the wrongful act or neglect of another must be brought within two years. That is Code of Civil Procedure section 335.1, and it is the deadline to start a case.

It is not how long a case takes. Readers merge the two constantly — a person who has heard “two years” often believes that is when the matter concludes, and a person who has been told a case takes years often believes they still have years to call. The second error is the one that costs someone a claim, and it is created by content that answers the duration question without ever naming the filing deadline as a separate thing.

Separating the two clocks in the first paragraph is the highest-value sentence on the page. It is also the sentence most competing pages do not contain.

Publish the stages, not the months

The honest structure is sequential rather than numeric: investigation and treatment, demand, negotiation, filing if negotiation fails, discovery, and resolution by settlement or trial. Each stage has a driver a reader can understand, and the largest driver early on is usually not the court at all — it is that a claim cannot be valued sensibly until the client’s treatment has reached a stable point.

That single explanation answers the question behind the question. A client asking how long it takes is usually asking why nothing appears to be happening, and “your medical picture is not finished yet” is both true and reassuring in a way that a range of months is not.

The fork the reader cannot see coming

Some cases are placed on an entirely different track. A complex case in California is an action that requires exceptional judicial management to avoid placing unnecessary burdens on the court or the litigants and to expedite the case, keep costs reasonable, and promote effective decision making. In deciding, the court considers factors including numerous pretrial motions raising difficult or novel legal issues, management of a large number of witnesses or a substantial amount of documentary evidence, a large number of separately represented parties, coordination with related actions in other counties or courts, and substantial postjudgment judicial supervision. The rule is California Rules of Court, rule 3.400.

This is the most useful thing a firm can publish on duration, because it is the only part of the answer that is categorical rather than estimated. A case is on the ordinary track or it is not, the criteria are written down, and a reader whose matter involves many defendants or parallel proceedings can recognise themselves in the list. No competitor quoting an average has told them this.

Local procedure sets the pace, and it is knowable

Duration is a county-level fact more than a state-level one, and a firm that practises in a particular court knows things the averages do not. In Sacramento County, complex civil cases are assigned for all purposes to one of two departments, and case management conferences in those cases are typically scheduled for Fridays at 10:30 a.m., though a party may be ordered to appear at a different time because of a conflict in the court’s schedule.

That level of specificity is not decoration. It is the strongest available demonstration that the firm actually appears in that courthouse, and it is the kind of detail an assistant will attribute, because it is checkable and nobody guesses it.

The rule that names this page specifically

Most advertising-rule caution in this practice area is general. Here it is not. Business and Professions Code section 6157.2 prohibits an advertisement containing statements or symbols saying the licensee can generally obtain immediate cash or quick settlements — the timeline claim is called out in the statute by name, alongside the prohibition on guaranteeing an outcome.

So a page on duration is in the rule’s direct line of sight in a way that a page on, say, practice areas is not. The safe form and the useful form are the same form: describe what determines the pace, name the fork, and decline to forecast. A firm that explains why it will not promise a timeline is more credible than one that promises a short one, and it is the version that survives being quoted back.

Keeping it accurate

Court practices change more often than statutes do. A departmental assignment or a standing conference time is exactly the kind of fact that is right when written and quietly wrong eighteen months later, and it is worse than a vague page precisely because it is specific enough to be relied on.

Publish a review date, name the source for each procedural detail, and treat anything drawn from a court’s own page as carrying a shorter shelf life than anything drawn from a statute. Where a detail could not be confirmed, say so rather than rounding it into a general statement — an unresolved detail that is labelled is honest, and an unresolved detail that has been smoothed over is a claim.

Where it belongs

This page pairs with the fee page and the case value page, and the three together answer the whole of what a prospective client is actually weighing: how long, how much, and what it costs me. It does not belong next to case results, for the same reason the value page does not — a duration figure sitting beside past outcomes reads as a forecast, whatever the surrounding text says.

A duration answer only reaches a client who has already found the firm, which is everything that has to work before this question is asked.