When the government hurts someone, it answers for it.

When the badge is the defendant

Officers are allowed to use the force a situation reasonably requires. They are not allowed to use more. We handle cases where an arrest, stop or search turned into a beating, a shooting, a taser deployment or a K9 bite that the circumstances never justified, and cases where someone was arrested, detained or charged without a lawful basis at all.

We also handle deaths and serious injuries inside jails, prisons and immigration detention. A facility that takes a person into custody takes on the duty to keep that person alive. When it fails, the cause is usually one of a few things: medical conditions that were reported and ignored, mental-health crises that went untreated, suicide risks that staff knew about and did not watch, restraint that compressed the chest or airway, overdoses on drugs the facility let in, or violence from other inmates that staff should have prevented. Each of those is a case we know how to build.

Who we represent

• Families who lost a parent, child or sibling to police or in a jail cell.
• People seriously injured during an arrest, a traffic stop or a search.
• People held in custody without adequate medical or mental-health care.
• People arrested, jailed or charged without cause.
• Witnesses and bystanders hurt in police operations.

The six-month clock

If the defendant is a city, a county or the State of California, state law does not let you simply file a lawsuit. Under the Government Claims Act you must first present a written claim to that public entity within six months of the injury or death. If the claim is rejected, you then have six months from the rejection to sue. Miss the first deadline and your state-law claims are usually gone, with narrow exceptions that are hard to win.

Federal civil-rights claims under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 work differently. There is no claim requirement, and the deadline is two years. The federal claim is often the heart of a case against an officer or a department, and California's Bane Act adds its own cause of action and, like the federal statute, lets a winning plaintiff recover attorney's fees from the defendant.

We say this plainly because it matters: families in grief routinely miss the six-month deadline and lose their state claims. The first months after a death are spent on a funeral, a coroner's report that has not come back, and an agency that will not return calls. Six months pass quickly. If you are reading this and someone you love has died in custody or at the hands of police, call now, even if you are not sure you want to sue.

Evidence disappears fast

Under California law, body-worn camera footage of a critical incident such as a shooting or a use of force causing death or serious injury must generally be released within 45 days, and agencies can delay that only on specific grounds. Other evidence has no such rule. Surveillance video from nearby businesses is overwritten in days. Jail medical and classification records, cell-check logs, radio traffic and dispatch recordings can be lost, altered or buried in a records request that takes a year. Witnesses move or stop answering.

When we take a case we send preservation demands to every agency involved immediately, request the coroner and autopsy reports, pull the jail's medical records and policies, and get investigators to the scene and to the witnesses before memory and footage fade. We do this in the first week, not after a claim is filed.

What a case can recover

When someone has died, California wrongful-death law compensates the family for the loss of the decedent's financial support, companionship, care and guidance. The estate can separately recover for the decedent's own pain and suffering before death, and for medical and funeral costs. When someone survives, the case covers medical costs, lost earnings and the physical and emotional harm of what was done. Federal and state civil-rights law allow punitive damages against individual officers whose conduct was malicious or reckless, and both allow a winning plaintiff's attorney's fees to be paid by the defendant rather than out of the recovery.

Why a trial firm

Government defendants rarely pay fairly before trial. Their lawyers are paid by the hour and by the taxpayer, they know most firms will settle for whatever is offered, and they price cases accordingly. Officers assert qualified immunity, which can end a federal claim before a jury hears it unless the facts and the law are developed with care. Holding the department itself responsible requires proof under Monell that a policy, a custom or a failure to train caused the harm, which means discovery into years of records the agency does not want to produce.

That work only pays off if the defendant believes you will try the case. We will. Our partners try cases to verdict, and the firms behind LaCour Trial Lawyers have recovered more than $200 million for the people we represent. That is the posture a government defendant notices, and it is what moves the number.

This page is general information about California and federal law as of October 2026, not legal advice. Deadlines depend on facts we need to hear from you. Nothing here is a promise about what any claim is worth.