If you were injured on someone else’s property due to unsafe conditions, a premises liability attorney in California can help you understand your legal rights and determine whether you have a valid claim. Property owners and other responsible parties generally have a duty to maintain reasonably safe conditions and address foreseeable hazards.
Whether you suffered a slip and fall, a trip and fall, or another injury caused by dangerous property conditions, an attorney can evaluate your case, identify potentially liable parties, and help you pursue compensation for medical expenses, lost wages, and pain and suffering.
Key Takeaways
- California law requires ordinary care in the management of property. It does not make an owner responsible for every injury that happens there.
- The duty is the same across the category; what has to be proved shifts with the kind of hazard involved.
- Who controlled the area is treated as a question in its own right, and the answer is often not the business whose name is on the door.
- Private claims and claims involving public property run on different clocks, and the public route has a second deadline after the first one is met.
- Evidence on commercial property is frequently recorded over on a routine schedule, which makes the timing of a first call a practical question rather than a formality.
What California Property Owners Actually Owe
The duty comes from Civil Code section 1714, the general negligence statute, which the California Supreme Court has quoted as providing that “Everyone is responsible, not only for the result of his or her willful acts, but also for an injury occasioned to another by his or her want of ordinary care or skill in the management of his or her property or person.”
Two words in that sentence do most of the work. Ordinary sets the standard at reasonable care rather than perfection. Management locates the duty in how the property is run — inspection, upkeep, response to a known problem — rather than in the bare fact of ownership.
What follows from that is the thing most people get wrong in both directions. An owner is not an insurer of everyone who comes onto the property, so an injury alone establishes nothing. But an owner also cannot discharge the duty by not looking, because management includes finding out. Our page on California slip and fall claims sets out how knowledge of a hazard is treated.
The Category Is Wider Than Slip and Fall
Premises liability covers injuries arising from the condition of property and from how it is managed, which reaches well beyond wet floors — stairways and railings, lighting, lifts and escalators, pools, falling objects, construction areas left open, and the security arrangements on a property where that is the risk at issue.
The duty does not change across those. What changes is the evidence. A hazard that appeared minutes before an injury raises a different question from one built into the structure, and a claim about how a property was secured is proved from different material again. That is why the category has a single name and a dozen different shapes.
The Question That Decides Who You Would Be Calling About
This is the part that most often turns out to matter, and it is the part almost nobody searching this question is thinking about yet.
Before anything about hazards or notice, a premises claim has to establish who was responsible for the area where the injury happened. The Judicial Council’s civil jury instructions treat this seriously enough to give it a separate instruction: alongside the premises liability elements and the basic duty of care, the 1000 series carries a distinct instruction on the extent of control over a premises area, and another on unsafe conditions.
Control is a separate question because ownership, leasehold, occupancy and day-to-day control routinely sit with different parties. A shopping centre landlord, the tenant operating the unit, a management company engaged to maintain common areas, a contractor working on site that week, and a public entity responsible for the adjoining pavement can all be distinct entities with distinct responsibilities, and the boundary between them is contractual rather than visible.
The practical consequence is that the obvious defendant is often not the right one, or not the only one. Someone who fell in a parking structure may be looking at the store they were visiting while the maintenance obligation sat elsewhere entirely. Sorting that out is a records exercise, and it is the reason an early conversation tends to be about documents rather than about the injury.
Two Clocks, and a Third That Is Easy to Miss
Premises claims do not all run on the same deadline, and the difference depends on who controlled the property rather than on where the injury happened to occur.
Private property. The California Courts give the deadline for a personal injury claim as two years from the injury, under Code of Civil Procedure section 335.1.
Public property. A claim against a government agency has to be presented to the agency first. The California Courts state that for an injury to you or damage to something you own, that claim is due within six months from the injury, with exceptions.
The third one. Presenting the claim in time is not the end of the timetable. The California Courts state that once the agency mails a rejection, “you have 6 months from the date they mailed the rejection to file your lawsuit.” That period runs from the mailing, and it is considerably shorter than the two years a reader may believe applies. It is the deadline most often absent from general guidance on this subject, and the one most easily lost by assuming the hard part was over.
When Calling Actually Changes Something
Some situations are materially affected by an early conversation. Others are not, and it is worth being plain about both.
The circumstances where timing tends to matter:
- Control is unclear or shared. Leases, maintenance contracts and service agreements decide who was responsible, and they are not available to the person who was injured.
- A public entity may be involved. The six-month presentation period starts immediately, and the question of whether an entity is involved at all is sometimes not obvious from the location.
- The evidence is perishable. Recorded footage on commercial property is frequently overwritten on a routine schedule, and inspection and maintenance logs are retained according to a company’s own practice rather than anyone else’s needs.
- An insurer has made contact. Early contact ordinarily comes before the extent of an injury is understood.
And the circumstances where it may not change much: a minor incident with no lasting injury, clear facts, a single obvious occupier and a cooperative response is not a situation an attorney transforms. Asking costs nothing, but nobody needs to be told they have a case when they do not.
Talk to a California Premises Liability Attorney
The first conversation is less about the injury than about the property: who held it, who maintained it, what was recorded, and which deadline is running. Those are answerable now, and some of the material behind them will not exist indefinitely.
Vaksman Khalfin, PC acts for people injured on property across California, with Alan D. Khalfin leading that work from the San Mateo office. The first consultation is free. Related material sits in the California personal injury guides.
Reviewed by Alan D. Khalfin, Partner and Managing Attorney, Vaksman Khalfin, PC (admitted in California). Last reviewed: 10/16/2026
Frequently Asked Questions
Any injury arising from the condition of property or from how it was managed — a stairway or railing in disrepair, inadequate lighting, a lift or escalator fault, an unsecured pool, an object falling from height, an open construction area, or a hazard on a walking surface. The common thread is the condition and its management, not the specific hazard.
Early on, mostly identification and preservation: establishing who owned, leased, occupied or controlled the area, requesting that perishable evidence such as recorded footage be preserved before it is overwritten, obtaining inspection and maintenance records, and determining which deadline applies.
There is no general answer, and any figure offered for the category as a whole is describing a mixture rather than a case. What a particular claim turns on is usually identifiable early — most often whether the responsible party can be established and what the records show was known about the condition.
No reliable duration can be given in advance, and published averages combine claims resolved without proceedings with those that are litigated. What is knowable at the outset is the deadline, which is fixed, and whether a public entity is involved, which changes the timetable substantially.
The California Courts give two years from the injury for a personal injury claim under Code of Civil Procedure section 335.1. Where a government agency is involved the route is different: a claim must be presented to the agency, generally within six months of the injury, and if it is rejected there are six months from the date the rejection was mailed to file suit.
The government claim route applies, and it starts sooner than most people expect. The presentation deadline is generally six months from the injury, exceptions exist, and the second deadline after a rejection is mailed is short enough that it is worth knowing about before it arrives.
It depends on what the lease and any service agreements allocate, which is why control is treated as a question of its own rather than assumed from occupancy. More than one party can carry responsibility for the same area, and the documents rather than the signage decide it.
Consultations at Vaksman Khalfin, PC are free. Injury claims are handled on a contingency-fee basis: there is no upfront cost, and attorney's fees are owed only if we recover compensation for you. Fees and case costs are separate items, and how costs are handled is set out in the written agreement.
