5 Situations Where the Statute of Limitations Is “Tolled” in California

The statute of limitations in the California legal system sets a strict deadline within which a lawsuit must be filed. In most cases, failing to file within this period usually means you lose the right to sue. Nevertheless, the law has some exceptions to this rule, including the doctrine of tolling, which stops the statutory time from running under some circumstances. This principle of law is meant to safeguard the right of a claimant to seek redress when certain situations hinder their capacity to file a timely suit.

The information below outlines five main situations in which the statute of limitations is tolled in California.

1. The Plaintiff is a Minor (Under 18)

California law protects those who have experienced a legal injury before the age of majority. Code of Civil Procedure 352(a) extends the statute of limitations when the injured party is less than 18 years old when the injury occurs. In legal terms, the statute of limitations is put on hold. The statute of limitations does not run against the minor until he/she turns 18, whereupon the statutory period is available to the minor.

The basis of this rule is the public policy that minors do not have the legal capacity and experience to identify a legal injury, know their rights, and explore the intricacies of the justice system. The tolling effect of this rule provides a minor with extra time to pursue justice.

For example, in a situation involving a 10-year-old child who is injured as a passenger in a car accident. The statute of limitations on a personal injury claim in California is two years. This two-year statute does not begin on the day of the accident. Instead, it was put on hold after eight years. Tolling ends when the minor turns 18, and the two-year limitations period begins on that date. As a result, this person has up to his/her 20th birthday, in which he/she can sue on his/her behalf due to the injuries he/she sustained as a child. This ensures that the minor will not lose his/her right to legal redress because of their age when the harm occurs.

However, waiting is not always the best choice. The law offers a means of bringing a suit in the name of a minor before adulthood by a guardian ad litem. This is an adult appointed by the court, usually a parent or a close relative, and is allowed to act in the minor's best interest, including filing a claim even with a guardian ad litem. Filing a claim nearer the time of the incident has several benefits, namely:

• It immediately retains critical evidence, including car data, scene photographs, and physical items

• It is much more credible that the witness's testimony is based on fresh memories

• It is possible that the sooner the better, the settlement funds or a court award can be received, which may be used to cover the ongoing medical costs, educational requirements, and other expenses of the child, instead of letting the child wait until adulthood to be compensated for the harm.

2. Plaintiff is of Unsound Mind (Lacks Legal Capacity)

Similarly to its provisions protecting minors, the law also puts the statute of limitations on hold for people incapable of decision-making due to a lack of legal status. According to CCP §352(a), when a person lacks legal capacity due to mental incapacity, the statute is suspended for the duration of the mental condition. The statute of limitations is tolled until the mental condition is terminated.

It is important to note that the term insane in this legal setting does not imply any medical diagnosis but a legal criterion. It is a condition where an individual cannot comprehend the nature of their actions and consequences, and cannot manage his/her affairs or understand his/her legal rights and duties. This means that the right of an individual to bring a claim is not unjustly eliminated due to an inability to take action due to a cognitive impairment.

Lacking legal capacity, or being of unsound mind, includes a variety of extreme conditions, such as:

• An individual who has entered a coma as a result of an act of medical malpractice

• A person in the later stages of dementia or Alzheimer's disease

• Someone who has a severe developmental disability that makes them unable to comprehend the legal process

The key factor is whether the person understands and acts on their legal rights.

The state of incapacity is quite a critical legal requirement, and it cannot be proved easily. Significant evidence is needed to establish this state. A court will not just listen to the plaintiff. The claim must be supported by extensive medical reports, psychiatric reports, and, in most cases, expert witnesses who can testify to the severity, duration, and impact of the person's condition.

The purpose of tolling in this situation is to keep the cause of action alive until the person is of sound mind to take action.

For example, consider a case where a patient receives negligent treatment and, as a result, is comatose for one year. The statute of limitations in California on medical malpractice is usually one year after the date of discovery. In this case, the clock would be tolled one year throughout the period that the patient is in a coma.

Assuming that the patient awakens and regains mental competence after that year. The statute of limitations would only start to run on that date of recovery, and he/she would have a year to file his/her malpractice claim. If the incapacity is permanent, a conservator may be needed to institute the lawsuit on behalf of the person and thus have his/her rights vindicated.

3. The Defendant Is Out of State

Historically, one of the most critical tolling provisions concerns a defendant's physical absence within the state. Code of Civil Procedure §351 provides that when an individual flees the state upon an accrual of a cause of action against him/her, the time he/she spends out of California does not count towards the time the action must be brought.

The intent of this statute was simple in its original inception: to ensure that criminals could not avoid justice by simply crossing state lines and thus becoming unlocatable or inaccessible to pursue via a lawsuit. In a time when there was no modern communication and legal procedure, the absence of a defendant presented an insurmountable obstacle to plaintiffs.

However, courts now rarely apply this tolling rule due to modern service laws. The development of long-arm statutes and other legal instruments that enable effective service of process upon defendants outside California is the leading cause of this change. When a plaintiff can continue to serve the defendant with a lawsuit, for example, by certified mail or by serving a designated agent in the state, then the defendant is said to be amenable to service, and the fact that he/she is located physically outside of California is immaterial. Courts in these situations have found that CCP 351 tolling is not applicable since the defendant's absence no longer stands in the way of the plaintiff prosecuting their claim. This nuance is critical for legal practitioners to understand, as relying on this tolling provision without confirming the defendant is not amenable to service is a common and potentially fatal error for a case.

These limitations notwithstanding, the rule may still be applicable in certain circumstances. For example, a case where the defendant in a breach of contract case, with a four-year statute of limitations, relocates to Nevada right after the breach. If the defendant cannot be found or served in the state of Nevada using any legally accepted method after six months, a court could toll the statute of limitations for six months. This would extend the time the plaintiff can file his/her case. The key factor is not merely the defendant’s absence, but whether that absence genuinely prevents the plaintiff from effectuating service and moving the case forward. Consequently, the applicability of the tolling provision is a fact-sensitive inquiry regarding the defendant's amenability to service.

4. The Defendant Willfully Concealed the Truth (Fraudulent Concealment)

Another critical basis for tolling the statute of limitations is the doctrine of fraudulent concealment, which applies the equitable principle that a defendant should not be allowed to take advantage of his/her deception. It applies when a defendant deliberately hides facts so the plaintiff does not realize they have a claim. The statute of limitations is tolled as long as the fraudulent activities of the defendant succeed in concealing the truth. However, this doctrine is not the same as the discovery rule, which applies when a plaintiff is ignorant of his/her injury.

This form of tolling can apply when someone in a position of trust uses his/her role to hide wrongdoing, for example:

• In a medical malpractice lawsuit, a surgeon who knows that he/she made a surgical error could purposefully change the patient's medical records to eliminate any indication of the error.

• In business fraud, a financial advisor could make fraudulent account statements indicating that the client has earned phantom profits, thus hiding that the advisor was mismanaging or stealing the client's investments.

• A product manufacturer who finds out about some dangerous flaw in its product during internal safety checks covers it up and publicly denies any problem with the product so that injured consumers do not realize the actual cause of the injury.

In all the above situations, the defendant’s deliberate concealment is the direct cause of the plaintiff’s delayed discovery. To effectively plead this doctrine, a plaintiff should generally prove that he/she exercised reasonable care in determining the facts and that his/her inability to uncover the claim was because of the defendant's order. To effectively plead this doctrine, a plaintiff should generally prove that he/she exercised reasonable care in determining the facts and that his/her inability to uncover the claim was because the defendant misled him/her.

Once fraudulent concealment is established, the statute of limitations is suspended until the plaintiff, acting with reasonable diligence, learns or ought to have discovered the truth of the facts underlying his/her action. This will prevent a wrongdoer from employing fraud to attack the plaintiff and a shield against liability.

5. You Were Unaware That You were Injured

The discovery rule is a typical exception that depends heavily on the facts of the case to the general statute of limitations, providing a life-saving lifeline to the uninformed plaintiff who does not know:

• He/she is hurt

• What caused the injury

• When the injury occurred

This doctrine delays the start of the statute of limitations until the plaintiff knows or should know of the injury and its cause, until the plaintiff learns or with reasonable care should have learned about the injury itself, and also that it was probably caused by the defendant doing something wrong.

Contrary to the typical situation in which the statute of limitations is considered to have begun running on the event date, the discovery rule recognizes that some injuries, particularly those involving latent injury or covered-up negligence, might not be readily apparent. This exception prevents inequitable exclusion of claims in which a plaintiff, due to no fault of his/her own, had been unable to file a case within the standard time frame.

The concept of reasonable diligence is critical in applying the discovery rule because it is the objective standard against which the time the plaintiff should have learned about his/her injury and its cause is measured. This is not a test of what the plaintiff knew, but a test of what a reasonable, prudent person would have known under the same circumstances to investigate their symptoms or circumstances. The plaintiff should exercise care and caution as a reasonable person would to safeguard his/her interests. This may be through:

• Consulting a doctor when experiencing unusual symptoms

• Questioning about a procedure

• Researching possible causes of a new condition

It is not about whether the plaintiff had specialized medical or legal knowledge, but whether he/she used ordinary care when observing his/her condition and relating it to a possible external factor. Here are a few examples to illustrate:

• Consider the case of medical malpractice wherein a patient undergoes an operation and a surgical sponge is accidentally left in the body. The statute of limitations does not start on the operation date, but many years later, when the foreign object is finally discovered due to an X-ray or other diagnostic equipment. In this case, the patient would not have had any direct means of knowing the negligence.

• In the case of toxic exposure, an individual may contract a serious disease like cancer several years after exposure to asbestos at work. In this case, the statute of limitations would start as soon as they are definitively diagnosed to have the cancer and have a reasonable ground to believe that their condition was connected to the exposure to the asbestos. This will likely need a medical opinion or further investigation to determine the causal relationship.

• A homeowner discovers that his/her home has severe foundation issues, like numerous cracks, eight years after the house was constructed. If it is subsequently established that this damage arose due to poor soil grading during the construction process, then the statute of limitations may only start to run on the day the cracks were first noticed and could have been detected. This is so because this is the time when the homeowner, acting with reasonable diligence, would have been in a position to know of the damage to their property.

What Occurs at the End of Tolling?

Once a tolling period is over, the legal stopwatch suspended because of a specific claim is immediately set into motion again, and the plaintiff is put under the time constraint of the statute of limitations. When the state of suspension is lifted and the timeline is again set into motion, it is a critical moment in any legal claim. The plaintiff must act fast to ensure the right to file a lawsuit is not lost. How the statute resumes depends on the type of tolling event, which creates a pivotal distinction in calculating the remaining time.

It is necessary to explain whether the clock of the statute of limitations goes back to zero or only continues where it was left. In some tolling cases, including the case of a minor becoming an adult (18), the statute of limitations on claims accrued by a minor is often tolled (restarted) as of the date of majority, effectively providing the minor with a whole new statutory period to bring. The reason is that the legal disability of a minority is regarded as making the commencement of a claim impossible. However, in most other tolling situations, for example, when a defendant abandons the state and later re-enters, the stopwatch simply resumes at the time at which it was paused. The time already passed before the tolling period commenced is still included, and the plaintiff is left with the balance of the original statutory time.

For example, a claim with a one-year statute of limitations would not give the plaintiff a year to file after the six-month tolling period is over in the case that two months had already passed before the tolling event. Instead, the two months that have passed before tolling are not deducted, so that when the clock is restarted, the plaintiff has only 10 months to file his/her lawsuit (one year, or 12 months, minus 2 months that have already passed).

No grace period or extension is allowed merely because the claim has been terminated. Plaintiffs and their attorneys have to be exceptionally careful to estimate correctly the time that remains and make sure that all legal procedures, including the actual filing of a complaint, are done far before the expiry of the statutory period that was paused to prevent the fatal effect of having their claim become permanently inadmissible.

Find a Personal Injury Attorney Near Me

Understanding tolling is essential. It can mean the difference between filing on time and losing your case. It is the difference between being able to seek justice and losing your right to do so. The discovery rule and other vital exceptions recognize the realities that the intricacies of life can delay awareness of an injury or the ability to pursue a claim. These exceptions, however, are complex and fact-specific and need a precise knowledge of how they apply to your particular case.

When you or a loved one has been injured and you believe you may be in a situation with a tolling exception to your claim, it is time to take action. Discuss your case with attorneys at The LA Personal Injury Law Firm. We understand the law's intricacies and will help you secure a fair assessment of the case and have your rights guaranteed. Call us today at 310-935-0089 to determine your options and receive the legal advice you require.