Who Is Actually Handling Your Personal Injury Case?
Who handles your case depends on the firm, and California does not standardize it. What is typical is a division of labor: a non-attorney handles day-to-day contact and document work, specialists cover narrower pieces like medical records and liens, and an attorney carries the legal judgment.
Some smaller firms/practices can even see individual lawyers handling day-to-day activities.
The state sets no limit on how many cases one lawyer can take. It does limit what non-attorney staff may do, and it places the legal consequences of their work on the supervising attorney.
At DK Law, for example, your Case Manager is your main point of contact throughout your claim. Behind the scenes, a dedicated liens team handles healthcare liens and reimbursement claims, while a separate bills and records team gathers and organizes your medical documentation. You can find the breakdown further down this page.
Key Takeaways
- Non-attorney staff performing substantial work on your case is normal, legal, and contemplated by the California Rules of Professional Conduct.
- A California paralegal is barred by statute from giving legal advice, representing you in court, or setting your fee, and the supervising attorney is personally liable for harm caused by the paralegal’s negligence or misconduct.
- Whether to accept a settlement is your decision alone, and a retainer clause purporting to give your attorney that decision is void in California.
- California imposes no caseload cap and no staffing disclosure requirement on private attorneys, so there is no number you can check your firm against.
Is it normal for a paralegal to handle your case instead of your lawyer?
Yes. The comment to California’s Rule 5.3 describes secretaries, investigators, law student interns, and paraprofessionals as people who act for the lawyer in delivering the lawyer’s professional services. Delegation is the assumed baseline, not an exception a firm has to justify.
There is a reason this arrangement usually favors you. Paralegal time costs less than attorney time, someone is reachable when your attorney is in a deposition, and a staffer who handles nothing but medical records catches things a generalist misses.
The rule that makes it safe is one nobody publishes. Under Business and Professions Code section 6452, an attorney who uses a paralegal’s services is liable for any harm caused by that paralegal’s negligence, misconduct, or violation of the paralegal statute. The lawyer cannot point at the staffer.
What can a paralegal do, and what can they not do?
Section 6450 permits a paralegal to perform substantial legal work under an attorney’s direction and supervision, including case planning and management, legal research, interviewing clients, gathering facts, and drafting legal documents. That covers most of what happens on a personal injury file.
The same section then lists what a paralegal may not do. No legal advice. No representing a client in court. No setting the fee you will be charged, which the supervising attorney must establish. Settlement advice sits on the wrong side of that line too, because recommending whether to accept an offer is legal advice.
California also regulates the job title itself, which no other state does. A person cannot call themselves a paralegal on a business card, letterhead, or website without meeting the statutory education requirements and working under attorney supervision. Every two years, a California paralegal completes eight hours of continuing education, four of them in legal ethics.
Which decisions can only your lawyer make?
The settlement decision is not your lawyer’s to make at all. Rule 1.2 requires an attorney to abide by the client’s decision whether to settle a matter, and Rule 1.4.1 requires prompt communication of all amounts, terms, and conditions of any written settlement offer.
In 2021, in Amjadi v. Brown, a California appellate court voided a settlement entered by attorneys who relied on a retainer clause giving them sole discretion to accept offers. The court held the clause invalid to the extent it purported to authorize settlement over the client’s objection, and referred the attorneys to the State Bar.
Once a complaint is filed, there is also a formal answer to who is responsible. A named, licensed attorney is your attorney of record, and under Code of Civil Procedure section 284 that person can only be changed by your consent or a court order. The name appears on the docket. You can look it up.
One more thing worth knowing about the people who call you. The comment to Rule 5.4 permits a firm to pay a non-attorney employee a salary or a general bonus, but prohibits compensation based on a percentage or share of the fees in specific cases. Nobody at a California firm can lawfully be paid a cut of your settlement.
Does California limit how many cases one lawyer can take?
No. There is no caseload cap, no staff-to-attorney ratio, and no requirement that a firm disclose either one. The Rules of Professional Conduct require reasonable supervision and competent representation, and stop there.
The Judicial Council’s standards for court-appointed dependency counsel set 141 clients per full-time attorney as a base and 77 as the optimal figure, and the state commissioned RAND-led work on public defender workloads. For privately retained civil attorneys, the legislature has left it alone.
How your case is handled at DK Law
Your Case Manager is your main point of contact throughout your claim. They know your file, can answer questions about where things stand, and are who you reach without waiting for a callback.
Behind the scenes, specific parts of your claim are handled by dedicated teams who focus on that work alone:
- Case Manager. Your point of contact through the life of the claim. Manages the case, document requests, and keeps you current on what’s happened and the next steps.
- Bills and records team. Gathers and organizes your medical bills and treatment records from every provider you’ve seen. A claim can only be valued based on the records that have actually been collected, and gaps aren’t always obvious until later in the process, so this step matters more than it might seem.
- Liens team. Manages healthcare liens and reimbursement claims against your recovery, including negotiating reductions where possible. This is often what determines what you actually take home, not just the settlement figure you see. Our guide on negotiating medical liens after a settlement covers this in more detail.
- Accounting. Handles disbursement once your claim resolves, including the trust accounting rules that govern how settlement funds are held and released.
The reason for this specialization is simple: these are genuinely different skills, and depth matters. Someone who negotiates lien reductions every day will consistently get better results than a generalist who handles it only a handful of times a year. The same is true for collecting and organizing medical records, it takes focused, repeated experience to catch what a generalist might miss.
Talk to someone about your case
If you cannot get a straight answer about who is responsible for your claim, or the person you can reach cannot answer the questions that matter, that is worth acting on rather than tolerating. Firms that resolve claims on volume rather than individual attorney judgment have a name for it, and our guide on what a settlement mill is explains how that model works.
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