Los Angeles & Orange County Personal Injury Law Firm – The Reeves Law Group

Accident and Injury cases Our Firm handles

The Reeves Law Group represents accident victims in Los Angeles and Orange County who have suffered serious harm due to someone else’s negligence. Our attorneys focus on three core areas where we have secured significant recoveries for clients: traffic accidents, serious injury claims, and water-related accidents.

Traffic Accidents

Southern California’s congested freeways and surface streets produce thousands of serious injury collisions every year. Insurance companies respond to these claims with delay tactics, liability disputes, and lowball settlement offers designed to minimize payouts. Our trial-ready approach forces insurers to value cases properly or face a jury.

Truck and Commercial Vehicle Accidents

Collisions with 18-wheelers, semi-trucks, delivery vehicles, buses, and commercial fleets cause devastating injuries due to the size and weight disparity between trucks and passenger vehicles. These cases are more complex than standard auto accidents—federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations govern driver hours, maintenance schedules, cargo securement, and licensing requirements. Multiple parties may share liability: the driver, trucking company, cargo loader, vehicle manufacturer, or maintenance contractor.

Derek Pakiz is the only attorney in California certified by the State Bar as a specialist in both Civil Trial Law and Truck Accident Law. This dual certification—held by no other lawyer among 250,000+ in the state—means your case is handled by counsel who understands the regulatory framework, knows how to preserve black box data and driver logs, and has the courtroom credentials to take trucking companies to trial.

Car and Auto Accidents

Rear-end collisions, intersection crashes, T-bone impacts, sideswipes, head-on collisions, and multi-vehicle pileups. Common causes include distracted driving, speeding, impaired driving, aggressive lane changes, failure to yield, and running red lights. We also handle single-vehicle accidents caused by road defects or vehicle malfunctions, and hit-and-run cases where the at-fault driver left the scene.

California follows a pure comparative negligence standard—you can recover damages even if you were partially at fault, reduced by your percentage of responsibility. Insurance adjusters exploit this rule by inflating victim fault to shrink settlements. We counter with accident reconstruction, witness testimony, and physical evidence that establishes what actually happened.

Uber, Lyft, and Rideshare Accidents

Rideshare collisions create insurance coverage disputes that don’t exist in typical car accident cases. Coverage depends on the driver’s status at the time of the crash: offline, waiting for a ride request, en route to pickup, or transporting a passenger. Each phase triggers different policy limits and different responsible insurers. Uber and Lyft’s corporate policies, the driver’s personal auto policy, and your own uninsured/underinsured motorist coverage may all come into play.

We identify every available source of recovery and handle coverage disputes with the multiple insurers involved. Whether you were a rideshare passenger, another motorist, a pedestrian, or a cyclist struck by a rideshare driver, we pursue maximum compensation from all liable parties.

Serious Injuries

Not every accident justifies hiring an attorney. The cases we take involve significant harm: injuries requiring surgery, extended treatment, or permanent impairment; trauma causing lasting disability or disfigurement; and deaths leaving families without their loved ones. These claims demand aggressive representation because the stakes—and the insurance company resistance—are highest.

Personal Injury

Personal injury law covers any harm caused by another party’s negligence, recklessness, or intentional misconduct. This includes vehicle accidents, premises liability incidents like slip-and-falls, dog bites, assaults on negligently secured property, defective products, and medical errors. The legal framework requires proving four elements: the defendant owed you a duty of care, breached that duty, caused your injury, and left you with compensable damages.

Damages in California personal injury cases include economic losses (medical expenses, future treatment costs, lost wages, diminished earning capacity, property damage) and non-economic losses (physical pain, emotional distress, loss of enjoyment of life, disfigurement, loss of consortium). In cases involving egregious conduct, punitive damages may apply.

Wrongful Death

When someone dies due to another party’s negligence—whether in a traffic collision, workplace incident, drowning, medical error, or violent crime—California law allows surviving family members to file a wrongful death claim. Eligible claimants include surviving spouses, domestic partners, children, and in some cases parents or other dependents.

Wrongful death damages compensate survivors for funeral and burial costs, loss of the deceased’s expected income and financial support, loss of companionship and consortium, and the grief and emotional suffering caused by the death. A separate survival action can recover damages the deceased would have claimed had they lived: medical bills incurred before death, pain and suffering experienced between injury and death, and lost earnings during that period.

Catastrophic Injury

Catastrophic injuries permanently alter the victim’s life: traumatic brain injuries causing cognitive deficits and personality changes; spinal cord damage resulting in paralysis, paraplegia, or quadriplegia; severe burns requiring grafts and reconstruction; amputations demanding prosthetics and rehabilitation; multiple fractures requiring hardware and long-term physical therapy; crush injuries with lasting nerve damage.

These cases require calculating lifetime damages: future medical care, surgical revisions, home healthcare, adaptive equipment, vehicle and home modifications, vocational retraining, and the ongoing impact on earning capacity and quality of life. We work with medical experts, life care planners, and economists to document the full scope of harm—figures that often reach into the millions.

Water-Related Accidents

Aquatic injuries and drownings demand specialized knowledge that most personal injury attorneys lack. Derek Pakiz is the rare exception: before practicing law, he worked for decades as a professional lifeguard and supervisor, handling rescues, enforcing safety protocols, and training rescue personnel. This operational background gives him unmatched insight into how drownings occur, what safety measures should have been in place, and who bears responsibility when those measures fail.

Drownings

Drowning is a leading cause of accidental death for children under five and remains a significant risk for all ages. Survival depends on response time—brain damage begins within minutes of oxygen deprivation. Victims who survive near-drowning incidents often suffer hypoxic brain injuries causing permanent cognitive and physical impairments.

Liability may rest with property owners who failed to install required barriers or self-latching gates, pool operators who provided inadequate supervision or untrained lifeguards, hotels and resorts with defective drain covers or missing safety equipment, daycare centers and schools that failed to supervise children near water, or product manufacturers whose defective pool equipment contributed to the incident. Derek Pakiz’s lifeguard background allows him to identify exactly where safety protocols broke down and hold responsible parties accountable.

Swimming Pool Accidents

Pool injuries extend beyond drowning: diving accidents causing spinal cord damage and paralysis, slip-and-falls on wet pool decks, drain entrapment incidents, chemical exposure from improperly maintained water, and electrocution from faulty underwater lighting or nearby electrical sources.

California’s Pool Safety Act mandates specific safety features for residential pools: barriers, covers, alarms, or other approved devices. Commercial pools face additional regulations covering depth markings, lifeguard requirements, water quality, and emergency equipment. When pool owners—whether residential homeowners, apartment complexes, hotels, gyms, or public facilities—fail to comply with these standards, they can be held liable for resulting injuries.

Boating Accidents

Collisions between vessels, crashes into fixed objects, falls overboard, propeller strikes, capsizing, and accidents involving jet skis, wakeboarding, and water skiing. Operator inexperience, intoxication, excessive speed, and failure to maintain proper lookout cause most boating accidents. Defective equipment—steering failures, throttle malfunctions, fuel system leaks—can also contribute.

Boating cases may involve maritime law, Coast Guard regulations, and different procedural rules than land-based accidents. Liable parties can include boat operators, vessel owners, rental companies, tour operators, or manufacturers of defective marine equipment. We pursue claims against all parties whose negligence contributed to your injuries on the water.