Santa Ana Personal Injury Lawyer

If you have been seriously injured in Santa Ana, you should not have to navigate your case through layers of case managers. At Kubota & Craig, founding partners Yoshiaki C. Kubota and Cynthia A. Craig personally handle every case the firm accepts, giving clients direct access to the attorneys responsible for their claim. The firm has recovered more than $200 million for injury victims and holds a National Tier 1 ranking in Personal Injury Litigation – Plaintiffs from Best Law Firms®. Santa Ana is the Orange County seat, and the county’s civil courts sit right downtown — so the firm regularly litigates in the same Orange County Superior Court where local injury claims are decided, from an office a short drive away in Irvine.

Your Case Is Handled by the Lawyers Whose Names Are on the Firm

At many firms, the attorney you sign with is not the person who works your case afterward — the file is handed to a case manager, and you may rarely speak with the lawyer again. Kubota & Craig is built the opposite way. From the first call through the resolution of your claim, Yoshi Kubota and Cynthia Craig are personally responsible for the work: the strategy, the negotiations, and the courtroom if it comes to that. That is a real advantage in Santa Ana, where the Orange County Superior Court sits downtown — the name partners try their own cases in these courthouses rather than sending an outside appearance attorney. Both founding partners are past presidents of the Orange County Trial Lawyers Association (OCTLA), the county’s trial bar (Yoshi Kubota served as president in 2011). When the other side knows the lawyers whose names are on the door are prepared to go to trial, it strengthens your position in every negotiation — a readiness reflected in results that include a $51.5 million recovery in a fatal highway-collision case.

Santa Ana Personal Injury Cases We Handle

We represent people across every major kind of serious-injury case in Santa Ana:

Why Injured Santa Ana Clients Choose Kubota & Craig

Yoshiaki C. Kubota (California Bar #175555) has more than 30 years of trial experience, served as president of OCTLA in 2011, and has been named to Super Lawyers every year since 2010 and to Best Lawyers in America since 2025. Cynthia A. Craig (California Bar #226318) has more than 20 years representing injured people and is a trial lawyer who has tried dozens of cases to verdict; a past president of the Orange County Trial Lawyers Association, she has been recognized by Best Lawyers in America (2022–2026) and Super Lawyers (2024–2026). Both founding partners are personally involved in every case — the attorney you meet is the attorney who handles your claim.

What Our Santa Ana Clients Say

Past results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Each case depends on its own facts.

Understanding Injuries in Santa Ana

The sections below are background for anyone who wants it — what Santa Ana's own traffic-safety planning and California data show about how and where people are hurt here. It reflects the local ground we work on; your own claim is always built on the evidence in your case, not on citywide statistics.

How Santa Ana's traffic injuries changed, 2021–2023

The California Office of Traffic Safety (OTS) tracks traffic injuries by city. In Santa Ana, most categories rose over three years — and the increases were sharpest for the most vulnerable road users.

From 2021 to 2023, total people killed or injured rose about 18%, but pedestrians hurt rose about 24% and pedestrians under 15 climbed from 4 to 17. Here is the pedestrian trend:

What Santa Ana's Vision Zero study found

Santa Ana adopted a Vision Zero safety plan in 2024 that analyzed 19,494 collisions from 2017 through 2021. Its most striking finding is not the raw count — it is how differently the risk falls on people outside a car. In the city's analysis, roughly 16% of pedestrian collisions resulted in a fatal or severe injury, compared with about 5.5% of bicycle collisions and about 2% of automobile collisions:

Over that period the city recorded 906 pedestrian collisions (including 33 fatalities and 119 severe injuries) and 673 bicycle collisions (including 7 fatalities and 30 severe injuries). Pedestrian and bicycle crashes were only about 8% of all collisions but a far larger share of the deaths and life-changing injuries — which is exactly why these cases demand careful investigation.

Streets Santa Ana has prioritized for safety improvements

Rather than guess which roads are risky, Santa Ana ranked them. Using a methodology that weighs killed-and-seriously-injured crashes per mile, school-zone exposure, and equity factors, the Vision Zero plan named the city's highest-priority road segments. These are the city's own findings — not a list an attorney invented:

First Street: one of Santa Ana's busiest and highest-collision corridors

First Street shows up on the city's priority list for a reason. In a May 2026 city staff report on the First Street study corridor (roughly three miles from Bristol Street to Tustin Avenue), Santa Ana reported traffic and a collision rate that stand out:

City staff reported a collision rate on the corridor more than twice the national average for similar roadways, and the Vision Zero plan separately flagged the First Street segment between Fairview and Bristol as a high-collision area (associated with 3 fatalities and 14 severe injuries in the study period). The city is now studying a redesign — a historical safety problem moving toward a planned fix.

Emergency and trauma care after a serious Santa Ana accident

Santa Ana has a designated trauma center within the city: Orange County EMS lists Orange County Global Medical Center, at 1001 N. Tustin Avenue, as a trauma-receiving center. A seriously injured patient is routed through Orange County's EMS process based on trauma-triage criteria rather than simply the nearest hospital, and those trauma and hospital records often become central medical evidence in a serious-injury case.

What if the City of Santa Ana may be responsible?

Some injuries involve a public agency — an unsafe public-property condition, an alleged roadway or sidewalk defect, a city vehicle, or a public facility. A claim against the City of Santa Ana is filed through the City's claims process, and California generally requires a written claim within six months of the injury — far shorter than the two-year deadline for most lawsuits. Limited relief may exist for certain late claims, but the window is short and strict, so the correct entity (city, county, or state) should be identified and the claim evaluated by an attorney right away.

Where a Santa Ana personal injury lawsuit is filed

Injury lawsuits arising in Santa Ana are generally filed in the Orange County Superior Court. Most limited and unlimited civil cases are heard at the Central Justice Center, 700 Civic Center Drive West, in Santa Ana; cases formally designated complex are handled at the Civil Complex Center, 751 W. Santa Ana Boulevard. (Limited civil generally means $35,000 or less; unlimited civil, more than $35,000.) Which courthouse and county are proper can depend on the facts — venue commonly turns on factors such as where the injury occurred or where a defendant resides — so the right filing location is a question your attorneys sort out for your specific case.

How a Santa Ana Injury Claim Works

Most injury claims come down to negligence — showing that another party owed you a duty of care, breached it, and caused you real harm. California applies comparative fault, so more than one party (sometimes including you) can share responsibility, and compensation is adjusted accordingly; being blamed by an insurer, or listed as a contributing party in a report, does not by itself end a claim. When liability is established, the compensation available can include past and future medical costs, lost income and earning capacity, pain and suffering, and other losses tied to the injury. What a case is worth depends on its facts and the available insurance — not a formula — and we give a realistic assessment after reviewing the records.

Deadlines matter. Most California personal injury lawsuits must be filed within two years of the injury (Code of Civil Procedure § 335.1), and property-damage claims within three. If a public entity may be responsible, a written claim is generally due within six months. Because the deadlines and the responsible party vary, it's best to talk with us early.

Santa Ana Personal Injury FAQ

Sources & Methodology