Slip & Fall in Lafayette, LA

Lafayette Police work crashes inside the city, the Lafayette Parish Sheriff's Office covers the rest of the parish, and Louisiana State Police often handles I-10 and I-49. The officer at the scene gives you something with an agency name and a number on it, and that piece of paper is what tells you where the request goes. Keep it somewhere you'll find it again.

The 15th Judicial District Court. It's a three-parish district — Lafayette, Acadia, and Vermilion — so where the wreck happened decides which courthouse the suit belongs to, and a crash out toward Crowley or Abbeville is not automatically a Lafayette Parish case just because Lafayette is where you live. An attorney sorts that out. We don't.

Not the deadline. What it changes is the fact pattern, because the Thruway runs as one-way pairs through downtown with short merges and frequent lights, and a rear-end or a lane-change wreck there turns into an argument about who had the lane — which under Louisiana's pure comparative fault rule is an argument about money. Every percentage of blame they put on you comes off your recovery.

In Louisiana, the deadline is generally 2 years from the date of the accident. 'Prescriptive period' 2 years as of 2024-07-01 (was 1 year — a major recent change). Uses civil-law terminology. Deadlines are strict — the sooner you act, the more options you have.