Colorado Injury Case Timeline: Retainer to Demand

The question usually arrives around month five, and it's a fair one: is anything actually happening?

Here is the honest answer with real timelines attached. Between the day you sign and the day your demand goes to the carrier, a Colorado injury file moves through three phases. One is supposed to take a long time. One takes longer than it should, for reasons largely outside any law firm's control. The third is fast. Knowing which is which makes the wait survivable.

Phase one is Care and Treatment, and it is supposed to be the longest

You treat. You see specialists, you request and receive referrals, you follow them. What I tell clients is that I want you 100% better before we move forward — or as close to 100% as your body is going to get. Colorado gives us the room to do that. A motor vehicle injury claim carries a three-year deadline under C.R.S. § 13-80-101(1)(n)(I).

That patience is not a negotiating tactic. A demand is a description of what happened to a human body, and you cannot describe an injury that is still changing. Send it at month four and you are guessing about month fourteen. The point of treatment is that you get better; the value of the claim is downstream of that, not the other way around.

Three years is the car-crash rule, not the personal-injury rule

The three-year figure is specific to motor vehicles, and people generalize it in the direction that hurts them.

Claim	Deadline	Source
Bodily injury or property damage arising out of the use or operation of a motor vehicle	3 years from accrual	C.R.S. § 13-80-101(1)(n)(I)
Most other negligence claims (falls, dog bites, premises)	2 years	C.R.S. § 13-80-102(1)(a)
Written notice of a claim against a public entity	182 days from discovery of the injury	C.R.S. § 24-10-109(1)
Wrongful death	2 years, with a narrow 4-year exception	C.R.S. § 13-80-102(1)(d), (2)

That third row is the one that keeps me up. If the vehicle that hit you was a bus, a plow, a county truck, or any other public entity's, written notice under § 24-10-109(1) is due within 182 days of discovering the injury — and the statute calls compliance a jurisdictional prerequisite, with failure forever barring the action. The comfortable three-year runway is gone before most people have finished physical therapy.

Deadlines have exceptions, statutes get amended, and how a deadline applies depends on facts a table cannot hold. Confirm yours with a lawyer rather than with a blog post. If a government vehicle was involved in your collision, that conversation should happen in weeks, not months — our Denver car accident team can tell you quickly whether the short clock applies.

Phase two is the records and bills request, and it runs two to eight months

When you tell us you are done treating and feeling good, we confirm the full list of every provider you saw. A separate team then requests all relevant medical records and bills from each one.

This phase is the long pole, and the range is not a hedge: two months on the fast end, eight on the slow end. Both ends are real files. We move as fast as we can and do everything in our power to expedite it, and it is still frequently the only thing standing between you and a demand.

It is also the phase where the rest of the claim architecture gets built — identifying who will want to be reimbursed out of any recovery, and on what authority. That is its own subject, and we wrote it up separately in how Colorado hospital liens differ from health plan subrogation.

Records stall because your file usually is not at the hospital

Almost every mid-size and large hospital system contracts records and billing out to a third-party vendor. The loop looks like this: we contact records or billing, they route us to the vendor, the vendor tells us it is pending on the provider's side, and we start again.

Nobody in that loop is refusing. The request is in transit between two organizations, each of which reasonably believes the other has it. We escalate on both ends at once rather than waiting politely in one queue, and when we are genuinely stuck, we say so plainly instead of calling it "in process." One out-of-state hospital system kept a single file of ours inside that loop for the better part of a year.

What your file is doing while it looks quiet

A monthly email. A monthly text message. A monthly call. Not because there is always news, but because silence is its own kind of harm and you should never have to wonder.

Our doors are open in between, too — call on week two if you want to. Ideally you are also working with a medical case manager through your providers who is keeping a close eye on the file. That helps medically, it helps the liability picture, and frankly it helps you as a person going through something hard.

Drafting the demand takes one to two weeks

Once the complete records and billing file is in hand, the demand itself takes one to two weeks at most. The writing was never the bottleneck.

That is worth sitting with. Nearly all of the wait you experienced was a single phase, and it was the phase where we were waiting on somebody else's mailroom.

The one time we do not wait

Here is where I part ways with the advice to always finish treating first. If the medical bills are already sufficient to demand the full policy limits, waiting adds nothing. The ceiling is the ceiling, and more records do not raise it. In that situation we go now.

Absent that, we do not demand early as a matter of standard operating procedure. Not because early resolution is always wrong, but because in every other scenario the number is still moving, and we would be the ones who stopped it.

The client who mailed us 300 pages

Rarely, the client is the one who breaks the loop. A patient requesting their own chart through the portal or in person sometimes moves when an authorized third-party request does not.

I still remember the one who did it best. He understood exactly what was happening, did not hold the delay against our team, went and got his own records, and mailed 300 pages to my office — organized, in order, beautifully done. His case resolved at the at-fault driver's policy limits not long after. Every case is different, and nothing here predicts or promises any particular outcome in yours.

Credit for that one goes to God first, then to him, then to a records team that had been grinding on it for months.

Elliot Singer, Esq.
Conduit Law, LLC — Denver, Colorado

This article is general information about Colorado law, not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Deadlines and outcomes depend on facts specific to your situation, and statutes change. Consult a licensed attorney about your own case.