Deadlines are not one number — they depend on your situation.

There is no single deadline that applies to injury claims. Time limits vary by jurisdiction, by the type of claim, by who the responsible party is, by the language of the specific policy or contract involved, and by whether a matter has moved into a procedural posture with its own schedule.

That is why this page does not publish a number. A general figure read on the internet and applied to the wrong claim type, the wrong defendant, or the wrong jurisdiction is worse than no figure at all. Some claims also carry earlier notice obligations that arrive long before any filing window closes.

What is broadly true is that preservation is early work. Photographs, witness recollection, vehicle or scene condition, and the initial description of an injury all degrade with time, and continuity of treatment is difficult to reconstruct after the fact. Those decisions tend to be made in the first weeks, before anyone is thinking about a deadline at all.

The instrument below is educational: it helps you understand what categories of deadlines to ask about. If a deadline may be close, or you are unsure which one applies, that is a situation for qualified legal review — not for a calculator. SmartClaim™ is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice.