Louisiana’s Prescriptive Period for Injury Claims: The Deadlines Nobody Explains Until It’s Too Late

Key Takeaways:

• Louisiana changed its personal injury prescriptive period from one year to two years effective July 1, 2024 under Act No. 423 (HB 315), enacting La. C.C. Art. 3493.11.
• The old one-year deadline still applies to any injury that occurred before July 1, 2024. This isn’t retroactive.
• Medical malpractice has its own rules: one year from discovery, but a hard three-year cap from the date the malpractice happened — no exceptions under La. R.S. 9:5628.
• The doctrine of contra non valentem can suspend prescription in rare cases where you genuinely couldn’t have known about your injury, but Louisiana courts apply it narrowly.
• Evidence — especially surveillance footage — disappears far faster than any prescriptive period runs. Most businesses overwrite security camera recordings within 7 to 30 days.

What Changed in 2024 — and What Didn’t

For 199 years — since the Louisiana Civil Code of 1825 — personal injury victims in this state had one year to file a lawsuit. One year from the date of injury. That made Louisiana one of only three states in the country with a deadline that tight. Texas gives you two years. Mississippi gives you three. Arkansas, three. Louisiana gave you twelve months and not a day more.

Act No. 423 doubled it. The governor signed it, effective July 1, 2024. The old Article 3492 was repealed and replaced with Article 3493.11, which reads: delictual actions are subject to a liberative prescription of two years.

But here’s what the headlines missed — the law only applies prospectively. Section 3 of the Act says it applies to actions arising after July 1, 2024. So if you were rear-ended in Shreveport on June 30, 2024, you had one year. If the same accident happened on July 1, you had two. One day apart, double the time.

And does someone who got hurt in March 2024 and is still recovering know which rule applies to them? Almost certainly not — unless a lawyer told them. That transitional gap is going to catch people for years.

Why Louisiana Called It “Prescription” in the First Place

If you’ve tried to Google this and ended up confused by the terminology — prescription, liberative prescription, prescriptive period — that’s because Louisiana doesn’t run on common law like every other state except possibly parts of Puerto Rico. The legal system here traces back to the Napoleonic Code, French and Spanish civil law traditions. Written statutes, not judge-made precedent, form the foundation.

“Prescription” in Louisiana law means roughly what “statute of limitations” means everywhere else: a time limit after which you permanently lose the right to sue. But the mechanics are slightly different — prescription can be interrupted (which resets the clock), suspended (which pauses it), or renounced (which waives it). Those distinctions matter in practice, and they don’t have exact equivalents in common law states.

If you’re dealing with an injury in Louisiana and you’re not sure what deadline applies to your situation — or whether evidence that could prove your case is still recoverable — the fastest way to find out more about how the prescriptive period affects your specific claim is a conversation with a Louisiana personal injury attorney. Most offer free consultations, and the call takes less time than the evidence takes to disappear.

How the Two-Year Clock Actually Runs

The prescriptive period starts on the day you sustain the injury or damage. Not the day you hire a lawyer, not the day you decide to take action. The day you get hurt.

Say you slip on a wet floor in a New Orleans grocery store on September 15, 2025. Your deadline to file is September 15, 2027. You can hire a lawyer six months later, negotiate with the store’s insurer for another year, and still have time — barely — to file if negotiations collapse. Under the old one-year rule, that same timeline would have already expired before the insurer finished dragging its feet.

What counts as “filing”? A lawsuit, filed in the correct court, with proper service. Filing in the wrong court, or filing incorrectly, does not interrupt prescription. The Louisiana Supreme Court has been clear on this: a defective filing is not a filing.

What About Wrongful Death?

Wrongful death claims have their own two-year prescriptive period, but it starts from the date of death — not the date of the accident that caused the death. If someone is injured in a car crash in January and dies from those injuries in August, the two-year clock for the wrongful death claim starts in August. That distinction has saved families who would otherwise have been time-barred if the clock started from the accident date.

Medical Malpractice — The One-Year Rule Survived Here

The two-year extension under Act No. 423 applies to general personal injury — car accidents, slip and falls, premises liability, dog bites, workplace injuries. Medical malpractice did not get the extension.

Under La. R.S. 9:5628, medical malpractice claims are still governed by two separate deadlines:

One year from the date of discovery — meaning the day you discovered (or should have discovered) the malpractice. Not when the procedure happened, but when you realised something went wrong.

Three years from the date of the act — an absolute outer wall. Even if you couldn’t have known about the malpractice for four years, the three-year cap shuts the door. The Louisiana Supreme Court in Borel v. Young (2007-0419) confirmed that the discovery rule embedded in contra non valentem does not extend past this three-year limit.

And before you file a lawsuit, you have to go through the medical review panel process first. Filing with the panel suspends prescription during the review period plus 90 days after the panel renders its opinion. That procedural quirk is actually protective — it stops the clock while the mandatory review happens — but it also adds months of delay before you ever see the inside of a courtroom.

If a surgeon left a sponge inside you and you didn’t discover it for two years, you’d still have a year from discovery to file — as long as the total time from surgery hasn’t exceeded three years. If the sponge causes symptoms at year 2.5, you’d have six months. At year 3, you’d have zero, even if you only found out yesterday.

Contra Non Valentem — The Exception That’s Harder Than It Sounds

Contra non valentem agere nulla currit praescriptio. Prescription does not run against a person who is unable to act. It’s a Latin maxim from French civil law, and Louisiana courts have applied it as a jurisprudential (judge-made) exception to prescription since 1817, when it first appeared in Quierry’s Executor v. Faussier’s Executors — a case decided during a period when the courts were physically closed in anticipation of the British invasion in the Battle of New Orleans.

Louisiana courts recognise four situations where contra non valentem applies:

1. Courts or their officers were prevented from acting — think natural disaster closures. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Louisiana legislatively suspended all prescriptions from March 16 to July 25, 2020 — a 111-day freeze.
   
2. A contractual or procedural condition prevented the plaintiff from suing.
   
3. The defendant actively concealed the cause of action — the debtor-concealment category. A doctor who knows about a complication and deliberately hides it from the patient, for example.
   
4. The plaintiff didn’t know and couldn’t reasonably have known about the injury — the discovery rule. This is the most commonly invoked category, and it’s the one that courts scrutinise most carefully.
   

Does it sound like a safety net? It’s narrower than it appears. In Babineaux v. State DOTD (2004 CA 2649), a woman hydroplaned on a state highway. She didn’t file suit until more than a year later, after seeing a billboard warning about hydroplane hazards on that road. She argued contra non valentem — she didn’t know the state was potentially liable. The court rejected it. She knew she hydroplaned at the time of the accident. She could have investigated sooner. Her ignorance, the court said, was attributable to her own inaction, not to any impossibility of acting.

The takeaway from the case law is consistent: contra non valentem won’t rescue you if you knew enough to ask questions but chose not to. A plaintiff is deemed to know what they could have learned through reasonable diligence. The clock starts when there’s enough to call for an inquiry — not when the inquiry produces proof.

The Evidence That Vanishes While the Clock Still Has Time

Even with two years instead of one, evidence degrades on its own schedule. The prescriptive period is a legal deadline. The evidence preservation window is a practical one, and it’s almost always shorter.

Surveillance Footage

How long does the gas station camera, the grocery store CCTV, or the parking lot recorder actually keep footage? Not long.

• Small retail businesses: typically 7 to 14 days before the system overwrites.
• Chain restaurants and mid-size retailers: around 30 days. Policies vary, but 30 is common.
• Banks and financial institutions: 45 to 90 days, sometimes up to 6 months.
• Casinos and high-security facilities: varies by area — gaming floor footage may last longer than hallway cameras.
• Traffic and police body cameras: retention policies vary by department, but 30 to 90 days is standard for routine recordings.

If your injury happened on a Friday evening and nobody requests the footage until Monday, some systems may have already started overwriting weekend recordings. A 14-day loop on a small business camera means that by day 15, the footage doesn’t exist anymore — and no subpoena or preservation letter can bring it back.

A spoliation letter (also called a preservation letter) — sent by an attorney to the business — creates a legal obligation to preserve specific footage. Without that letter, the business has no duty to save anything. They’re not destroying evidence on purpose. They’re running a system with limited storage that deletes old files automatically to make room for new ones.

Witness Memory

Memory research is consistent on this point: eyewitness recall declines measurably within the first 48 to 72 hours after an event. Details get substituted, sequences get rearranged, confidence goes up while accuracy goes down. A witness interviewed the day after an accident gives a materially different account than the same witness interviewed six months later — not because they’re lying, but because that’s how memory works.

Getting recorded or written witness statements early isn’t about being aggressive. It’s about capturing information while it still resembles what actually happened.

Police Reports and Incident Records

Police reports are generally available within a few weeks of the incident, but requesting them promptly matters because the underlying officer notes, dispatch logs, and supplemental reports may not be preserved indefinitely. If your case involves a contested sequence of events — who ran the red light, who was in which lane — the raw data supporting the official report is what your attorney actually needs.

Medical Records

Under federal law (HIPAA), healthcare providers must respond to records requests within 30 days, with a possible 30-day extension. Louisiana doesn’t impose a shorter timeline. But the records themselves — ER notes, imaging results, surgical reports — only exist at all if you actually went to a doctor. The single most common evidence problem in Louisiana injury claims isn’t lost records. It’s a gap between the accident date and the first medical visit. Insurance adjusters love that gap because it lets them argue the injury either didn’t happen or wasn’t caused by the accident.

Government Claims — Shorter Windows Still Apply

Suing a government entity in Louisiana — whether it’s DOTD, a parish, a municipality, or a state agency — involves additional procedural requirements that can shorten your effective deadline even further. Notice requirements vary by entity and the specific statute governing the claim.

For claims against the state under the Louisiana Governmental Claims Act, you may need to provide written notice within a specific timeframe — and failure to do so can bar the claim entirely, even if the two-year prescriptive period hasn’t run. The notice requirements exist separately from the prescriptive period and can create a trap for people who assume they have a full two years to sort everything out.

If the accident involved a state highway, a city-maintained road, a public building, or a government employee acting in the course of their duties, the first question isn’t “how long do I have?” It’s “who do I need to notify, and how quickly?”

What Suspends or Interrupts the Clock

Minors: If the injured person is a minor, prescription does not run against them until they turn 18. A 10-year-old injured in a car accident has until their 20th birthday (18 + 2 years) to file. Parents can file on the child’s behalf before then, and often should — but the child retains the right independently.

Mental incapacity: Prescription may be suspended if the injured person lacks the mental capacity to understand their legal rights. It resumes when capacity is restored.

Defendant leaves the state: If the person who caused your injury leaves Louisiana before you file suit, the prescriptive period may be suspended during their absence.

Interruption vs suspension: Interruption (filing a lawsuit, for example) resets the clock completely. Suspension pauses it — whatever time already ran still counts when it resumes. The distinction matters if you’re close to the deadline and trying to figure out how much time you actually have left.

Filing against one defendant: If you properly sue one defendant within the prescriptive period, you may be able to add other liable parties later, even after their individual deadlines have technically passed.

When to Get Legal Advice

The two-year window feels generous compared to what Louisiana had before. But evidence disappears in days, not years. Government notice deadlines can be measured in months. Medical malpractice still runs on the old one-year discovery rule. And the transitional period means anyone injured before July 2024 is still operating under the old deadline.

References

• Louisiana Civil Code Article 3493.11 (effective July 1, 2024) — two-year prescriptive period for delictual actions. Enacted by Acts 2024, No. 423 (HB 315).
• Louisiana Civil Code Article 3492 (repealed effective July 1, 2024) — former one-year prescriptive period.
• Louisiana Revised Statutes § 9:5628 — medical malpractice prescription (one year from discovery, three-year cap).
• Borel v. Young, 2007-0419 (La. 2008), 989 So.2d 42 — Louisiana Supreme Court on contra non valentem and the three-year medical malpractice cap.
• Babineaux v. State DOTD, 2004 CA 2649 (La. App. 1 Cir. 2005) — contra non valentem rejected where plaintiff knew facts giving rise to inquiry.
• Quierry’s Executor v. Faussier’s Executors (La. 1817) — first Louisiana application of contra non valentem (courts closed during Battle of New Orleans).
• Cozen O’Connor, “Louisiana Adopts Two-Year Statute of Limitations for Tort Claims” (June 2024) — https://www.cozen.com/subrogation/resources/publications/louisiana-adopts-two-year-statute-of-limitations-for-tort-claims
• Security Industry Association — average surveillance footage retention period of 30 days for commercial systems.
• COVID-19 prescription suspension: March 16 to July 25, 2020 (111 days), legislatively enacted.