September 2026

The boulder walls that went up behind Beach Road homes after Hurricane Marie were never meant to stay. Under the terms the California Coastal Commission attaches to an emergency permit, the work is temporary and has to come out unless the owner later wins a regular coastal development permit authorizing it for good.¹ A Commission…

Nine homes on Beach Road in Dana Point were red-tagged on September 9, 2026, after swells generated by Hurricane Marie breached seawalls and battered the Capistrano Bay shoreline.¹ One home was demolished. Seven more received yellow tags indicating significant structural damage, bringing the total to 16 affected properties. City officials declared a local emergency as…

Providence Mission Hospital Laguna Beach has operated a 24-hour emergency room since 1959. It sees roughly 17,000 visits per year and receives approximately 60 percent of all ambulance transports dispatched by the Laguna Beach Fire Department.¹ Under a California seismic retrofit law with a hard deadline of January 1, 2030, that emergency room may not…

At the arraignment, the driver who hit you may plead no contest rather than guilty. In a criminal case, that choice changes almost nothing: under Penal Code section 1016, the court treats a no contest plea the same as a guilty plea and finds the defendant guilty either way. In your civil case it can…

Most people learn the at-fault driver’s policy limit early in a claim, and it can be the worst news they’ve gotten since the crash. Bad faith insurance in California is the reason that number isn’t always where the conversation ends. There’s a route by which an injured person recovers more than the policy, and it…

On the morning of August 28, 2026, a semi truck left the roadway on eastbound Interstate 80 near Floriston Way, tore through the freeway rail, and came to rest with its cab suspended roughly 80 feet above the concrete below. The trailer stayed connected and blocked the eastbound lanes for hours. The driver was thrown…

A Los Angeles County jury needed six days of trial and a single uneven seam in a concrete walkway to reach a $3.7 million verdict. The woman who tripped on it, Nora Garcia, worked as a special education assistant principal at Orange High School in the City of Orange. She was walking outside a newly…