Alina S. Vulic recently co-authored “Breaking the Sixty-Year Barrier: SB 29 and the Fight to Preserve Survival Damages” in the July/August 2026 issue of Forum, the magazine of Consumer Attorneys of California. She wrote the piece with CAOC Policy Director Jacqueline Serna for the issue’s “Breaking Barriers to Justice” feature.
The article examines what changed for California plaintiffs on January 1, 2026, when the survival damages provisions of Senate Bill 447 expired. For four years, a decedent’s estate could recover pre-death pain, suffering, and disfigurement in a survival action. With the sunset, California returned to a rule limiting recovery to economic damages, a rule 45 other states and the District of Columbia rejected long ago.
Vulic and Serna trace that rule to 1961, when insurance industry lobbying inserted the language extinguishing pain and suffering into California’s survival statute. They explain how it shapes litigation strategy today, rewarding defense delay in nursing home neglect, catastrophic injury, and toxic exposure cases where a plaintiff’s mortality becomes part of the defense calculation. The article also identifies the filing-date cliff the sunset reintroduced, where two families with the same loss and the same defendant recover very different amounts depending on when the complaint was filed.
The piece makes the case for Senate Bill 29, authored by Senator John Laird and co-sponsored by CAOC, which would extend the survival damages provisions through January 1, 2030 and preserve the Judicial Council reporting framework. SB 29 is pending an Assembly vote.
Alina S. Vulic is an Associate at Kabateck LLP where her practice focuses on complex civil litigation, including personal injury, employment law, wrongful death, and medical malpractice.