Filing an Injury Lawsuit in Connecticut: Why It Starts with a State Marshal, Not the Courthouse

In most states, you beat the deadline on an injury lawsuit by filing papers at the courthouse. Connecticut works differently: a lawsuit here generally begins when a state marshal delivers the papers to the defendant — the courthouse comes second. That quirk, layered on top of a two-clock deadline system, makes Connecticut one of the easier states in which to lose a valid claim without realizing it.

The marshal comes first

Connecticut is one of a small number of states where a civil lawsuit is commenced by service of process, not by filing a complaint with the court. In practice, your attorney prepares the summons and complaint, hands them to a Connecticut state marshal, the marshal serves the defendant, and only then is the paperwork returned to the Superior Court ahead of a scheduled “return date.” If the marshal has not acted in time, a complaint sitting in a lawyer’s outbox generally does not stop the clock.

The legislature built in a safety valve: under Conn. Gen. Stat. § 52-593a, a claim is generally not lost to the deadline if the papers were personally delivered to the marshal within the limitation period and then served within thirty days. That rule has rescued plenty of last-minute cases, but it assumes the papers actually reached the marshal in time — which is exactly why waiting until the final weeks is a gamble. Anyone with a serious claim in Connecticut should be talking to a lawyer well before the deadline gets close, because the mechanics of starting the suit take longer here than people expect.

Two clocks run at once

Connecticut’s core deadline for negligence claims sits in Conn. Gen. Stat. § 52-584, and it has two moving parts. First, an injured person generally has two years from the date the injury “is first sustained or discovered or in the exercise of reasonable care should have been discovered” to bring suit. Second — and this is the part that surprises people — no suit may generally be brought more than three years from the act or omission that caused the harm, regardless of when the injury came to light.

That outer three-year limit is called a statute of repose, and it can quietly close the door on late-discovered injuries. If a problem caused by someone’s negligence does not surface for several years, the claim may already be gone before the two-year discovery clock ever meaningfully started. Medical malpractice claims run under the same statute, with additional procedural requirements of their own. The dates involved are fact-specific, so treat the numbers here as a starting point and confirm your own timeline with a licensed Connecticut attorney.

Connecticut walked away from no-fault decades ago

Connecticut experimented with no-fault auto insurance and then repealed it, effective at the start of 1994. Since then it has been a traditional at-fault state: the driver who causes a crash, through their insurer, is generally responsible for the resulting damages. There is no no-fault injury threshold to clear before you can pursue the responsible driver, and no requirement that you exhaust personal injury protection benefits first — Connecticut policies do not carry mandatory PIP at all. Fault, and the evidence that proves it, is the whole ballgame from day one.

The 50 percent line

Being partly to blame does not automatically end a Connecticut claim. Under Conn. Gen. Stat. § 52-572h, the state follows modified comparative negligence: you can generally recover as long as your own negligence is not greater than the combined negligence of the parties you are suing, with your recovery reduced by your percentage of fault. Cross the line — 51 percent or more — and recovery is barred entirely.

Because that threshold is decisive, insurance adjusters have every incentive to push your assigned share of fault upward. An early phone call confidently telling you the accident was mostly your fault is a negotiating position, not a legal finding. Fault percentages are argued and proven with evidence, and they are contested in nearly every serious case.

Hurt on a public road or sidewalk? You may have 90 days

Connecticut’s most brutal deadlines involve the government. If your injury came from a defective road, bridge, or sidewalk that a town maintains, the claim generally runs through the municipal highway defect statute, Conn. Gen. Stat. § 13a-149 — and it requires written notice to the town within ninety days, describing the injury, the defect, and the time and place it happened. Courts treat that notice as a prerequisite to the case existing at all; late or vague notice has ended otherwise valid claims. A parallel statute, § 13a-144, covers defects on state highways and requires ninety-day notice to the Commissioner of Transportation.

Claims against the State of Connecticut outside the highway statutes are a different maze. Sovereign immunity generally requires going through the Office of the Claims Commissioner, with notice generally due within one year, and in many cases the Commissioner must grant permission before the state can be sued at all. The lesson is simple: if any government entity might be involved in your injury — a city sidewalk, a state road crew, a public building — the comfortable two-year clock may not be your real deadline. Ninety days disappears fast when you are in treatment.

No damage caps — but a collateral source haircut

Here is the flip side: Connecticut is one of the states that imposes no cap on compensatory damages, in ordinary injury cases or in medical malpractice. Economic losses and non-economic harm like pain and suffering are valued on the evidence, not against a statutory ceiling. Punitive damages are narrowly limited under Connecticut common law, but those are a rare add-on rather than the core of a claim.

One Connecticut-specific wrinkle cuts the other way. Under Conn. Gen. Stat. § 52-225a, a court generally reduces an award of economic damages by amounts already paid by collateral sources — such as health insurance — after crediting what you paid in premiums, and subject to exceptions where the insurer has a right of repayment. Valuing a claim in Connecticut is therefore less about a headline number and more about how these moving parts interact; our guide to what goes into an injury claim’s value walks through the general framework.

What this adds up to

Connecticut rewards people who move early:

• Starting a lawsuit has mechanical lead time. The marshal must serve the papers before the case reaches the court.
• The three-year repose clock runs whether you know about your injury or not.
• Government claims can require written notice within ninety days.

None of this is a reason to panic — two years is genuine breathing room for most claims — but it is a reason not to sit on a potential case while deadlines you have never heard of run in the background. For a condensed version of the state’s deadlines and fault rules, see our Connecticut quick-reference page.

If you were hurt in Connecticut and want to know whether you may have a claim, answer a few questions about what happened and we will connect you with a participating law firm that can evaluate it. Free, confidential, and no obligation.