Wrongful Death Lawyer in Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania's wrongful death statute of limitations under 42 Pa.C.S. § 5524(2) is two years from the date of death — the same as the general personal injury SOL. But the most urgent deadline in any Pennsylvania wrongful death case involving a government defendant is the six-month notice requirement under 42 Pa.C.S. § 5522, which runs from the date of injury. If a decedent is critically injured on a PennDOT-maintained highway and lives for seven months before dying, the six-month government notice window expires during hospitalization — before the wrongful death claim can even be filed. An attorney retained by the family during hospitalization preserves the government notice option while the decedent is still alive, filing the § 5522 notice on the potential future wrongful death claim before the window closes.

Pennsylvania's two-action structure requires careful coordination between the wrongful death action and the survival action to avoid double-counting while maximizing aggregate recovery. Lost income is the primary source of duplication risk: both actions claim some component of earnings. The wrongful death action claims the survivors' loss of expected financial support — the amount the decedent would have contributed to the household. The survival action claims the decedent's own lost earnings between injury and death plus lost future earning capacity, reduced by the personal maintenance costs the decedent would have spent on themselves. Expert economic testimony must be structured to avoid overlap: the same stream of income cannot be counted as both a survivor's loss of support and the estate's loss of future earning capacity simultaneously. An attorney with Pennsylvania wrongful death experience structures the two-action damages presentation to capture the maximum non-duplicative recovery.

Punitive damages in Pennsylvania wrongful death cases are available exclusively through the survival action (42 Pa.C.S. § 8302) — not the wrongful death action itself. The standard for punitive damages in Pennsylvania is "outrageous" conduct or "conscious disregard" of a known risk: a carrier that dispatched a fatigued driver in violation of documented hours-of-service limits, a property owner with written notice of a fatal structural defect who failed to act, or a product manufacturer that concealed known defect data. The survival action's punitive exposure adds a separate compensation stream for the estate that goes to the estate's beneficiaries under the will or intestacy — separate from the wrongful death recovery that goes to qualifying survivors directly. An attorney evaluates punitive exposure at the outset of the case, preserving ELD logs, prior safety complaints, and internal risk assessment documents before the defense destroys them.

Pennsylvania's 51% comparative fault bar under 42 Pa.C.S. § 7102 applies to wrongful death claims — the decedent's own fault is attributed to the action and can reduce or eliminate the survivors' recovery. At 51% or above, the wrongful death and survival actions are both barred. Below 51%, all damages are reduced proportionally by the decedent's assigned fault percentage. Insurance defense teams in Pennsylvania wrongful death cases build decedent-fault narratives specifically targeting the 51% threshold. An attorney builds the liability case from crash reconstruction, EDR data, witness statements, and road conditions evidence to anchor the decedent's fault well below 51% before the defense narrative hardens.