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When a Charleston family loses someone to another person’s negligence, the legal side should not fall on you as well.
There is no good way to be handed news like this, and no legal case brings your person back. What a Charleston wrongful death claim can do is narrower and more practical. It establishes who was responsible, and it can replace the income, the household work and the support your family counted on, so that the bills arriving this month do not become a second crisis stacked on the first one.
Schiller and Hamilton Law Firm has a Charleston office at 1629 Meeting Street Road. We work with Lowcountry families who are somewhere they never expected to be, and a good deal of the early work is simply answering questions. What has to happen first. Why the estate is involved at all. How long you have. You are welcome to call 843-350-5420 and ask. That conversation is free and private, and we are paid only if the case recovers something.
A wrongful death claim is a civil case under South Carolina Code 15-51-10, available when a person dies because someone else acted negligently, recklessly or wrongfully. In Charleston County the causes tend to follow the geography: collisions on I-26 and I-526, the US-17 corridor and the Ravenel Bridge, tractor-trailer traffic running to and from the port, boating and drowning deaths on the harbor and the rivers, unsafe conditions on commercial property, defective products, and deaths at work.
This is separate from anything the Ninth Judicial Circuit prosecutes. A criminal case belongs to the state and is about punishment. A wrongful death claim is your family’s own case, filed in the Court of Common Pleas here in Charleston County, and it is about your family’s losses. Both can proceed at once, and you never have to wait for the criminal side to finish before starting yours. Because a civil case is decided on a lower standard of proof, families sometimes recover where no one is convicted.
South Carolina Code 15-51-20 answers this narrowly. The action must be brought by or in the name of the executor or administrator of the estate, meaning the personal representative named in a will or appointed by a court. For most Charleston families that appointment happens at the Charleston County Probate Court. One person files, but the case is not that one person’s case.
The same statute sets who the recovery is actually for, and in what order. First the surviving spouse and children. If there is no spouse or child, the parents. If there are no parents, the heirs of the person who died. Under 15-51-40, what is recovered is divided among those beneficiaries in the shares they would have taken had your loved one died without a will, rather than sitting in the estate as an ordinary asset. If no personal representative has been appointed yet, that is a step we can help your family take before anything else moves.
Section 15-51-40 allows a jury to award damages proportioned to the injury the death caused the beneficiaries. In practice that reaches two very different kinds of loss, and both of them belong in the claim.
The measurable side includes funeral and burial costs, the medical bills from the final injury, often from MUSC or another Charleston hospital, and the earnings and support your loved one would have provided over the years ahead. The rest cannot be receipted. South Carolina law recognizes grief and mental suffering, and the loss of a person’s companionship, care, guidance and protection. Where the conduct was reckless, wilful or malicious, 15-51-40 also permits exemplary damages, which are meant to punish rather than to compensate. No two families lose the same things, and much of our work is describing your particular loss accurately rather than generically.
South Carolina keeps a second claim separate from the first. Under Code 15-5-90, a cause of action for injury to the person survives to the personal representative, so the claim your loved one would have had if they had lived does not die with them. That is the survival action, and it belongs to the estate.
It covers what your loved one personally went through: conscious pain and suffering between the injury and the death, their own medical expenses, and their other losses. The wrongful death claim asks what the family lost. The survival action asks what your loved one endured. In Charleston County the two are usually filed together, because each answers a question the other does not, and because they are handled differently afterward. Survival proceeds are estate assets. Wrongful death proceeds go to the beneficiaries.
Under Code 15-3-530(6) the deadline for a wrongful death action is three years, and the statute says the period begins to run upon the death of the person on whose account the action is brought, not on the date of the accident. Where an injury and a death are weeks or months apart, that distinction matters. Miss the deadline and the claim is gone, however clear the fault was.
Three years sounds generous and often is not. Marks on the I-526 pavement are gone within days, a crash report can take time to correct, camera footage gets overwritten, carriers keep some records only as long as they must, and witnesses move away. A claim against a city, a county or a state agency runs on a shorter and different track: under Code 15-78-110 the Tort Claims Act allows two years, extended to three only where a verified claim was filed first. Asking early costs nothing and keeps your options open.
Expect the other side to suggest your loved one shares the blame. It is routine, it is painful to hear, and in South Carolina it usually does not end the case. The rule comes from the state Supreme Court’s decision in Nelson v. Concrete Supply Co. rather than from a statute.
Under it, your family recovers as long as your loved one is found fifty percent or less at fault, with the award reduced by that share. If the fault assigned is twenty percent, the family receives eighty percent. Past fifty percent there is no recovery at all, which is why insurers press this one point so hard, and why an early reconstruction of an I-26 or Ravenel Bridge collision can matter more than anything said months later. Fault is decided on what the evidence shows, so we go after the physical record while it still exists: the vehicles, the scene, the download from the truck, the people who actually saw it. We answer the argument with proof rather than with argument of our own.
An adjuster usually calls within days. They are polite and they are doing a job, and that job is to close the matter cheaply before anyone has counted what was actually lost. A family in the middle of planning a funeral is in no position to have that conversation, and should not have to be.
We take on the investigation, the estate appointment, the filings and deadlines, the experts and the difficult conversations, so your family is not carrying them. One point worth knowing early: under Code 15-51-41 and 15-51-42, a wrongful death or survival settlement is not final until a court approves it. Only the appointed personal representative may settle, and a probate court, circuit court or federal court has to sign off. We work on contingency, so there is nothing upfront and no fee unless there is a recovery. The first conversation is free and confidential. Our Charleston office is at 1629 Meeting Street Road, and the number is 843-350-5420.
Three years, under South Carolina Code 15-3-530(6), and the statute runs that period from the date of death rather than from the date of the injury. Claims against a governmental entity are different, because the Tort Claims Act allows two years, or three where a verified claim was filed first. It is worth having the deadline confirmed early rather than assumed.
Code 15-51-20 requires the action to be brought by or in the name of the executor or administrator of the estate, so one appointed personal representative files it. What is recovered goes to the statutory beneficiaries in order: spouse and children first, then parents, then the heirs. If nobody has been appointed yet, that is done through the Charleston County Probate Court, and we can help your family arrange it.
A wrongful death claim compensates the beneficiaries for what they lost, such as support, companionship and guidance. A survival action, preserved by Code 15-5-90, belongs to the estate and covers what your loved one personally suffered before dying, including conscious pain and their own medical bills. In Charleston County the two are commonly filed together.
Usually yes. Under Nelson v. Concrete Supply Co., South Carolina applies modified comparative negligence, so your family recovers if your loved one is found fifty percent or less at fault, with the award reduced by that percentage. Past fifty percent there is no recovery, which is why the fault finding gets contested so hard.
Nothing upfront. We work on a contingency fee, so the fee comes out of a recovery and there is no fee if there is no recovery. The first conversation is free and confidential. Any settlement also has to be approved by a court before it is final. Call 843-350-5420 whenever you are ready.
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