Attorney Spotlight: Jeff Schwalbach, Huntington Beach Injury Lawyer
For the first six years of his career, Jeff Schwalbach was paid to make injury claims go away. He started on car and trucking collisions, premises cases and wrongful death suits, appearing for the insurance companies on the other side of them from 2015 to 2017. The next four years took him to the medical end of the same business, defending physicians, hospitals and other providers against claims of professional negligence, elder abuse, dependent adult neglect and civil rights violations. Those years taught him, in detail and from the inside, what a carrier believes a hurt person’s case is worth and how it intends to argue the number down.
In 2021 he changed sides and has been suing insurers and corporations ever since. He took his law degree at Pepperdine in 2015 and was admitted to the California bar that December, and he now runs DJA Injury Attorneys out of a suite on Beach Boulevard in Huntington Beach. The work is what washes up in a beach town in Orange County: cars and motorcycles and bicycles, people knocked down in parking lots, slip and falls, dog bites, the occasional catastrophic brain or spinal injury.
He personally manages every case from start to finish, priding himself on consistent client communication and support throughout the often-stressful litigation process.
— DJA Injury Attorneys, firm bio
Crossing the Street
Nothing in the public record explains why 2021 was the year he stopped, and lawyers who make this move rarely announce a reason beyond the obvious one. What is clear is that he did not do it by halves. Since that year he has represented only injured people, suing the carriers and companies whose arguments he used to make, and in 2024 he stopped working for anyone else and opened a firm under his own name. DJA Injury Attorneys followed, and it is where he practices now.
He is admitted in every California state court and in the federal district courts of California, and the practice runs inland as well as along the coast, with a second body of work in Santa Ana alongside the Huntington Beach base.
What the firm publishes between cases reads like a guide to getting hurt in Huntington Beach in particular. There are entries on e-bike crashes, on who pays after an Uber or Lyft collision, on what to do when the injury happens at a hotel or a vacation rental, on who is liable in a parking lot, and on whether a person can sue the city itself over a sidewalk, a bike path or the beach walkway. The most pointed of them explains why adjusters open with lowball offers, which is a subject he can address from both sides of the desk.
The Cases a Carrier Prices at Nothing
The settlements he publishes have a pattern in them, and it is not the pattern most injury firms advertise. One rear-end collision with modest damage to both vehicles and medical bills under $100,000 resolved at a $1 million policy limit. In a minor-impact case where his client’s car sustained less than $2,500 in damage, brought against a publicly traded defense contractor, he settled at $699,999. A college student who came out of a crash with profound emotional injuries and very little physical harm recovered $1.35 million. Contested liability in a low-speed accident against a major rideshare company produced $750,000, arrived at after a long fight and just before expert discovery.
Those are the claims an adjuster is trained to treat as cheap. Small property damage is taken to mean small injuries, low medical bills to mean a low number, and disputed liability to mean hold the line and see who blinks. Schwalbach spent six years on the other end of that reasoning, and his published results are the cases where it did not hold.
Scrambled Eggs, Fifty Days Before Trial
His largest published result began with a hotel refusing to accept any fault at all. A nurse slipped on scrambled eggs on the floor of an international, publicly traded hotel chain and broke her ankle badly enough to need two operations, after which she could not work for an extended period. The chain’s answer was that the floor had been fine.
Defendant claimed the area where our client slipped on scrambled eggs had been inspected five minutes earlier.
— DJA Injury Attorneys, case results
Beating that claim took the unglamorous part of the job, which is discovery and a series of depositions of the hotel’s own employees about what the inspection had actually consisted of. The case settled for $1.36 million, fifty days before it was due to go in front of a jury. Two of the smaller entries on the same results page are a $600,000 recovery in a case that never involved surgery and a $362,500 dog bite settlement.
Suing an Insurer Over a Renter’s Policy
One case from 2022 shows the switch put to its most literal use. A man in Los Angeles County had been sued by a neighbor, in a dispute involving allegations about loud music played to harass and a foul-smelling substance forced through holes in a shared wall. He had renter’s insurance, and he asked his carrier to defend him, which is precisely what the policy is for. United Services Automobile Association refused.
The ground for the refusal was a pollution exclusion, the clause that carves out “the actual, alleged, or threatened discharge, dispersal, release, escape, seepage, or migration of pollutants however caused and whenever occurring.” Schwalbach sued the insurer on his client’s behalf, and USAA demurred, arguing the complaint failed as a matter of law. On August 3, 2022, Judge Colin P. Leis overruled the demurrer in its entirety. Notice of settlement followed that October, and the case was dismissed with prejudice at the plaintiff’s own request.
What the case turned on was a carrier reaching for an environmental exclusion to get out of defending a quarrel between neighbors, and the argument did not survive first contact with a judge.
Beach Boulevard
Running the firm alone means he is also the entire litigation department, and the reviews his clients leave describe a lawyer who answers his own phone. One came to him after tripping on carpet and developing necrotizing fasciitis, the infection that eats through soft tissue and turns an ordinary fall into a fight for a limb. Another had been rear-ended hard enough to total her car and send her to hospital, and reached him only after she had exhausted every attempt to deal with her own auto insurer herself.
I was hurt in a car accident, and suing was scary, but Jeff held my hand throughout the litigation. He took a lot of time with me and always made me feel heard.
— a client, on the firm’s testimonials page
The recognition has been steady rather than spectacular, which fits a career just past its first decade. Super Lawyers has named him a Rising Star six times, from 2019 through 2021 and again from 2023 through 2025, on a list restricted to lawyers who are forty or under or within ten years of admission. He holds an 8.9 rating on Avvo as of this writing, and his record with the State Bar of California shows no discipline.
Away from the office he is at home with his wife and their two young daughters. The building on Beach Boulevard is shared with a couple of dozen other businesses, which is a long way from the defense firms where he started, and it is the address he chose when he decided whose calls he wanted to be taking.
