A published decision from California's Third Appellate District has handed uninsured motorist practitioners a clean, unforgiving reminder: the five-year clock on a UM arbitration is real, it functions like a jurisdictional bar, and the pandemic did not stop it. In Prahl v. Allstate Northbrook Indemnity Co. (2025) 110 Cal.App.5th 118, the court affirmed the denial of a claimant's petition to compel arbitration because the statutory deadline to conclude that arbitration had already run. For anyone carrying UM or UIM files, the opinion is worth reading closely, because the mistake it describes is easy to make and impossible to fix after the fact.
The facts
Brian Prahl was injured in a multiple-vehicle collision in March 2016. He was insured by Allstate under a policy that carried uninsured motorist coverage, and Allstate agreed to arbitrate his UM claim on May 29, 2018. An arbitration was set for November 2022 but was continued because of counsel's unavailability. In August 2023, Prahl's counsel reached out to reset the arbitration, and on September 11, 2023, Prahl filed a petition to compel it. By then, the court concluded, it was too late.
The holding
Insurance Code section 11580.2, subdivision (i), provides that a UM arbitration must be concluded within five years from the institution of the arbitration proceeding. The proceeding here was instituted when the parties agreed to arbitrate in 2018, and the arbitration had not concluded within the five years that followed. Prahl argued that Judicial Council Emergency Rule 10, adopted during the COVID-19 emergency, extended the deadline by six months, as it does for the time to bring a civil action to trial. The Court of Appeal rejected the argument. Emergency Rule 10, the court held, applies to a civil action, and a UM arbitration is not a civil action. It is an alternative to one. The six-month extension therefore did not reach it, the five-year period had expired, and the petition to compel was properly denied.
The distinction is the entire case. The five-year rule for bringing a civil action to trial under Code of Civil Procedure section 583.310 is a familiar hazard, and Emergency Rule 10 softened it for pandemic-era filings. The parallel deadline for UM arbitration lives in a different statute, and the court declined to read the emergency relief across the gap. Two similar-sounding five-year rules, one covered by the emergency extension and one not, and Prahl landed on the wrong side of the line.
Why the deadline is easy to miss
UM and UIM claims lull practitioners into a slower rhythm than litigation. There is no answer to file, no trial-setting conference to force the pace, and the carrier is often content to let a case sit. The arbitration demand goes out, liability seems clear, and the file drifts while medical treatment and lien work continue. Nothing on the docket announces a deadline, because there is no docket. The clock in section 11580.2 runs quietly in the background, and it does not care that the parties were cooperative or that a continuance was reasonable.
Prahl also shows how a routine continuance can become fatal. The November 2022 setting was within the window. The continuance pushed the hearing past it, and once the arbitration was not concluded within five years of its institution, the right to compel evaporated. A continuance that would be unremarkable in litigation carried a consequence here that no one apparently priced in.
What to do about it
The practical response is not complicated, but it has to be systematic:
- Diary the arbitration clock separately. The date a UM arbitration is instituted, whether by written agreement, demand, or filing depending on the policy and statute, should generate its own five-year deadline in the calendaring system, independent of any litigation dates.
- Get extensions in writing. The parties can agree to extend the period, but an informal accommodation to reset a hearing is not the same as a written stipulation extending the statutory deadline. If the arbitration will run long, paper the extension before the clock runs, not after.
- Treat a continuance as a deadline event. Any continuance that pushes the arbitration hearing should trigger a recalculation of the conclude-by date and a check that the new setting still fits inside it.
What it means for case-building
Prahl is not a damages case or a coverage-theory case. It is a reminder that the strongest UM claim in the world is worth nothing if the right to arbitrate it lapses. For firms handling volume UM and UIM work, the opinion is an argument for building the five-year deadline into intake and case-management software rather than trusting individual memory. That is as much a matter of practice operations as of substantive law.
The decision also sharpens how counsel should think about the arbitration-versus-litigation choice at the front of an auto accident file. Arbitration carries its own timing rules, and they do not always mirror the litigation deadlines practitioners know by reflex. Reading each new appellate opinion in this area, and there is a steady stream of them, is how firms keep small procedural traps from becoming malpractice exposure. It is a theme that runs through much of the recent case law and settlement coverage, and Prahl is a particularly clean example of a preventable loss.