Legal Question in Business Law in California

Re: accident

First, the LLC may not be liable if the driver was driving outside the "course and scope" of the driver's employment. If the driver was on company business, or anything vaguely resembling company business, the LLC is more than likely liable along with the driver. If the driving being done at the time of the accident was entirely unrelated to company business, the driver alone is probably liable, and the company is not.

Issues like this should be referred to your insurance company! They will presumably provide legal defense and their lawyers should be answering your questions!

I'm not sure what you mean by "released" of liability. A release from liability happens when a victim or other potential litigant provides you with a release, which is a kind of legal document. When you have a fully-signed document with a title something like "General Release" and it is in proper form, then you are released of liability to that particular victim. Probably you mean to ask whether you are immune from liability, or something like that.

As the owner of an LLC, you are probably immune from personal liability for the LLC's debts, including things like claims from accident victims caused by the LLC's employees' driving accidents. There are various legal theories under which corporate or LLC owners can be tapped for damages despite the corporate or LLC shield, and these usually depend upon some kind of serious mis-use or abuse of the corporate or LLC entity by the owner. If you ran your LLC more or less properly, you will probably benefit from the immunity of an LLC owner from personal liability on the LLC's debts.

Even then, there is some possibility that a victim could find something you did personally that contributed to the accident, such as negligently hiring a driver with a very bad record, or encouraging the driver to drink before making deliveries, etc.

If by "filed bankruptcy on my llc" you mean that you put your LLC into bankruptcy, I'd say this does little or nothing to affect your personal liability for the accident. I can't see that the bankruptcy helps you. You don't mention whether the bankruptcy happened before or after the accident, nor whether the accident was a factor in the filing.

I'm pretty sure you can expect the victims' lawyers to be crawling over all aspects of the way this LLC was set up and managed; they will be poking into every aspect of the bankruptcy filing; they will be looking for deep pockets, attackable assets, and any sign of fraud such as "looting" of the LLC's assets before or after the accident and banruptcy to see if the LLC recently had valuable assets that may have disappeared into the owners' pockets.

Finally, the victims' lawyers will be asking about insurance, because that's how victims ordinarily get paid for their injuries.