One year is the main deadline in Kentucky, and the person who files is usually the personal representative of your dad's estate.

What should have happened first: after the death, someone should have opened an estate in Jefferson District Court and been formally appointed executor or administrator. In Kentucky, the wrongful death lawsuit is not usually filed by an individual child, spouse, or parent in their own name first. It is filed by the estate's representative.

What to do now: find out whether an estate was opened and who was appointed. Also gather the crash report, death certificate, funeral bills, and any medical records from before death. If the crash happened in Louisville, the report may be from Louisville Metro Police; on some state routes or highway scenes, it could involve the Kentucky State Police.

If no estate has been opened yet, that usually needs to happen next.

What comes next legally is where the terms get confusing:

• A wrongful death claim is for the family beneficiaries.
• A survival claim belongs to the estate for what your dad went through before death.

In Kentucky, wrongful death money is distributed by statute, usually to the surviving spouse and children, then other relatives if there is no spouse or child. The estate can separately seek things like medical expenses before death, funeral and burial costs, and the decedent's conscious pain and suffering before passing.

A spouse may also have a loss of consortium claim tied to the death case.

For timing, Kentucky cases are often treated as having a 1-year filing deadline, and estate appointment dates can matter, so do not wait. If VA survivor benefits are involved, those are a separate federal system. They do not replace a Kentucky wrongful death or survival case, and the two systems usually do not communicate automatically.