A Typo Left Two Different Dollar Amounts in Your Claim Letter to the City. Does That Cost You the Right to Sue?

Before you can sue a city, county, or other government body in Arizona over an injury, you have to send it an official notice first — and that notice has to identify one certain amount that would settle the claim, either by stating it or by providing a basis for calculating it precisely. It sounds simple enough, until you're the one filling it out under a deadline, describing what happened to you, and deciding what amount would settle the claim. In this case, the notice used both words and digits; the Court did not say that both were required.

Now imagine the two don't match. You meant one figure. What you sent said another — plainly a mistake anyone reading it would recognize as a mistake. Does the government get to guess which one you meant? Does it have to ask? Or does the mismatch alone knock your case out before it even starts?

On September 24, 2026, the Arizona Supreme Court answered that question, in a case that turned on a single typo.

A police dog, and a claim letter with two numbers

In June 2023, a police dog from the Payson Police Department was chasing a suspect when it mistakenly attacked and injured a bystander. Before he could sue the Town of Payson over his injuries, Arizona law required him to first send the Town a notice of claim — a formal letter describing what happened and identifying a certain amount that would settle the matter, giving the Town sixty days to investigate and decide whether to accept.

His notice offered to settle for "one hundred thousand dollars ($250,000)." The words said one number. The parenthetical said another. The Town let the sixty-day window pass without accepting, and he filed suit seeking damages for his injuries.

Which number did he mean — and does it matter?

The Town argued that the conflicting amounts meant the claimant's notice never stated a specific settlement amount at all, and asked the court to end the case before it reached the merits. The trial court agreed and ruled for the Town.

The Court of Appeals reversed, reasoning the way a contract dispute might be resolved: it looked to legal conventions for interpreting written documents, concluded that a number placed in parentheses is meant to clarify the words before it rather than override them, and decided that he had unambiguously meant $100,000. Under that reading, his notice was good enough.

The Arizona Supreme Court disagreed with both the reasoning and the result. It set aside the Court of Appeals' opinion and left the trial court's judgment for the Town in place.

What the Court decided

Courts cannot use contract-interpretation rules to cure conflicting settlement amounts in a notice of claim. The Court held that Arizona's notice-of-claim statute requires one certain settlement amount, either stated directly or precisely calculable from the notice. It doesn't ask the government to apply rules for resolving ambiguous contract language, and it doesn't ask a court to investigate what the claimant privately meant to write. A notice with two conflicting figures fails the requirement no matter which figure turns out to be the "real" one, because the entire point of the rule is that the government shouldn't have to guess. The Court distinguished using contract principles to confirm an unambiguous offer from using them to repair conflicting figures.

The government doesn't have to help you fix it, even when it easily could. The claimant argued the Town should have simply asked him to clarify an obvious clerical error. The Court agreed the Town could have — and held that nothing in the law required it to. Arizona courts have held for years that public entities aren't obligated to help claimants get their own paperwork right.

The Court reaffirmed an existing rule. The Court described its ruling as consistent with two decades of cases requiring strict — not "close enough" — compliance with the notice statute, including a 2024 decision involving a settlement demand pegged to an insurance policy limit that turned out to be impossible to pin down from the notice alone. The common thread: if the notice leaves any room for debate about the number, it doesn't satisfy the law.

Why the Court drew the line where it did

The sixty-day window matters. It gives the government time to investigate the incident, assess liability, and consider settlement before litigation. A clear settlement amount also assists financial planning and budgeting. The government needs to know what amount is on the table without guessing or litigating what the claimant intended. Requiring it to resolve conflicting settlement figures would frustrate those purposes.

The Court was careful about what it wasn't saying. It did not decide whether the Town was liable for the claimant's injuries. It acknowledged that his mistake was clerical and that the Town could easily have asked what he meant. But the clerical nature of the mistake did not excuse noncompliance: the statute puts the burden of a clear notice on the person filing the claim, not the government receiving it, and it is the Legislature's call — not the courts' — to decide otherwise.

What the Court did not decide

The Court didn't rule on the facts of the claimant's injury, and its decision says nothing about who was at fault for the incident itself. It also didn't decide that the Town would have accepted either $100,000 or $250,000 had the notice been clear — only that the Town was entitled to a notice clear enough to make that decision without guessing. And the ruling is specific to notices with genuinely conflicting dollar figures; it doesn't address every way a notice of claim might fall short.

What does this decision teach us?

• "Specific amount" means exactly that. The notice must identify one certain settlement amount, either by stating it or by providing a basis for calculating it precisely. Conflicting figures or guesswork about the intended amount do not satisfy that requirement.
• It doesn't matter that the mistake was innocent. The Court accepted that the claimant's conflicting numbers were a clerical error, not a change of heart — and ruled against him anyway. Intent isn't the test; clarity is.
• The government isn't required to fill in the gaps for you. A public entity that could easily guess or ask what you meant has no legal duty to do either.
• This is a strict-compliance rule, not a close one. Arizona courts have applied this standard consistently for two decades; this decision reaffirms rather than changes it.
• A notice of claim must satisfy a statute's requirements. Rules developed for interpreting contracts — like treating written words as controlling over numbers in parentheses — don't automatically carry over to a government claims notice.