Fort Myers personal injury lawsuit

Published on: November 27, 2023

“Can the Defense in My Fort Myers Injury Lawsuit Spy on Me?”

Fort Myers injury lawsuit spying by defense The uneasy feeling of being covertly watched is one that’s inspired more than a few catchy songs, but you should know it’s a possibility if you’re the plaintiff in a Fort Myers personal injury lawsuit.

Whether we’re talking about a matter of medical malpractice, a car accident injury, or a dangerous product case, there’s nothing in Florida law that will technically block the defendant from conducting some type of surveillance on you. In fact, you should probably expect it. In personal injury cases, the goal of “spying” is to rebut damage claims. Florida courts have generally held that because of the public interest in exposing fraudulent personal injury claims, plaintiffs can anticipate that a “reasonable” investigation is likely to include independent verification of their injuries.

But that doesn’t mean your privacy goes out the window. By working with a Fort Myers injury lawyer, you’ll get a much better sense of what these investigators are likely to look for and ways you can shield your privacy. We will help ensure that your rights are protected, and injury case defendants won’t get away with playing dirty.

What Are the Surveillance Rules in a Florida Injury Lawsuit?

Fairly common surveillance tactics in Florida injury lawsuits:

Monitoring your social media pages to see what sort of activities you’re up to. They may scour the posts and pictures for clues about not only your physical capabilities, but your mental/emotional state – which can be a significant component of damages in a Fort Myers injury lawsuit.
They might have an investigator post up to watch/record you as you leave your home, enter your place of employment, or carry on with daily activities.
They might request surveillance footage of local businesses or government agencies that might show you moving throughout a typical day – grocery shopping and lifting bags, walking through the park with a backpack on, unloading items from your vehicle at a local print shop, etc.

However, this “spying” is not without limitation. Continue reading

Published on: September 30, 2020

6 Factors Impacting Your Fort Myers Personal Injury Lawsuit Timeline

by Leland Garvin

Fort Myers personal injury lawsuit

Aside from how much money a case is worth, Fort Myers personal injury lawsuit plaintiffs often want to know how long their case will take to resolve. Most are not thrilled to hear the ever-popular lawyer answer: It depends. But the truth is that determining how long a case will take to resolve can be more of an art than a science. First, know that settlements can often be preferable to litigation. They take less time and tend to use fewer resources. You may never even need to file a lawsuit if your injury attorney can successfully negotiate a fair resolution with the insurer(s) involved. While this is oversimplified for purposes of making this a brief blog post; for a settlement to be reached, both sides need to agree on two main issues: Liability and fair value.

Liability refers to which party is legally responsible for paying. Florida follows a system of “pure comparative fault,” essentially meaning a plaintiff (the person filing the case) could be 99 percent liable – and still collect the remaining 1 percent of damages from the other at-fault party. However, your damage award is going to be proportionately reduced by your degree of fault. So if you are 40 percent liable, your total damages will be reduced by 40 percent.

Fair value refers to how much your case is reasonably worth in light of the severity of your injuries, how much physical pain you suffered, the totality of your medical expenses (past and future), the time you had to take off work, the impact to your future wage-earning capabilities and the extent to which this has impacted your personal life. Understand that for cases involving serious injuries, it is probably impossible to resolve in less than a few months because it is going to take at least that long (usually longer) to accurately determine the full severity of your injuries, the long-term estimate of future medical expenses and how these injuries are going to impact the rest of your life.

It should go without saying that you or your attorney will need to prove causation, that is that the injury for which you are seeking “fair value” was actually caused by (or made worse as a result of) the crash or incident. This is an often contested area as many of us have some evidence of the natural aging process going on in our body at a time that we may become injured.

Needless to say, there can be more than a few points of disagreement. When those differences cannot be resolved, cases end up going to trial.

Published on: March 12, 2020

Common Myths About Florida Personal Injury Lawsuits

by Leland Garvin

Many people with strong claims to financial damages in Florida personal injury lawsuits are very reluctant to explore the possibility, and it largely has to do with some common myths and misconceptions of the process. They are:

Assuming it is going to be extremely expensive;
Thinking their injuries are not serious enough;
Hesitant to “punish” the at-fault person;
Reticent to seem “greedy”;
Presuming their insurance will cover it all anyway.

As our South Florida injury lawyers can explain, while the individual facts and circumstances of the situation ultimately determine the viability of your claim, by-and-large: These notions are incorrect or exaggerated. Some of these myths are rooted in a simple misunderstanding of the law. Others can be traced to an aggressive push for tort reform messaging.

Let us address them one-by-one: Continue reading