South Florida injury lawyer

Published on: April 20, 2022

Florida Injury Lawyer Explains: What Exactly Does “Full Coverage” Mean?

South Florida injury lawyer As a longtime Florida car accident lawyer, I’ve come across many individuals who were tricked into believing that if they were involved in a crash, they had nothing to worry about because “I have full coverage.”

Unfortunately, in the auto insurance world, “full coverage” doesn’t go half as far as most people think. And even in situations with decent insurance, it can be a tooth-and-nail battle to compel the insurance company to pay their fair share.

In Florida, people have an especially warped view of how much might be covered because of the fact that we are a no-fault auto insurance state. The (erroneous) presumption is that insurance is going to cover damages, no matter who is at-fault. Although it is true that Florida requires personal injury protection (PIP) coverage of every vehicle owner, some (like motorcyclists) are expressly excluded. Plus, it only covers up to $10,000 in damages – and sometimes even getting them to pay that requires negotiation.

What Exactly Does it Mean to Have “Full Coverage” in Florida?

If you’re involved in a crash with another driver who assures you, “Don’t worry – I’m fully covered,” you shouldn’t assume that everything will be covered and that it’s ok to relax. For one thing, Florida is a no-fault state, meaning you can’t collect damages from the other motorist at all unless your injuries meet the serious injury threshold criteria, outlined in F.S. 627.737. You’d also have to prove the fault of the other driver. Over the years we have learned that insurance companies often don’t do the right thing and fairly pay claims; if they did our law firm would have little purpose and would likely be out of a job.

But beyond that, “full coverage” simply means that one has the bare minimum coverage legally required by Florida law – and that ain’t much. Specifically: 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: May 11, 2020

How to Recover Damages in a Florida Car Accident With an Uninsured Driver

by Leland Garvin

Florida car accident lawyer A jury recently awarded a plaintiff $202 million in damages for a Florida car crash that left her seriously injured and her son with permanent, catastrophic injuries. Law.com reports the at-fault driver slammed into the passenger side of a vehicle, where the plaintiff, then 8-months-pregnant, was sitting, causing her to suffer placental abruption. She suffered serious injuries. Her baby, born prematurely, barely survived. The plaintiff reports the child, now 4, is blind and non-verbal with permanent brain damage and suffering some 20 seizures daily.

The defendant was convicted of drunk driving. He was negligent in the crash. Yet as the article notes, “The defendant … was uninsured and unrepresented, so the damages award of $202 million is likely unrecoverable.”

Uninsured drivers are indeed a serious problem in Florida. We have the highest percentage of uninsured motorists in the U.S. According to the Insurance Information Institute, nearly 27 percent of motorists in Florida do not have auto insurance – even though it is required by law. Continue reading

Published on: February 19, 2020

I Was Injured on Vacation in Florida. What Are My Rights?

by Leland Garvin

Florida tourist injury lawyer

While the risk of a Florida tourist injury may depend on the activities in which one is engaged, often it is merely a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time – be it navigating heavy traffic or a slippery hotel floor. That does not mean no one is to blame.

Visitors should know that no matter where they are from, they have the same rights as residents when pursuing damages for others’ negligence resulting in injury.

News outlets recently reported that two Norwegian tourists were struck and seriously injured in a hit-and-run pedestrian accident in Fort Lauderdale. Meanwhile, shootings were reported in two tourist-heavy districts – one in Orlando on International Drive and another in Miami’s Wynwood district. In 2018, four Spanish tourists were struck and killed in a trucking accident in Key West. Several years before that, two teenagers from Indiana suffered broken bones, brain trauma, and severe internal injuries in a parasailing accident in Panama City.

What each of these occurrences has in common is that they involved Florida tourist injuries for which there likely are (or were) grounds to file Florida personal injury or wrongful death lawsuits, albeit based on different legal theories. As long-time South Florida tourist injury lawyers, we have helped many tourists injured on vacation in Florida to weigh their case’s viability and pursue the most favorable outcome.