Fort Lauderdale Motorcycle Accident Lawyer
A rider walks away with road rash and a wrecked bike on a good day, and with surgery and months off work on a bad one. We can take it from here. Call 954-522-5800 for a free consultation. You pay us nothing unless we win. Our Fort Lauderdale personal injury lawyers have taken these cases across Broward County since 1993.
Motorcycle Accident claims in Fort Lauderdale
The driver who turned across your lane will say they never saw you, and their insurer will start from the idea that you were going too fast. Meanwhile you are counting up the surgery, the shifts you cannot work and a bike nobody has offered to replace. Taking that assumption apart is what we do, from the first call.
Left-turn collisions along Federal Highway and the beach approaches are the pattern we see most in Broward. A driver crosses a rider’s path, tells the officer they never saw the bike, and the insurer’s first theory is that the rider must have been speeding. Scene measurements, gouge marks on the asphalt and the damage pattern on the fairing usually establish approach speed far better than either account.
A Broward motorcycle claim almost always opens with the other side asserting the rider was going too fast, before anybody has measured anything. It is answered from the road surface, the damage geometry and the car’s own event data recorder. Nothing pays a rider’s first medical bills automatically, so the coverage question is a first-week problem. Most claims carry a two-year filing deadline.
What to do after a motorcycle accident in Fort Lauderdale
- Keep the motorcycle, and keep the gear. Do not let the bike be repaired, sold for salvage or released to an insurer until somebody has photographed and measured it. The damage pattern on the fairing, the forks and the pegs is what an engineer reads approach speed and impact angle from. The same is true of a helmet and a jacket, which are physical evidence of what happened to your body and of what you were wearing.
- See a doctor the same day, even if you got up and walked. Adrenaline hides a great deal, and the injuries that matter most on a bike frequently present a day or two later as numbness, a headache that will not clear or a shoulder that will not lift. A gap between the crash and the first medical visit is the most common argument made about how badly somebody was actually hurt, and it is a hard one to answer after the fact.
- Photograph the road, not just the vehicles. The gouge in the asphalt, the scrape line, where the debris field starts and ends, and where each vehicle finished. Those marks tell a reconstruction where the impact happened and at what angle, and they are washed away or paved over within weeks. Photograph the intersection from the driver’s approach as well as your own.
- Write down what the driver said at the scene. Riders hear the same sentence constantly: I never saw you. Said to an officer or a bystander in the first minutes, that is a driver describing a failure to look, which is the negligence itself. It is worth more than most people realize, and it is frequently softened by the time a statement gets written down weeks later.
- Give no recorded statement to the other side. The call comes early and it is friendly, and the questions are about speed, about what gear you had on and about whether you had ridden that road before. You are not obliged to be recorded by the other driver’s carrier, and the answers given by somebody on pain medication in the first week get quoted back months later as though they were considered testimony.
Where these happen in Fort Lauderdale
Broward riders are on the road every month of the year, which means the collisions here are not seasonal and not concentrated on one road. Where it happened changes what physical evidence exists and who else might be responsible for the surface you were riding on.
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The beach loop and the bridges
A1A, the Intracoastal crossings and the roads feeding them, where the surface itself is part of the problem.
- Metal grate bridge decks and expansion joints, which behave very differently wet than dry
- Drivers slowing, stopping and turning into beach parking without checking twice
- Pedestrian and rideshare activity that puts doors and people into the traffic lane
- Bridge tender and marine traffic logs, which timestamp the minutes around a crash precisely
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The six-lane western main roads
University Drive, Pine Island Road, Sunrise Boulevard and Commercial Boulevard, where the danger is the driveway rather than the intersection.
- Left turns across a rider’s path at signals and at mid-block openings, which is the collision that injures riders most
- Cars pulling out of plaza exits after checking only for other cars
- Long sight distances that make a motorcycle appear slower and further away than it is
- Business and traffic cameras along these roads, most of which overwrite inside a month
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The interstate ramps and I-595
The interchange system and its ramps, where lane changes happen at speed and a motorcycle sits in a mirror without registering as a vehicle.
- Lane change collisions where the driver says they never saw the bike, which is the negligence itself
- Commercial traffic off the port and the airport, which brings a carrier and a different set of records
- Debris and shed loads that a car drives over and a motorcycle cannot
- Serious injuries routed to Broward Health Medical Center, which fixes a documented timeline
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Group rides and event traffic
Broward hosts a great deal of organized riding, and a collision within a group produces something a solo crash rarely does.
- Multiple riders who saw the same thing from different positions, which is unusually strong evidence
- Helmet and action camera footage, which several riders in any group are carrying
- Fault disputes among riders as well as with the driver, which need separating early
- Out-of-state riders whose own coverage has to be read rather than assumed
What causes them
- A driver turning left across a rider’s path, which is the single most common serious motorcycle collision on Florida roads
- Lane changes into a rider who was in the mirror the whole time and never looked like a vehicle
- Cars pulling out of side streets, driveways and plaza exits into traffic they only checked for other cars
- Following too closely, where the rider brakes for something and the car behind has nowhere to go
- Doors opened into traffic alongside parked cars and rideshare pickups
The injuries we see, and what each one turns on
Head and brain injury
A brain injury does not require losing consciousness and a normal CT scan does not rule one out, which is why so many riders are discharged with a clean result and problems that show up a week later in memory, concentration, sleep and temper. It is usually the people around somebody who notice first. These are proved with neuropsychological testing and treating records rather than with the scan taken on the day.
Road rash, degloving and scarring
Sliding on asphalt takes skin off in layers, and the serious version requires debridement, grafting and a long series of procedures. Two things get undervalued in an early offer: the infection risk that keeps somebody in the hospital far longer than the injury suggests, and permanent scarring, which is its own recoverable loss and needs to be documented photographically as it heals rather than described afterward.
Legs, feet and ankles
The lower body takes the impact in most motorcycle collisions: tibia and femur fractures, crushed ankles and open fractures that need hardware and then a second operation to remove or revise it. The first settlement offer usually arrives before anybody has said out loud that a second operation is coming, and it is priced on the bills that exist rather than the ones that will.
What Florida law requires you to prove
What the helmet law actually says
Under Fla. Stat. § 316.211, a rider aged 21 or older may lawfully ride without protective headgear while covered by an insurance policy providing at least $10,000 in medical benefits for injuries sustained in a motorcycle crash. Riders under 21 must wear a compliant helmet, and eye protection is required regardless of age. Riding lawfully without a helmet does not bar recovery, whatever an adjuster implies on the first call.
Who had to yield, and how fault gets split
A driver turning left has to yield to oncoming traffic that is close enough to be an immediate hazard, under Fla. Stat. § 316.122, and a motorcycle is oncoming traffic. Fault is then shared under Fla. Stat. § 768.81, where a rider found more than 50 percent responsible recovers nothing. Most Florida negligence claims arising on or after March 24, 2023 have to be filed within two years under Fla. Stat. § 95.11.
Lane position, and the license endorsement
Florida gives a motorcycle full use of a lane and prohibits a driver from crowding a rider out of it. Passing another vehicle within the same lane is not permitted under Fla. Stat. § 316.209, though two motorcycles may ride abreast in one lane. Riding without the endorsement on your license is a separate traffic matter and it does not decide who caused a collision, which is not how it will be presented.
The full statutory detail, and the parts that differ by claim type, sit on our statewide motorcycle accident page rather than being restated in every market.
How we prove it in Broward County
These cases are won on physical evidence, because the accounts are always in conflict and the rider is the one who was in an ambulance. Almost all of it we can get and most of it is on a short clock.
- The motorcycle itself, photographed and measured before it is repaired or sold for salvage
- The helmet, jacket, boots and gloves, which record what happened to the body and are routinely thrown away
- Gouge marks, scrape lines and the debris field, which fix the point and angle of impact and are gone in weeks
- The event data recorder in the car, which stores the seconds before impact regardless of what anybody remembers
- The driver’s first account to the officer, which is frequently softened by the time a statement is written
- Camera footage from businesses along the road and from any rider in the group
- The crash report and the officer’s underlying notes and photographs, which carry more than the report does
- Signal timing and any streetlight maintenance history where the collision happened at an intersection after dark
The single most time-critical item is the motorcycle. Everything else on that list is paper or can be pursued for months, and a bike that has gone through a salvage auction cannot be measured by anybody.
Who would handle your case
Being hurt in Fort Lauderdale is hard enough without working out the legal side on your own. The trial lawyers below have handled motorcycle accident claims across Florida since 1993, and one of them will take yours from the first call to the last check. They will tell you what your case is worth and why, and they will be straight with you about the parts that are hard.
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Richard P. Pravato Founding & Managing Attorney Board Certified in Civil Trial Law by The Florida Bar since 2004, and by the National Board of Trial Advocacy. Injury cases exclusively since 1996. Full profile → -
Brett J. Yonon Senior Trial Attorney Selected to Florida Super Lawyers in 2024 and 2025. Brett Yonon is who this firm puts on a catastrophic injury or a death in the family, and he has tried those cases to verdict. Full profile →
How insurance companies handle these claims
Motorcycle files are worked differently from car files, because the other side starts from an assumption about riders and knows that jurors sometimes share it.
- The rider must have been speeding
- It is the opening position in nearly every one of these files, and it is usually asserted before anybody has measured anything. It is answered with physical evidence rather than with argument: the gouge and scrape marks, where the debris field starts, the damage geometry on both vehicles and the event data recorder in the car, which records the seconds before an impact whether or not anybody agrees about them.
- The helmet question, asked early and asked often
- A rider 21 or older carrying the required medical benefits may lawfully ride without one, and doing so does not bar recovery. What a carrier may properly argue is that it affected the severity of a head injury specifically. It says nothing at all about who caused the collision, and it is raised early because it makes people feel they have already lost.
- You were between lanes, or you came out of nowhere
- The claim that a rider was lane splitting appears in files where the physical evidence puts the motorcycle squarely in its own lane. Where the vehicles ended, the angle of the damage and any camera along the road answer it. So does the driver’s own first account, which frequently begins with not having seen the bike at all.
What a claim can include
Medical care, past and future
Everything already billed and what the treating physicians say is still ahead. Future care is the part an early offer never includes, and on a motorcycle case it is frequently the largest single number in the claim.
Lost income and lost earning capacity
Wages missed, and separately what somebody can no longer earn. A rider who goes back to lighter work at less money has a loss that a pay stub does not show on its own.
Pain, and what daily life has become
Sleep, mobility and the things somebody used to do without thinking about them, including riding. It is proved with the account of the people around the injured person as much as with records.
What we have recovered
Verified matters this firm has handled on motorcycle accident claims. Figures are gross recoveries, before attorney fees, costs and medical liens come out of them.
Law enforcement first put fault for this fatal Miami-Dade motorcycle crash on the rider who died.
Confidential settlementEvery verdict and settlement we publish, with the press coverage for the ones that were reported. No result predicts another case: every claim turns on its own facts, its own evidence and the insurance actually available.
Why Wolf & Pravato in Fort Lauderdale
A Broward motorcycle case is tried in the Seventeenth Judicial Circuit in front of a Broward jury pool, and this office has worked in that courthouse since 1993. Carriers behave as though jurors start with an assumption about riders, which is exactly why the physical evidence and the record of the firm holding the file both move the number.
Richard Pravato has been Board Certified in Civil Trial law by The Florida Bar since 2004. The Bar lists 861 lawyers in the state holding it against a membership over 109,000. What it means in practice is that the other side knows the file can go in front of a jury, and files that can go to trial are priced differently from files that cannot.
The first conversation is free. We are paid out of the recovery or not at all, and if we do not think there is a claim worth bringing we will tell you that rather than take it.
Fort Lauderdale motorcycle accident questions
Who pays my medical bills if I have no coverage on the bike?
Not the automatic benefit a car carries, because Florida’s no-fault PIP requirement applies to vehicles with four or more wheels and motorcycles fall outside it. In practice it is a combination: your health insurance, any MedPay you carry, your uninsured or underinsured motorist coverage, and eventually the at-fault driver’s bodily injury policy. Florida does not require drivers to carry bodily injury coverage at all, so uninsured motorist coverage is frequently the largest policy in the case. Send us the declarations page and we will read it at no charge.
I was not wearing a helmet on A1A. Is my claim finished?
No. A rider 21 or older carrying at least $10,000 in medical benefits may lawfully ride without protective headgear in Florida, and doing so does not bar recovery. A carrier may properly argue it affected the severity of a head injury specifically. It says nothing about who caused the collision, and it is raised early precisely because it makes people assume they have lost.
The report says I was speeding but I was not.
A crash report records the officer’s conclusion, frequently formed from one account at a scene where the rider was already in an ambulance. It is not binding on a civil claim and it gets revised regularly once measurements exist. Gouge marks, the debris field, the damage geometry and the car’s event data recorder are what establish approach speed, and they do it better than either driver’s recollection.
I was not wearing a helmet. Can I still recover?
Yes. If you are 21 or older and carry at least $10,000 in medical benefits, riding without a helmet is lawful in Florida under Fla. Stat. § 316.211. It does not bar a claim. An insurer may argue it affected the severity of a head injury specifically, but it has no bearing on who caused the crash.
Does PIP cover a motorcycle accident in Florida?
Generally no. Florida’s no-fault PIP requirement applies to motor vehicles with four or more wheels, so motorcycles fall outside it. That means no automatic $10,000 medical benefit. Your health insurance, any MedPay, your uninsured motorist coverage and the at-fault driver’s policy have to carry it instead.
The questions that come up on every kind of claim, deadlines, fees, recorded statements and fault, are answered on our Florida injury claim FAQ.
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Tell us what happened
A lawyer will listen, tell you what Florida law does with those facts, and be straight with you about whether it is worth bringing. We are at 2101 W Commercial Blvd, Suite 1500, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33309.