Fort Myers · Lee County

Fort Myers Wrongful Death Lawyer

Florida requires a wrongful death claim to be opened through probate before anything else. We get that started. We can take it from here. Call 833-370-8692 for a free consultation. You pay us nothing unless we win. Our Fort Myers personal injury lawyers have taken these cases across Lee County since 1993.

Free Case Evaluation How these cases work

$3,500,000 Jury verdict, funeral home negligence.

§ 768.21 Sets who may recover and what each survivor may claim.

One claim Brought by the personal representative, not by each relative.

Lee County Our Fort Myers office takes these claims anywhere in the county.

In Lee County

Wrongful Death claims in Fort Myers

Whoever is responsible for a death has lawyers on the case within days, and the family is asked for paperwork while a funeral is still being arranged. Meanwhile the mortgage is due, the income has stopped, and nobody has given you a straight account of what actually happened. Getting that account, and providing for the people left behind, is what we do from the first call.

A wrongful death claim arising in Fort Myers is brought in the Twentieth Judicial Circuit at the Lee County Justice Center, by the personal representative of the estate rather than by relatives individually. Where the person who died was a seasonal resident, the estate may be administered in another state, which adds a step families do not expect.

Short answer

A Lee County wrongful death claim is brought by the personal representative of the estate rather than by the family directly, and Florida decides by statute which survivors may recover and for what. The general deadline is two years from the death. Opening the estate takes time, so it is the step worth starting first.

What to do after a wrongful death in Fort Myers

Nothing has to be decided this week. The deadline is measured in years and almost nothing is lost by taking two weeks. What is worth doing early is keeping paper: the hospital records, the police report number, the bills as they arrive, and a note of who has called and what they said. Families frequently call us because somebody asked them to sign something and it did not feel right, and that instinct is usually correct.
Do not sign a release, and be careful about a recorded statement. An insurer may make an early offer, sometimes a considerate one, and it will come with a release. A release cannot be reopened. Nobody should sign one before there is a clear picture of what happened and who is responsible, and a family is not required to be recorded by the other side while they are arranging a funeral.
Ask what became of the vehicle, the equipment or the scene. Whatever was involved may be repaired, released or scrapped within weeks, and once it is gone it cannot be examined. A short written request that it be preserved is often all that is needed, and it can be sent long before anybody decides whether to bring a claim.
An estate has to be opened before anything can be filed. Florida requires the claim to be brought by a personal representative of the estate rather than by the family directly, under Fla. Stat. § 768.20. It is a probate step, it takes time, and it is the one thing worth starting early even where the family has not decided anything else.
Ask before you agree to an autopsy decision either way. In some deaths the medical examiner decides and the family has no say. In others there is a choice, and it is made in the first day or two while nobody is thinking about evidence. Where the cause of death may be disputed later, that decision is difficult to revisit.

Where these happen in Fort Myers

Lee County has grown faster than its roads and its hospitals, and both of those show up in these cases: long distances to definitive care, and heavy traffic on routes that were rural until recently.

I-75 and the main corridors

The freight spine of the coast, carrying long-haul traffic through a county whose population has grown around it.
- Commercial vehicle collisions with federal records behind them
- Trauma care running to Lee Memorial Hospital, which documents the sequence
- Construction zones, which change within days of an incident
The eastern two-lane roads

SR 82, SR 80 and the agricultural routes, undivided and with nothing between opposing traffic.
- Head-on collisions with no median
- Long transport times, which alter the medical picture and give the other side something to argue about
- Almost no camera coverage, so the vehicle data and the roadway carry the case
The water

The Caloosahatchee, the passes and the Gulf produce boating and diving deaths, and almost none of the paperwork a road death does.
- No crash report in the form a road collision generates
- Witnesses gone to several different marinas by the evening
- Vessels hauled out, cleaned or repaired before anybody inspects them
Pools, rentals and construction

A county with a very large number of pools, short-term rentals and building sites, all at once.
- Gate, fence and alarm requirements measurable against a code
- Short-term rental properties, where the owner, the manager and the platform are separate questions
- Construction sites where a claim can exist against everybody who was not the employer

What causes them

Drownings, in pools where the gate, the alarm or the supervision was not what it was supposed to be
Violence at properties where the owner already knew there was a problem and did nothing about it
Medical care that went wrong, where the family is given an account that does not match what they saw
Nursing home neglect, where a decline was documented by the people who were paid to prevent it
Boating collisions, where there is often no police report and the witnesses scatter by evening

The injuries we see, and what each one turns on

Lost support and services

What the person contributed to the household, in money and in work that now has to be paid for or gone without. It is calculated from the date of the injury and forward over the years the person would reasonably have been expected to live, and it is usually the part that requires an economist.

What belongs to the estate rather than to a survivor

Medical and funeral expenses paid by the estate, and the earnings the person would have accumulated. These are separate from the survivors’ own losses and are recovered by the estate itself.

What the statute allows a family to recover

Florida sets this out by statute rather than leaving it to a court, in Fla. Stat. § 768.21, and what each survivor may claim depends on their relationship to the person who died. That is why the first conversation is usually about who is in the family rather than about what happened.

What Florida law requires you to prove

The deadline

A wrongful death action in Florida generally has to be filed within two years of the death under Fla. Stat. § 95.11. Claims against a government body carry a separate and much shorter notice requirement, which is why the identity of the defendant is worth settling early rather than late.

How fault is shared

Under Fla. Stat. § 768.81 a recovery is reduced by the share of fault attributed to the person who died, and a finding of more than 50 percent bars it altogether. Families are frequently told at an early stage that their relative caused it. That is an opening position rather than a conclusion, and it is answered with evidence.

The full statutory detail, and the parts that differ by claim type, sit on our statewide wrongful death page rather than being restated in every market.

How we prove it in Lee County

Away from the interstate there is often no witness and no camera, so these cases are built from the physical evidence and from records held elsewhere.

What we go after, and when

The crash or incident report with the officer’s notes and photographs
The medical examiner’s report and autopsy findings
Hospital, air ambulance and ground ambulance records, which here often cover a long transport
The vehicle, vessel or equipment, inspected before repair, release or disposal
Engine and equipment data, which exists whether or not anybody saw what happened
Property, association and rental platform records where a pool or a rental is involved
Prior incidents and complaints at the same property or by the same operator
Employment, tax and pension records for the economic losses

The single most time-critical item on that list is the vehicle or the vessel. Everything else is paper and can be pursued in discovery months later; a boat that has been hauled out and pressure-washed cannot be examined at all.

A setting a wrongful death claim in Fort Myers typically arises from

Who would handle your case

Being hurt in Fort Myers is hard enough without working out the legal side on your own. The trial lawyers below have handled wrongful death 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.

How insurance companies handle these claims

The other side is usually organized before the funeral. That is not cruelty, it is procedure, and it is worth knowing in advance rather than discovering it.

A sympathetic call, and an early offer: It often arrives before anybody knows the full picture, and it will be framed as helping with immediate costs. Accepting it means signing a release, and a release cannot be reopened when the rest of the facts come out. There is no harm in saying that the family is not making decisions yet.
The family is told to wait for the investigation to finish: A police or agency investigation can run for months and its conclusions are not binding on a civil claim in any event. Waiting for it is how evidence gets lost. The two processes run in parallel, and the civil work does not need permission from the criminal one.
The available insurance is described as small and fixed: Sometimes it genuinely is, and where a death was caused by somebody with a minimum policy that is a hard conversation to have honestly. Frequently it is not the whole picture: an employer, a vehicle owner, a property owner, a contractor or an umbrella policy can sit behind the first one. Finding out is a search rather than a question.

What a claim can include

Mental pain and suffering of the survivors

The grief of the people the statute recognizes, from the date of the injury onward.

Lost accumulations of the estate

What the person would have saved and left behind had they lived a normal working life. It generally requires an economist and it is frequently the largest single figure in the claim.

Funeral and burial expenses

Recoverable by whoever paid them, whether that was the estate or a survivor personally. Keep the invoices.

What we have recovered

Verified matters this firm has handled on wrongful death claims. Figures are gross recoveries, before attorney fees, costs and medical liens come out of them.

$2 millionWrongful death, out-of-code stairwell

A father and grandfather died in a fall down a makeshift stairwell built when an owner split a townhouse into two units without permits.

Broward County jury verdict

Every 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.

Another setting a wrongful death claim in Fort Myers arises from

Why Wolf & Pravato in Fort Myers

A Lee County wrongful death claim is filed in the Twentieth Judicial Circuit at the Lee County Justice Center, with the estate opened in the probate division there, and that is the courthouse this office works in. The circuit a case would be tried in shapes what an insurer offers to settle it, because carriers keep records of which firms in a county actually try cases.

Richard Pravato is one of 861 lawyers Board Certified by The Florida Bar in Civil Trial law, out of a membership over 109,000. The certification is about trial experience rather than advertising spend, and it is the part of a firm’s record that an insurance company checks.

Nothing is charged for the first conversation and nothing is charged at all unless there is a recovery. If we do not think you have a claim, we would rather tell you now than a year from now.

Call 833-370-8692 Free consultation. No fee unless we win.

Questions

Fort Myers wrongful death questions

It was a boating death and there is no report like there would be for a car. What is there?

Less on paper and more in the physical world, which is why speed matters. The vessel itself, the damage pattern and the conditions that day are the evidence, and a boat that has been hauled out and cleaned cannot be examined. Witnesses are real but they leave for different marinas the same evening, so finding them is a matter of days. Marine patrol and coast guard records exist and are worth requesting immediately.

It happened at a short-term rental we do not own. Who is responsible?

Possibly the owner, possibly a management company, and occasionally the platform, depending on what each of them knew and controlled. A pool at a rental brings in the gate, fence and alarm requirements, and those are measurable against a code rather than a matter of opinion. It is usually a question of identifying every party rather than choosing between them.

The ambulance took a long time to reach us out east. Does that hurt the claim?

It does not hurt it and it is a normal feature of the eastern county. What the other side will try to do is use the gap to argue about the cause of death, and the answer to that is the medical examiner’s findings and the ambulance record itself, both of which document the delay as geography rather than as anything the family did.

Can our relative’s creditors take the money?

Only part of it, and usually not the part families are worried about. Florida splits a wrongful death recovery in two. What each survivor recovers in their own right, for their loss of companionship and their own mental pain and suffering, belongs to that survivor. What is awarded to the estate, such as medical and funeral expenses that were paid by the estate and lost earnings the estate can claim, is subject to the claims of creditors who followed the probate rules for making one. So an unpaid card balance does not reach a widow’s own damages. We will tell you which side of that line each part of your claim sits on before anything is settled.

I have remarried. Does that end my claim?

No, remarrying does not take away a claim you already had. It is not invisible either, and that is the part nobody says out loud: Florida’s wrongful death statute makes evidence of a surviving spouse’s remarriage admissible, so the defense is entitled to raise it when a jury is deciding what the loss of companionship was worth. It is one fact among many, it is not a bar, and we would rather you hear it from us at the start than from a defense lawyer in a deposition.

The questions that come up on every kind of claim, deadlines, fees, recorded statements and fault, are answered on our Florida injury claim FAQ.

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 1825 Colonial Blvd, Fort Myers, FL 33907.

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Fort Myers Wrongful Death Lawyer

Wrongful Death claims in Fort Myers

What to do after a wrongful death in Fort Myers

Where these happen in Fort Myers

I-75 and the main corridors

The eastern two-lane roads

The water

Pools, rentals and construction