Miami · Miami-Dade County

Miami Premises Liability Lawyer

You were hurt somewhere you had every reason to feel safe, and it turns out the owner already knew there was a problem. We can take it from here. Call 844-643-7200 for a free consultation. You pay us nothing unless we win. Our Miami personal injury lawyers have taken these cases across Miami-Dade County since 1993.

Speak to a Lawyer How these cases work

Prior crime At the same address establishes foreseeability.

Measurable Lighting levels are testable and often below code.

No fee unless we win Free case review, and nothing to pay to start.

Miami-Dade County Our Miami office takes these claims anywhere in the county.

In Miami-Dade County

Premises Liability claims in Miami

The property will call it unforeseeable, and its insurer will look for a way to make it your own fault for being there. Meanwhile you are dealing with the injury, the time off, and a management company that has stopped returning calls. Proving what they were told before it happened is our job, and we start the day you call.

High-rise residential and hotel properties dominate these claims in Miami-Dade, and they generate paperwork that smaller properties do not: security assessments, access control logs, incident reports and board minutes discussing complaints. Where a management company runs the property for an owner, both are frequently responsible and both carry separate insurance.

Short answer

A Miami-Dade premises claim turns on what the owner, the association or the management company knew before you were hurt. For a fall in a business, Florida requires proof of actual or constructive knowledge of the hazard. For an attack, it is the incident history at that address. Most claims carry a two-year deadline, but the footage that proves them is usually gone within a month.

What to do after a premises liability in Miami

Report it to the property, and ask for the report number. Tell a manager, a leasing office or hotel front desk what happened and where, and ask for the incident report number before you leave. Properties write these reports for their own insurer rather than for you, and a report you never see is far harder to obtain three months later than a number you wrote down that day.
Photograph the condition before somebody fixes it. The spill gets mopped, the broken step gets patched and the dead light gets a new bulb, often within hours. Photograph the thing itself, then stand back and photograph where it sits, so there is a record of what a person walking there could actually see. If lighting is part of it, go back and photograph at the same hour of night.
Ask about the cameras this week. Most systems on apartment complexes, garages and retail properties overwrite themselves somewhere between 14 and 30 days. A written request that the footage be preserved, naming the date, the time and the camera location, costs nothing and can be sent long before anybody decides whether to bring a claim. After the overwrite there is nothing to ask for.
Find out who owns it and who runs it. The owner and the management company are usually separate businesses with separate insurance, and on a residential property there may be an association and a security contractor as well. Photograph any posted management sign and keep the lease, the folio number or the receipt. Naming the wrong company in month one costs months.
Get treated, and tell them where it happened. Say that you fell on a wet floor at a named store, or that you were attacked in a named garage. The medical record is the earliest independent account of what happened, and a chart that says only that you have a shoulder injury is worth much less later than one that says how you got it.

Where these happen in Miami

Miami-Dade is vertical, and that changes these cases. A high-rise property produces paperwork a strip plaza never generates, and the difficulty is rarely that the records do not exist. It is that four companies each say they belong to one of the others.

Residential towers and their common areas

Condominium and rental towers across Brickell, downtown, Aventura and the beaches, where the building has been writing about its own condition for years.
- Board minutes and engineering reports that frequently describe the exact defect before anybody was hurt by it
- Milestone structural inspections and reserve studies, which are recent Florida requirements and produce documents that did not exist a few years ago
- Access control and fob logs showing who could get into a building that was supposed to be secured
- An owner, an association, a management company and a security contractor, all separately insured
Hotels and short-term rentals

A hotel invites paying guests, controls the premises completely and generally knows more about the risks on it than anybody staying there.
- Guest incident reports and prior complaints, which exist and are not volunteered
- Pool decks, bathrooms and lobby surfaces, where the same falls repeat at the same properties
- Valet and garage operators, who are usually a contractor rather than the hotel
- Short-term rental units where the owner is offshore and the manager holds every record
Garages, arenas and event venues

Properties that fill and empty within half an hour and are then close to deserted, which is the pattern behind most negligent security claims here.
- Crowd and staffing plans, which show what the venue itself thought the risk was
- Prior incidents on event nights specifically, rather than an annual average
- Lighting and camera coverage in the far corners of a structure rather than at the entrance
- Stairwells, ramps and level changes that were designed for cars and are walked by people
Construction against a public sidewalk

Miami-Dade builds continuously, and much of it happens inches from a walkway the public is still using.
- Falling material and tools, where overhead protection was required and either absent or inadequate
- Temporary walkways, plating and unmarked level changes that change from week to week
- A general contractor and several subcontractors who will each point at the next one
- Site photographs and daily reports, which exist for every day of a job and are worth requesting by date

What causes them

Lighting well below what the property’s own plans called for, which is measurable with an instrument after the fact
Exterior gates and door locks reported broken and left that way for months
Cameras installed as a deterrent that were never recording, or recording nothing usable
Guard coverage reduced or removed after a documented incident on the property
Spills and tracked-in water in stores, lobbies and food courts, left without a cone or a mop

The injuries we see, and what each one turns on

Spine and back injuries

Herniations and fractures from a fall, and from being knocked to the ground. The standard defense is age: nearly every adult spine shows wear on imaging, and the argument is that the fall found it rather than caused it. What answers that is a clear picture of before and after, which is why the first medical visit carries more weight than the last one.

Hip and orthopedic fractures

Hips, wrists, shoulders and ankles, several of which need hardware and then a second operation to remove or revise it. In an older adult a hip fracture is rarely just a fracture, and the year that follows it often includes a loss of independence that no bill records.

Gunshot and stab wounds

The injuries in a negligent security case are frequently catastrophic, and the medical picture is complicated by surgeries that continue for a year or more. The claim itself, though, is not about the attack. It is about what the property knew before it.

What Florida law requires you to prove

What the property owed you depends on why you were there

Florida sorts people on a property into categories, and the duty follows the category. A customer, a hotel guest, a tenant and a delivery driver are generally invitees, owed reasonable care to keep the place safe and a duty to inspect for dangers the owner should have found. A social guest is owed less, and a trespasser less again. The first fight in many of these cases is which category you were in, which is worth settling early because everything else follows from it.

A fall in a store has its own statute

Where somebody slips on a transitory foreign substance in a business establishment, Fla. Stat. § 768.0755 requires the injured person to prove the business had actual or constructive knowledge of the substance. Constructive knowledge is shown by how long it had been there or by the fact that it happened regularly enough to be foreseeable. That is a records question rather than an argument, and it is why the inspection sheets and the camera footage decide these cases.

Security claims, the 2023 change, and the deadlines

In 2023 Florida created a presumption against liability for multifamily residential properties that substantially comply with a defined set of security requirements, including lighting, locks, gates, cameras and a documented crime prevention assessment. Whether a property actually met them is a question of fact and is frequently the whole case. Separately, most Florida negligence claims arising on or after March 24, 2023 carry a two-year deadline under Fla. Stat. § 95.11, and fault is shared under Fla. Stat. § 768.81, where a person found more than 50 percent responsible recovers nothing.

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

How we prove it in Miami-Dade County

The volume of paper a large Miami property generates is an advantage rather than an obstacle, provided the right custodian is identified early. Half the work in these cases is establishing which company held which record.

What we go after, and when

The incident report and the internal notification that followed it, which is often more candid than the report
Camera footage from the property, the neighboring buildings and any garage with a view of the same area
Association board minutes, engineering reports and any milestone inspection or reserve study for the building
Access control, fob and alarm logs, which show whether a door that was supposed to lock was locking
Police call histories for the address and for the block, which is what establishes that a risk was known
The management agreement, the security contract and the certificates of insurance naming each party
Work orders, vendor invoices and maintenance history for the specific component that failed
Contractor daily reports and site photographs where the injury happened around construction

Naming the right entities is the part that has to happen first. An owner, an association, a manager and a security contractor can hold four separate policies, and a claim filed against the one company without coverage is a year spent for nothing.

A setting a premises liability claim in Miami typically arises from

Who would handle your case

Being hurt in Miami is hard enough without working out the legal side on your own. The trial lawyers below have handled premises liability 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

A property claim is handled by a commercial carrier rather than an auto adjuster, and on a large property there is often a risk manager involved from the first day.

The footage was overwritten: Sometimes true, frequently a decision. Systems keep 14 to 30 days as a rule, and the property knew you were hurt on day one. A preservation request sent inside that window is routine; the same request in month three becomes an argument about what was destroyed and when, which is an argument worth having but a poor substitute for the video.
The hazard is described as open and obvious: The theory is that you should have seen it, and it is the most common defense in the practice. It is answered with the physical facts: what the lighting actually measured, where the sightlines went, what was in your hands, and whether the property had put anything there to warn people. Open and obvious is also not a complete defense in Florida where the owner should have anticipated the harm anyway.
Fault is moved onto you by degrees: You were on your phone, you were wearing the wrong shoes, you had had a drink. Every percentage point is money off the claim and past 50 percent it ends it. This is why the scene photographs and the camera footage matter more than a recollection, and why both depend on how early the work started.

What a claim can include

Lost income and lost earning capacity

Wages missed, and separately what somebody can no longer earn. A person who goes back in a lighter role at less money has a loss 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. It is proved with the account of the people around the injured person as much as with records.

Psychological injury after an attack

Treatment, and the practical cost of not being able to return to a place you lived or worked. Both are recoverable and both need to be documented while they are happening.

What we have recovered

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

ConfidentialDiving injury at a short-term rental

A serious neck injury from a dive off the dock of a Fort Myers Airbnb on the Caloosahatchee River, on a failure to warn of shallow, murky water.

Confidential settlement

$1.38 millionPropane explosion

Our client was servicing propane tanks behind a Pompano Beach bakery when they exploded, burning his arms and face.

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 premises liability claim in Miami arises from

Why Wolf & Pravato in Miami

A Miami-Dade premises case is filed in the Eleventh Judicial Circuit at the Dade County Courthouse, and the firm has an office on Brickell Avenue rather than a mailing address here. That matters practically, because these cases require records requests to buildings and management companies across the county and somebody who can appear when a hearing is set.

The firm is led by a Board Certified Civil Trial lawyer, a certification held by 861 attorneys in Florida against a membership over 109,000. Insurance companies keep their own records of which firms in a county actually try cases, and that record moves an offer further than anything a firm can say about itself.

There is no charge to ask. Our fee comes out of what we recover and nowhere else, and if the answer is that you do not have a case, that is the answer you will get.

Call 844-643-7200 Free consultation. No fee unless we win.

Questions

Miami premises liability questions

The condominium association says it is the management company’s responsibility. Is that true?

It is the first thing said and it is frequently wrong. Responsibility follows the governing documents and whoever actually controlled and maintained the area, which is a documentary question rather than a matter of opinion at the front desk. In practice both are often responsible, they carry separate insurance, and each holds records the other does not. Sorting it out early is what keeps a claim from being filed against the wrong company.

I was hurt by something falling from a construction site while I was on the sidewalk.

That is a claim against the site rather than against the city, and generally against several companies at once. What decides it is what protection was required over a walkway the public was still using, and whether it was there. Daily reports, site photographs and the permit file document that day by day, and they are worth requesting before a job finishes and the crews disperse.

Does it matter that I was a guest rather than a tenant?

It can matter, because Florida sets the duty owed according to why you were on the property. A hotel guest, a customer and a tenant are generally owed the highest duty, which includes an obligation to inspect for dangers the owner should have found. A social visitor is owed less. Settling which category applies early is worth doing, because everything else in the case follows from it.

How do you prove the owner knew it was dangerous?

Mostly with their own documents and public ones. We ask for police call histories for the address, prior incident and injury reports, complaints from tenants or guests, work orders for broken gates and lights, and any security assessment the owner commissioned. A pattern in those records is what foreseeability actually looks like.

Is the apartment manager responsible or the owner?

Frequently both, and they are usually separate companies with separate insurance policies. The management company may have controlled day-to-day security decisions while the owner controlled the budget. Naming the right entities early matters because each holds different records.

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 1111 Brickell Avenue, 11th Floor, Miami, FL 33131.

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