Miami · Miami-Dade County

Miami Wrongful Death Lawyer

A family loses somebody and is then handed a funeral to arrange, an income that has stopped, and a company that already has lawyers on it. 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

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

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

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

Wrongful Death claims in Miami

The other side had counsel within days, and you are being asked for paperwork while you are still arranging a service. 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 Miami-Dade wrongful death action is brought in the Eleventh Judicial Circuit by the personal representative of the estate. Where family members live outside the United States, which is common here, the appointment and the notice requirements take longer than families expect, and the underlying evidence is aging throughout.

Short answer

A Miami-Dade wrongful death claim is brought by the personal representative of the estate, and Florida decides by statute which survivors may recover and what each may claim. The general deadline is two years from the death. Opening the estate is a probate step with its own timetable, so it is the thing worth starting first.

What to do after a wrongful death in Miami

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 Miami

Miami-Dade produces a wider range of these cases than anywhere else on this coast, and the type of place usually decides which records exist and who else may be responsible besides the obvious party.

The expressways and the port

The Palmetto, the Dolphin, I-95 and the freight moving between the port, the airport and the warehouse districts.
- Commercial carriers with investigators on scene the same day and federal records on a retention schedule
- Trauma care running to Ryder Trauma Center at Jackson Memorial, which documents the timeline precisely
- Container equipment belonging to several different companies, each with its own policy
High-rise construction

Tower construction across Brickell and downtown, where a fall or a falling object involves a chain of companies rather than one employer.
- Developers, general contractors, structural and mechanical subs, crane and hoist operators
- Workers compensation covering the employer while a separate claim exists against the rest of the site
- Inspection and structural condition records, which have become much easier to get since the milestone inspection changes
Apartment complexes and negligent security

Deaths from violence at properties with a documented history, which is a claim about what the owner already knew.
- Prior police calls to the same address, something we can get and central to the case
- Fencing, lighting, cameras and gates that were promised, broken or never monitored
- Management companies and owners as separate defendants with separate policies
Water and pools

Boating collisions in Biscayne Bay and drownings at residential and community pools.
- No police report of the kind a road death generates, and witnesses gone by evening
- Gate, alarm and fence requirements, which are measurable against a code
- Vessels and equipment moved or cleaned before anybody inspects them

What causes them

Ordinary road collisions at speed, which remain the most common cause of a claim of this kind
Motorcycle and pedestrian collisions, where there is nothing between a person and a vehicle
Falls from height on construction sites, and objects falling onto people below
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

The injuries we see, and what each one turns on

A surviving spouse

Loss of the companionship and protection of the person who died, and the mental pain and suffering from the date of the injury. A spouse is also generally the person who receives lost support and services.

Children

Minor children may recover for lost parental companionship, instruction and guidance, and for their own mental pain and suffering. Adult children may recover those same losses where there is no surviving spouse, which is one of the places the statute is narrower than families expect.

Parents

Parents of a child who died as a minor may recover for mental pain and suffering. Parents of an adult child may recover where there are no other survivors under the Act.

What Florida law requires you to prove

Who brings the claim

The personal representative of the estate brings it, on behalf of the survivors and the estate together, under Fla. Stat. § 768.20. A family cannot file individually. If there is a will it usually names who that should be; if there is not, the court appoints somebody, and the probate step runs alongside the injury claim rather than after it.

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 Miami-Dade County

These cases are proved out of documents, physical evidence and the history of a place, because the person who could describe what happened is gone.

What we go after, and when

The incident or crash report, and the investigating officer’s notes and photographs
The medical examiner’s report and autopsy findings, which take months
Hospital, trauma and ambulance records from injury to death
The vehicle, vessel, machine or product itself, inspected before it is repaired or released
Electronic data: engine modules, access control logs, equipment telemetry, building systems
Camera footage from buildings, businesses and municipal systems, generally overwritten inside a month
Prior incidents, complaints and police calls at the same address
Employment, tax and immigration-status-neutral earnings records, which support the economic loss figures

Several of those records sit with parties who are not the obvious defendant, which is why the preservation letters go to more than one address in the first weeks. A crane company or a management firm has no reason to keep anything about an incident nobody told it about.

A setting a wrongful death 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 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 request for a recorded statement from a grieving family: You are not required to give one to the other side. What gets said in the first two weeks, by somebody who has not slept and does not yet know what happened, is quoted back months later as though it were considered testimony.
Fault is moved onto the person who died: They were speeding, they were not paying attention, they should have known. Every percentage point moves money off the claim and past 50 percent it ends it. The person it is being said about cannot answer, which is exactly why the physical evidence, the data and an independent reconstruction matter more here than in almost any other kind of case.
The vehicle or the equipment is released and disposed of: Once it is gone the only version of events is the one written down by somebody else. A preservation request in the first weeks is routine and costs nothing. The same request in the fourth month is an argument about what was destroyed.

What a claim can include

Medical expenses from the final injury or illness

The care between the injury and the death, which in some cases runs for weeks and is substantial.

Lost support and services

The money the person brought in and the work they did that now has to be paid for or gone without, projected over the years they would reasonably have been expected to live.

Loss of companionship, guidance and protection

What a spouse, a child or a parent has lost that is not financial. The statute decides which survivors may claim it.

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 Miami arises from

Why Wolf & Pravato in Miami

A Miami-Dade wrongful death claim is filed in the Eleventh Judicial Circuit at the Miami-Dade County Courthouse, with the estate opened in the probate division there, and that is the courthouse this office works in. What an insurer offers depends in part on the venue, because carriers keep records of which firms in a county actually try cases.

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 wrongful death questions

Our relative was not a citizen. Does the family still have a claim?

Yes. A wrongful death claim under Florida law depends on the relationship to the person who died and on who is appointed personal representative, not on immigration status. Survivors living outside the United States can be recognized by the statute, and the estate can be administered with the family abroad. It adds steps rather than removing the claim.

It happened on a construction site. Is workers compensation the only option?

Frequently not. Compensation covers the employer and generally bars a claim against them, but a tower site involves a developer, a general contractor and several subcontractors, and a claim can exist against any of them who was not the employer. That second claim covers losses compensation never touches, which is why identifying every company on the site matters early.

The building says its cameras were not recording. Is that the end of it?

It is often the beginning. A camera system that existed and was not working is itself part of the claim where security was promised, and the maintenance and monitoring contracts show what the owner knew about it. Prior police calls to the same address come from a source the property does not control at all.

What can a family actually recover?

Depending on the survivor, it can include lost support and services, loss of companionship and protection, mental pain and suffering, and medical and funeral expenses they paid. The estate may separately recover certain losses. The categories are set by statute rather than negotiated, which is why an early read of where a family sits is worth having.

How long do we have?

Generally two years from the date of death for most wrongful death claims. Cases involving medical negligence and claims against government entities run on their own timetables with their own pre-suit requirements. Because those tracks differ, it is worth asking early rather than assuming the two-year figure covers your situation.

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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