West Palm Beach Car Accident Lawyer
A car accident turns a normal week upside down: pain, a wrecked car, time off work, and no idea who pays for any of it. We can take it from here. Call 833-370-8692 for a free consultation. You pay us nothing unless we win. Our West Palm Beach personal injury lawyers have taken these cases across Palm Beach County since 1993.
Car Accident claims in West Palm Beach
The other driver caused it, and their insurer is already asking you for a recorded statement. Meanwhile you are working out how to pay the first medical bill, how to replace the paycheck you just missed, and how to get to work tomorrow without a car. Answering all of that is our job, and it starts the day you call.
The crashes we handle in Palm Beach County concentrate on I-95 and the Okeechobee and Southern Boulevard corridors feeding it, with the serious injuries going to the trauma center at St. Mary’s Medical Center. Palm Beach also has a large population of older drivers and passengers, and insurers routinely argue that injuries in that group are degenerative rather than caused by the crash.
A West Palm Beach car accident claim is decided on evidence rather than on the crash report, and you have two years from the crash for most collisions on or after March 24, 2023. The deadline that bites first is medical: your own coverage pays nothing unless a qualifying provider sees you within 14 days of the crash.
What to do after a car accident in West Palm Beach
- Call the police and get a report number. A crash with any injury or meaningful damage should have a report. It is not the last word on fault and it is not evidence at trial, but it fixes the date, the vehicles, the drivers and the witnesses, and a claim with no report is one the other insurer will treat as a dispute about whether it happened at all.
- Photograph more than the damage. Both vehicles from the front and the side, the position they came to rest in, the debris, the skid marks, the signal, the sightline a driver would have had, and the businesses on the corner. Vehicles are moved within the hour and a scene is gone. What you photograph in ten minutes is frequently better evidence than anything anyone reconstructs later.
- Get names before anybody leaves. The other driver’s insurer and policy number, and every witness who stopped. Witnesses do not wait for an officer to work through a queue, and a witness with no phone number is not a witness. Somebody who saw the light is worth more to a claim than any argument about it afterward.
- See a doctor within fourteen days. This is the one deadline nobody hears about until it has passed. Your own coverage after a Florida crash is conditioned on being seen inside fourteen days, and adrenaline routinely hides a neck or a back injury for the first week. Going to be checked is not a claim that you are badly hurt.
- Do not give the other insurer a recorded statement. You have to report the crash to your own carrier. You are not required to be recorded by theirs. That call comes within a day or two, while you are still working out how bad it is, and what you say about feeling all right is quoted back months later when you know a great deal more.
Where these happen in West Palm Beach
Palm Beach County crashes concentrate on a few long main roads and on I-95, and the mix changes sharply between the season and the summer.
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I-95 through the county
Long runs at speed with widely spaced exits and heavy seasonal variation.
- High-speed rear-end and lane-change collisions rather than intersection crashes
- Serious injuries go to the trauma center at St. Mary’s Medical Center
- Department of Transportation camera coverage exists and does not keep itself
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Okeechobee Boulevard
The spine of the county between the interstate and downtown.
- Left turns across several lanes of oncoming traffic
- Event traffic downtown, which changes the volume without changing the road
- Signal phase timing for any specific intersection is a public record
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Southern Boulevard and Belvedere
Wide roads carrying commuter traffic across the county to the western communities.
- Vehicles crossing from commercial driveways into moving traffic
- Commercial and agricultural vehicles further west than most drivers expect
- Long distances between signals, which raises speeds and the injuries that follow
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Military Trail and Congress Avenue
Plaza after plaza, with a driveway every few hundred feet.
- Pulling out of a lot across multiple lanes is the pattern that produces these
- Backing and parking lot collisions, where the plaza’s own camera often caught it
- Older drivers and pedestrians in the same corridor as commuter traffic
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Downtown, Clematis and the waterfront
Slower speeds and a much higher chance of a pedestrian or a cyclist.
- Turning vehicles and marked crossings in the same block
- Rideshare pickups in live lanes on weekend nights
- Restaurant and building cameras are dense here and overwritten within weeks
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Seasonal traffic and visiting drivers
From late fall the county carries a different population of drivers.
- Rentals and out-of-state policies that change who actually pays
- Drivers unfamiliar with the road at interchanges that punish hesitation
- Volume that arrives faster than the signal timing is ever adjusted for
What causes them
- Running a red light or a stop sign, where the signal timing itself we can get
- A phone in a hand, which shows up in records long after a driver has denied it
- Impairment, and the separate claim a bar or a host can face for serving somebody
- Speed that was legal and wrong for the conditions, which is most afternoons in a Florida wet season
- Lane changes into a blind spot on a multi-lane main road
The injuries we see, and what each one turns on
Shoulders and knees
A shoulder braced against a wheel and a knee into a dashboard produce tears that do not appear on an X-ray and are routinely written off as strains. They are also the injuries most likely to need surgery months later, which is the point: a settlement priced on physical therapy does not pay for the operation that follows it.
Internal and seat belt injuries
The belt does its job and leaves a pattern doing it: rib fractures, abdominal bruising, and occasionally organ injury that presents hours later. This is the category where the emergency room visit matters most, because internal bleeding is the one thing that will not wait to be looked at.
Fractures
Wrists, ribs, ankles and the pelvis, and in a serious wreck the femur. A fracture is the easiest injury to prove and the easiest to undervalue, because the film shows a bone that healed and says nothing about the hardware left in, the range of motion that did not come back, or the arthritis that arrives in that joint a decade early.
What Florida law requires you to prove
The crash report is not the finding of fault
An officer arriving after the fact writes down what two drivers say, one of whom is often already in an ambulance. Fault in a civil claim is decided on evidence: the damage patterns, the resting positions, camera footage from the businesses along the road, signal timing, and the vehicles’ own event data recorders. Crash reports are regularly contradicted by all of it.
Two years, and it runs from the crash
For crashes on or after March 24, 2023, the deadline to sue is two years under Fla. Stat. § 95.11. Earlier crashes generally keep the older four-year deadline. A claim against a government vehicle carries its own written notice requirement on top, and that clock is far shorter.
Your share of the blame, and the line at 50 percent
Under Fla. Stat. § 768.81, somebody found more than 50 percent responsible recovers nothing at all. At or under half, the recovery is reduced by that share. Expect the argument that you were going too fast, stopped short or could have avoided it, because past the halfway mark that argument is worth the entire claim rather than part of it.
The full statutory detail, and the parts that differ by claim type, sit on our statewide car accident page rather than being restated in every market.
How we prove it in Palm Beach County
A Palm Beach County crash claim is built from the physical evidence and from records held by a municipality, a county department or a business on the corner.
- The crash report and the officer’s diagram, which frequently carry detail the narrative leaves out
- Signal phase timing and streetlight maintenance history, which are public records we request early
- Camera footage from the plazas and businesses along the corridor, typically on a two week loop
- The event data recorder in either vehicle, holding speed, braking and belt use before impact
- Damage patterns and resting positions, which routinely contradict the roadside account
- Phone records where distraction is in issue
- Rental agreements and out-of-state policies, which decide which insurer responds
- Treating records from St. Mary’s Medical Center, where the serious injuries in this county go
Public records take time to come back and private footage does not wait. Both start with a written demand in the first days, which costs you nothing.
Who would handle your case
Being hurt in West Palm Beach is hard enough without working out the legal side on your own. The trial lawyers below have handled car 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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Alazay Ventura-Coffey Trial Attorney On his first day as a sworn attorney, Alazay Ventura-Coffey co-chaired a Broward County jury trial that returned $1,387,060.58. He has built every case that way since. Full profile → -
Brian H. Malamud Senior Trial Attorney More than twenty-five years on the Wolf & Pravato trial team. Brian Malamud has handled your kind of case many times over, and he knows early which parts of it are going to decide it. Full profile →
How insurance companies handle these claims
A car claim is handled by an adjuster working from a file and a set of instructions, and the instructions are consistent enough that the order of events is predictable. Knowing what is coming is worth more than anything you could say on the call.
- An offer arrives before the treatment finishes
- Early money is priced on the bills that exist today, and the surgery a treating doctor recommends three months from now is not among them. A release signed at that point closes the claim permanently. There is no reopening it because the injury turned out worse than the first offer assumed.
- The file is built around your share of the blame
- Expect to be told you stopped short, were going too fast, or could have avoided it. It is worth real money to them under Fla. Stat. § 768.81, and past the halfway mark it is worth the whole claim, so it is argued in almost every file whether or not the facts support it.
- A gap in your treatment becomes the argument
- Miss three weeks for work, childcare or the cost of a co-pay and the file records it as evidence you were fine. Software scores these claims partly on how continuous the treatment was. Telling a doctor why you could not come in puts the reason in the record, where it answers the point instead of leaving it open.
What a claim can include
Pain, suffering and loss of enjoyment
Not calculated from a formula, whatever anyone tells you. It is argued from what the injury actually took away, which is why the detail of an ordinary week before the crash matters.
The vehicle, and what it is worth afterward
Repair or actual cash value, the rental while you wait, and the diminished value a repaired car carries at trade-in. The last of those is frequently left on the table because nobody asks for it.
Out of pocket and household costs
Travel to treatment, equipment, and help with the things somebody used to do themselves. Small individually, and routinely left out of a claim nobody documented.
What we have recovered
Verified matters this firm has handled on car accident claims. Figures are gross recoveries, before attorney fees, costs and medical liens come out of them.
A client was seriously hurt making a U-turn in Fort Lauderdale, and the responding officers assigned fault for a right-of-way violation.
Broward County policy limits 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 West Palm Beach
A Palm Beach County crash is filed in the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit in downtown West Palm Beach, which is where this office litigates. Which circuit a case would be tried in is part of how an insurer prices it.
Board Certification in Civil Trial law is the Bar’s own measure of trial experience, and 861 of Florida’s 109,000-plus lawyers hold it. Richard Pravato has held it since 2004. It is the credential that changes how an adjuster reads a file, because it says the case has somewhere to go if they will not pay it.
Asking costs nothing and there is no fee unless we win. If we look at what happened and think the claim is not worth pursuing, we will say so on the first call instead of signing you up.
West Palm Beach car accident questions
Can you actually get the signal timing for an intersection here?
Yes. Phase timing and any maintenance history for the signal and the lighting are public records held by the municipality or the county, and we request them at the start rather than at the end. They are ordinary documents and they regularly decide whether somebody had time to clear the intersection at all.
The driver who hit me was visiting for the season. Does that make it harder?
It adds a step rather than a barrier. An out-of-state policy, a rental agreement and sometimes a credit card policy can all sit behind the same crash, and which one responds first is a documentary question. It is worth resolving early, because a visiting driver is harder to reach six months later.
I was hit pulling out of a plaza on Military Trail. Am I automatically at fault?
Not automatically, and it is worth testing. Speed, sightlines blocked by landscaping or parked vehicles, and whether the other driver was where they were entitled to be all bear on it. Under Florida’s comparative fault rule a share of the blame reduces a recovery rather than ending it, until it passes half.
How long do I have to bring a West Palm Beach car accident claim?
Two years from the crash for most collisions on or after March 24, 2023, under Fla. Stat. § 95.11, and generally four years for earlier ones. A crash with a county or municipal vehicle carries a separate written notice requirement on a much shorter clock.
Where would my case be filed?
In the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit in downtown West Palm Beach. A crash in the south of the county is filed at the South County Courthouse in Delray Beach instead, which is the same circuit in a different building.
The insurance adjuster wants a recorded statement. Should I give one?
Not before you speak to a lawyer. Adjusters are trained, you are injured and probably medicated, and the recording exists forever. Since March 2023 anyone more than 50 percent at fault recovers nothing in Florida, so a few sentences that sound cooperative can be worth more to them than anything else in the file.
How much is my Florida car accident case worth?
It depends on the injuries, the treatment, lost earnings, whether the injury is permanent, and how much coverage exists to pay it. Available coverage is often the real ceiling, not the severity of what happened to you. Any lawyer who quotes a number before reading your medical records and the policy limits is guessing.
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 Vista Parkway, Suite 4500, West Palm Beach, FL 33411.