Fort Lauderdale 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 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.
Car Accident claims in Fort Lauderdale
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 I-95 and I-595 interchange, Broward Boulevard and Federal Highway carry the bulk of the collisions we see in this county, and the serious ones follow a predictable path to Broward Health Medical Center. A crash report written at the roadside on any of those routes is usually the driver-versus-driver account, taken while one of them is already in an ambulance. It is not the last word, and it is regularly contradicted by the vehicle damage and by cameras on the businesses lining those roads.
Fault in a Fort Lauderdale crash is decided on evidence rather than on the crash report, and you have two years from the crash to sue for most collisions on or after March 24, 2023. The deadline that arrives first is medical: your own coverage pays nothing at all unless a qualifying provider sees you within 14 days of the crash.
What to do after a car accident in Fort Lauderdale
- 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 Fort Lauderdale
Broward runs three of the busiest roads in the state through intersections that were laid out for far less traffic, and the bad wrecks happen where those roads meet.
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The I-95 and I-595 interchange
Merges, weaves and a speed differential that punishes anyone hesitating.
- Rear-end and sideswipe collisions where two streams of traffic are asked to trade lanes in a few hundred feet
- Department of Transportation cameras cover much of it and the footage does not keep itself
- A serious wreck here goes to Broward Health Medical Center, which is where the records will be
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Broward Boulevard and the downtown grid
Signals, buses, pedestrians and turning traffic in the same block.
- Left turns across oncoming traffic, which is the pattern that produces the worst injuries
- Signal phase timing for a specific intersection is a public record and we request it
- Business and doorbell cameras along the corridor are dense and are overwritten within weeks
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Federal Highway and A1A
A tourist corridor where a good share of drivers have never driven the road before.
- Rental and visitor vehicles, and out-of-state policies that complicate who pays
- Beach parking, U-turns and pedestrians crossing mid-block
- Motorcycles and scooters mixed into turning traffic all year rather than in a season
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Sunrise, Commercial and Oakland Park boulevards
Wide roads with commercial driveways every hundred feet.
- Vehicles pulling out of a plaza across three lanes of moving traffic
- Delivery and commercial vehicles run to a schedule that does not allow for the traffic
- The plaza’s own camera frequently covers the driveway it did not mean to
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Port Everglades and the airport approaches
Cruise turnaround days and flight banks put a month of traffic through in an afternoon.
- Shuttles, rideshare, taxis and rental returns competing for the same lanes
- A commercial operator brings a larger policy and a documentary trail an ordinary driver does not have
- Permit and inspection records exist for the vehicles that carry passengers for hire
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Residential streets and school zones
Lower speeds and a much higher chance the person hurt was outside a vehicle.
- Backing collisions in driveways and lots, where nobody expects a camera and there usually is one
- School zone timing and signage records are held by the city or the county
- A child’s comparative fault is not assessed the way an adult’s is
What causes them
- Following too closely, which is most rear-end collisions and almost all of the arguments about them
- Left turns across oncoming traffic at intersections built for less volume than they now carry
- 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
The injuries we see, and what each one turns on
Neck and back
Herniated and bulging discs, facet injuries and nerve root compression that presents as pain down an arm or a leg rather than in the spine itself. Age is the standard defense: nearly every adult spine shows degeneration on imaging, and the argument is that the crash found it rather than caused it. What answers that is the difference between how somebody functioned before and after, which is why the first medical record matters more than the last.
Head and brain
A brain injury does not require losing consciousness and a normal CT does not rule one out. What follows is memory, concentration, sleep and temper, and it is usually the people around the injured person who notice first. Those claims are proved with neuropsychological testing and with treating records rather than with the scan taken on the day.
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.
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 Broward County
What decides a Broward crash claim is rarely what either driver remembers. It is the physical evidence, the footage along the road, and the records neither driver knows exist.
- The crash report and the officer’s own notes and diagram, which frequently say more than the narrative does
- Camera footage from the businesses along the corridor, most of it on a two week loop
- Signal phase timing and streetlight maintenance records, which are public and which we request early
- The event data recorder in either vehicle, which holds speed, braking and belt use in the seconds before impact
- Damage patterns and resting positions, which routinely contradict the account given at the roadside
- Phone records where distraction is in issue, which survive long after a driver has denied it
- The commercial policy, the permit history and the maintenance file where a company vehicle is involved
- Treating records from Broward Health Medical Center, where the serious injuries in this county go
Most of that has a shelf life measured in weeks. A written preservation demand in the first days is what keeps it, and it costs you nothing to have one sent.
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 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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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 → -
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 →
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.
- The call comes early, and it is recorded
- Somebody rings within a day or two, sympathetic and easy to talk to, and asks for a recorded statement while you are still working out how badly you are hurt. You are not required to give one to the other driver’s carrier. Anything you say about feeling all right that week is quoted back months later.
- They ask you to sign a medical authorization
- The form is usually a blanket release covering your whole medical history rather than the part of you that was injured. That is how a neck claim becomes a file about a shoulder you hurt in 2011. An authorization can be limited to what is actually at issue, and it should be.
- 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.
What a claim can include
Medical care, past and future
Everything already billed, and what the treating doctors say is still coming. Future care is where these claims are won and lost, because it is the part that has to be proved rather than added up.
Lost earnings and lost capacity
Wages missed while treating, and separately the gap between what you could earn before and what you can earn now. They are two different claims and the second is usually the larger.
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.
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 Fort Lauderdale
Broward is this firm’s home circuit. A crash here is filed in the Seventeenth Judicial Circuit at the Broward County Courthouse, and the lawyers who have taken cases to verdict in front of a Broward jury work out of this office.
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 car accident questions
The crash report says I was at fault. Is that the end of it?
No, and it is one of the most common reasons people do not call. A report is an officer’s summary of what two drivers said, one of whom was often already in an ambulance, and it is not admissible as a finding of fault. Damage patterns, resting positions, camera footage and event data recorders overturn them regularly.
The other driver has no insurance. Is there anything to claim?
Usually yes, through your own uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage, which most people do not realize they carry until somebody reads the policy to them. Florida does not require drivers to carry bodily injury liability at all, which is why UM coverage matters more here than in most states.
I was hit near the port by a shuttle. Does that change anything?
It usually helps. A vehicle carrying passengers for hire is permitted and inspected, which creates records an ordinary private car does not have, and it is generally behind a commercial policy with far higher limits. Establishing which operator and which permit applies is the first work in those files.
How long do I have to bring a Fort Lauderdale 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 claim involving a government vehicle carries a separate written notice requirement with a much shorter clock. The evidence deadlines are shorter than any of them.
Where would my case be filed?
In the Seventeenth Judicial Circuit at the Broward County Courthouse. Most cases resolve without a trial, but which courthouse a case would be tried in is part of how an insurer values it, and this is the circuit this firm works in every week.
Do I still have a case if Florida is a no-fault state?
Yes. No-fault decides who pays your first medical bills, not who is responsible for the crash. Once your injury meets the statutory threshold, which includes permanent injury, significant permanent scarring, significant and permanent loss of an important bodily function, or death, you can bring a claim directly against the at-fault driver for the full extent of your losses, including pain and suffering.
What if the driver who hit me had no insurance?
Florida does not require drivers to carry bodily injury liability coverage, so this happens constantly. The claim usually runs through your own uninsured or underinsured motorist coverage instead. Many people carry UM without knowing it. Send us your declarations page and we will read it for you at no charge.
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.