Slip and Fall Attorney in Florida

The first few minutes after a slip and fall incident are crucial in determining the success of filing an insurance claim and/or a civil lawsuit that seeks monetary damages. Although the personal injury incident might leave you temporarily dazed, you must follow a few steps to help build a strong enough insurance claim and personal injury lawsuit.

Get Your Injuries Treated

Receiving medical care is the first item on your to-do list after a slip and fall accident. Your Florida slip and fall accident lawyer needs to acquire copies of the medical bills and records that are associated with diagnosing, treating, and rehabilitating your injuries. The longer you wait to seek medical care, the more likely the other party’s attorney questions the validity of your claim that you sustained one or more injuries. Sustaining a serious injury requires emergency medical care. If you feel healthy enough to remain at the scene of the slip and fall incident, you should eventually schedule an appointment with a healthcare provider to be treated for your injuries.

Report the Slip and Fall

The manager on duty should receive notice of the slip and fall accident as quickly as possible. If you cannot inform a manager directly about your injuries, ask an employee to do it for you. Many businesses are small enough for an owner or a manager to notice a slip and fall incident. The most important reason why you must notify an owner or a manager is the business is responsible for completing a detailed incident report that your Florida slip and fall accident lawyer reviews.

Contact a Florida Slip and Fall Accident Lawyer at Morgan and Morgan

After you get treated for your injuries and you notify the owner or a manager about the slip and fall incident, the next step in the process involves scheduling a free case evaluation with a personal injury attorney at Morgan and Morgan. Working with a lawyer improves the chances of getting an insurance claim approved. Most insurance companies prefer to deal with claimants who have not acquired legal representation. Your attorney acts as an intermediary between you and the insurance company by monitoring the progress of your claim and if needed, negotiating a favorable settlement.

Collect Evidence

Hiring an experienced Florida slip and fall accident lawyer also helps you gather and organize the physical evidence you need to build a persuasive case. If you stay at the scene of a slip and fall incident, you should take photos of the area where you fell. Your attorney examines the photos to determine what caused your injuries, as well as whether the public venue should be held legally liable for causing you harm. Another benefit of hiring one of the highly-rated personal injury attorneys at Morgan and Morgan concerns submitting a formal written request to obtain the footage captured from a public venue’s security camera system.

If you file a civil lawsuit that seeks monetary damages, the goal of your attorney is to convince the judge hearing your case that the other party should assume 100 percent of the blame for causing your injuries. However, many civil lawsuits involve assigning blame to more than one party. To account for shared blame, Florida has adopted the comparative negligence principle, which assigns blame for causing an accident to more than one party.

Let’s assume you slipped and fell while shopping in one of the aisles at a grocery store. Store security footage clearly shows the slick surface where you slipped and fell. Security camera footage also displays you entering an area where a store employee placed a Wet Floor sign. Although the store did not eliminate the slick surface in a timely manner, you also must assume some of the blame for the accident because either you did not see the Wet Floor sign or you chose to ignore it.

If a judge assigns you 25 percent of the fault and awards you $40,000 in monetary damages, Your compensation decreases by 25 percent to $30,000.

One of the most important responsibilities handled by your Florida slip and fall accident lawyer is to ensure you file a personal injury lawsuit before the expiration of the statute of limitations. Every state has established a deadline for taking legal action, with most states setting a statute of limitations between two and four years. However, a few states allow as long as six years or as short as one year for plaintiffs to take legal action for personal injury cases. Florida grants plaintiffs up to four years to file a personal injury lawsuit that seeks monetary damages. The only exception to the four-year deadline is if a plaintiff developed delayed symptoms of an injury, which might give the plaintiff more time to file a civil lawsuit.

Four years is more than enough time to gather evidence and speak with witnesses before filing a personal injury lawsuit that seeks monetary damages. Nonetheless, you should not procrastinate when the time comes to take legal action. Your Florida slip and fall accident lawyer wants to interview witnesses as close to the date of the personal injury incident as possible. Witness accounts are more credible the closer they are given to the date of a slip and fall incident. You also want to be proactive to recover the financial losses that are associated with your case. Creditors do not wait for plaintiffs to receive favorable legal judgments before sending out bills. With medical expenses running into thousands of dollars, you should take legal action as quickly as possible after a slip and fall incident.

If for some reason you fail to follow the four-year statute of limitations established by Florida law, you can expect the court clerk processing your case to dismiss it.

The most important part of your attorney’s job is to get you compensated for your financial losses. In addition to filing a persuasive insurance claim, your attorney also can file a personal injury lawsuit that seeks three types of monetary damages.

Economic Damages

Economic damages represent the tangible expenses that are associated with your case. Medical bills are by far the costliest type of economic damage. You have the right to request compensation to cover the costs of diagnostic tests, treatment programs, and physical therapy sessions. If applicable, you also should ask for compensation to cover the costs of prescription medications and buying an assistive device such as a walker. If a slip and fall accident damages an electronic device like a Smartphone, you should ask for money to cover the costs of repairing the device. Economic damages also cover the monetary value of lost wages, which can be substantial if you sustained one or more serious injuries as a result of a slip and fall accident.

Non-Economic Damages

A slip and fall incident can do much more than cause physical injuries. Sustaining serious physical injuries might lead to the development of emotional distress issues. Developing the symptoms of anger, anxiety, and/or depression has a negative impact on your personal and professional relationships. Your Florida slip and fall accident lawyer calculates a value for non-economic damages by using a formula that factors in the value of economic damages.

Punitive Damages

Awarding punitive damages does not help you pay for economic and non-economic losses. Instead, punitive damages penalize the defendant for committing one or more acts of negligence. Judges that award punitive damages also want to deter defendants from committing the same acts of negligence in the future. If you are a victim of intentional negligence, the value of punitive damages can exceed the combined value of economic and non-economic damages.

Take action today by scheduling a free case evaluation with a Florida slip and fall accident lawyer at Morgan and Morgan.