Florida holds a dog owner responsible for a bite even when the animal has never shown aggression before. Florida Statute § 767.04 makes that responsibility strict, which places the state outside the older common-law rule that effectively gave every dog one free bite.

Under the statute, the owner of a dog that bites a person in a public place, or lawfully in a private place including the owner’s own property, is liable for the damages the bitten person suffers, regardless of the dog’s former viciousness or the owner’s knowledge of it. Strict liability is a rule that makes an owner answerable for the harm without the injured person having to prove carelessness. The statute then supplies one real defense, and it is narrower than the sign on the fence suggests. Our Miami dog bite attorneys find that gap misunderstood by owners and bite victims alike.

Florida wrongful death law treats a death caused by medical care differently from every other kind of death. Florida Statute § 768.21(8) removes an entire category of damages from adult children when the death arises out of medical negligence, and removes the matching category from parents when the person who died was an adult child.

Florida Statute § 768.21(3) otherwise lets children of a person who died recover for lost parental companionship, instruction, and guidance, and for mental pain and suffering from the date of injury. Subsection (8) withdraws that recovery where the claim is one for medical negligence. The loss is identical, the family is identical, and the outcome turns on what caused the death. Our Miami medical malpractice attorneys explain this to families more often than any other rule in the statute.

Almost every Florida slip and fall case is fought over how long a spill sat on the floor before someone stepped in it. Florida Statute § 768.0755 contains a second way to prove the same element, and it requires no evidence of timing at all.

The statute makes an injured person prove that the business establishment had actual or constructive knowledge of the dangerous condition and should have taken action to remedy it. Constructive knowledge is knowledge the law attributes to a business because a reasonably careful business in the same position would have found the hazard. Subsection (1)(b) allows that to be shown by proving the condition occurred with regularity and was therefore foreseeable. A case about a cooler that leaks every week does not depend on when this particular puddle formed. Our Florida premises liability attorneys reach for that route more often than the timing one.

Florida limits what a government agency can pay an injured person to $200,000, however large the verdict. The Florida Senate received 17 bills on August 7, 2026 whose entire purpose is paying claims above that ceiling, and five of them name Miami-Dade County.

The cap is not a measure of what a case is worth. Florida Statute § 768.28(5)(a) bars the state, its agencies, and its subdivisions from paying any one person more than $200,000, or more than $300,000 for all claims arising out of the same incident. The same subsection allows a judgment to be entered above those figures and directs that the excess may be reported to the Legislature, payable in part or in whole only by a further act of it.

People injured by a county vehicle, a public hospital, or a sheriff’s deputy are often told the cap ends the discussion. It does not. Friedman Rodman Frank & Estrada has handled personal injury claims across Miami-Dade County since 1976, including claims against public bodies, and two questions decide most of them. Was written notice given in time, and is the loss large enough to justify the legislative route.

What Section 768.28 Caps, and What It Does Not

The statute waives sovereign immunity, meaning it grants permission to sue a government body that would otherwise be immune from suit entirely. Florida Statute § 768.28(5)(a) then sets the payment limits at $200,000 per person and $300,000 per incident, and excludes punitive damages and prejudgment interest.

What the subsection does not do is cap the verdict. A jury can find damages of several million dollars against a county, and that judgment stands as entered. The agency simply cannot pay past the statutory figures without legislative authorization. The distance between those two ideas is the distance between a case that is finished and a case with one step left.

The Notice Requirement That Comes First

None of it is reachable without written notice, and this is where these claims are most often lost. Florida Statute § 768.28(6)(a) makes it a condition of filing suit that the claimant present the claim in writing to the appropriate agency, and, except for claims against a municipality, a county, or the Florida Space Authority, also to the Department of Financial Services, within three years after the claim accrues. A wrongful death claim carries a shorter window of two years.

The agency must then deny the claim in writing before suit can be filed. Failure to make final disposition within six months after filing counts as a denial, which stops an agency from running out the clock by staying silent. Florida Statute § 768.28(6)(b) treats notice and denial as conditions precedent rather than elements of the claim, so satisfying them does not change the date the cause of action accrued.

The Claim Bills Filed for the 2027 Session

A claim bill is a private bill asking the Florida Legislature to pay the portion of a judgment or settlement that exceeds the sovereign immunity limits. Every bill filed so far for the 2027 session is one. The Florida Senate’s 2027 bill list shows 17 filings, all dated August 7, 2026, and every one of them a relief act.

Five name Miami-Dade County. The rest name the Department of Children and Families, the Broward County Sheriff’s Office, Charlotte County, the City of Clearwater, the City of Temple Terrace, the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, the Department of Corrections, the Department of Legal Affairs, and the University of South Florida. Several are filed by an estate rather than a living claimant, which is what a Florida wrongful death claim against a public entity looks like by the time it reaches this stage.

Talk With Us About a Claim Against a Florida Government Agency

Claims against public entities run on a different clock and a different ceiling from ordinary injury claims, and the notice deadline is the one that quietly ends them. Friedman Rodman Frank & Estrada has represented injured people throughout Miami-Dade, Broward, and Collier Counties since 1976. Call us at (305) 448-8585 or contact our Miami office for a free consultation. We work on contingency, and you pay nothing unless we recover for you.

Two bills that would have ended Florida’s no-fault auto insurance system died in committee on March 13, 2026, the day the legislative session closed. Senate Bill 522 would have repealed the Florida Motor Vehicle No-Fault Law outright, and House Bill 769 was its counterpart in the House. Neither reached a floor vote, so personal injury protection coverage remains mandatory on most vehicles registered in the state.

Florida Statute § 627.736 requires PIP to pay 80 percent of reasonable and medically necessary medical expenses and 60 percent of lost gross income, up to a combined limit of $10,000. That coverage carries a deadline that ends more claims than either repeal bill would have. Initial services and care must be received within 14 days after the crash, or PIP medical benefits are not reimbursable at all. Our personal injury attorneys see that deadline missed more often than any other.

Florida’s First District Court of Appeal has changed how the deadline for filing a workers’ compensation petition is calculated, in an en banc decision issued March 23, 2026. The court held that benefit payments and authorized medical care do not lengthen the two-year window, which is what roughly 25 years of its own case law had concluded. They stop the clock instead, and it restarts a year later.

Under Florida Statute § 440.19(1), a petition for benefits is barred unless it is filed within two years of the date the worker knew or should have known the injury arose out of work. Section 440.19(2) tolls that period for one year from the last payment of indemnity benefits or the last furnishing of authorized treatment. In Estes v. Palm Beach County School District, the court held that this tolling suspends the two-year period rather than extending it, so the two years do not begin running until one year after benefits or care stop. Our workers’ compensation attorneys read that as a meaningfully longer window than the one carriers have been calculating.

Florida workers’ compensation is the only claim an injured employee has against an employer. Florida Statute § 440.11 makes that trade explicit, and it is the reason a workplace injury claim and a personal injury lawsuit are two different things carrying two different sets of damages.

Chapter 440 pays indemnity benefits and authorized medical care, and that is the whole of it. There is no provision anywhere in the chapter for noneconomic damages, which is the deliberate other half of the bargain the Legislature struck. A claim against a negligent third party who is not the employer runs in circuit court under ordinary negligence law, where those damages are available, and it can proceed at the same time as the comp claim. Our workers’ compensation attorneys look for that second claim in every serious injury file.

Coverage after a rideshare collision in Florida turns on what the driver’s app was doing at the moment of impact. Florida Statute § 627.748 sets two separate sets of minimum liability limits for transportation network company drivers, and the distance between them is wide enough to decide what an injury claim is worth.

A driver who is logged on to the app but has not accepted a ride must carry at least $50,000 for bodily injury per person, $100,000 per incident, and $25,000 in property damage, under Florida Statute § 627.748(7)(b). Once that same driver has accepted a trip and is engaged in a prearranged ride, the required coverage rises to at least $1 million under § 627.748(7)(c). Same driver, same intersection, twentyfold difference in what is available per injured person. Our rideshare accident attorneys start every one of these claims by establishing which of the two applied.

How Florida’s Wrongful Death Act Decides Who Can File

Florida law puts the wrongful death claim in the hands of the estate’s personal representative, not the grieving relatives directly. The Florida Wrongful Death Act, found at sections 768.16 through 768.26 of the Florida Statutes, controls these cases. Under Florida Statute § 768.20, the personal representative files a single lawsuit on behalf of everyone who lost something because of the death.

The attorneys at Friedman Rodman Frank & Estrada handle fatal crash and wrongful death cases for families in Miami-Dade, Broward, and the surrounding counties, and a driver fleeing does not close off the family’s options.

Your Own Insurance Can Pay When the At-Fault Driver Is Long Gone