Articles Posted in Personal Injury

It is not uncommon for minor children to be living with only one of their parents or neither. Since minors do not have the capacity to make various legal decisions, the question often arises as to who, in the above scenarios, does have that authority.

Custody law can be contentious and complicated. While it is beyond the scope of this blog to address the entire subject, the natural starting point is section 744.301, Florida Statutes.

Section 744.301(2) provides that parents, as the natural guardians of their children, have the authority to make legally binding decisions on behalf of their minor children in personal injury cases. However, the authority is not absolute.

When the parents are living together with the children, the decision making is shared jointly. It is a different story when the parents are divorced and living apart. Section 744.301(1) provides that “the natural guardianship belongs to the parent to whom sole parental responsibility has been granted, or if the parents have been granted shared parental responsibility, both continue as natural guardians.” 744.301(1). This makes it sound like the right to make binding decisions is determined solely by the status of “parental responsibility.” Not necessarily.

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Forty plus years of misleading Big Business propaganda has left the American public with the false impression that bringing a personal injury lawsuit comes without risk to the plaintiff. People have come to believe, sometimes with righteous indignation, that most lawsuits are frivolous and result in the recovery of undeserved compensation without any negative consequences for falling short of the mark.

The truth tells a different story.

From defense attorneys to trial judges to deeply cynical juries to courts of appeal and rules and statutes, Plaintiffs seeking their day in court with the simple aim of being made whole for being wronged face a host of hazards and hurdles enough to challenge the courage, strength, and fortitude of the toughest among us.

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In response to a Complaint we recently filed involving a serious crash on Florida’s Turnpike, the Defendant asserted as an affirmative defense that our client, the Plaintiff, should not recover because she had the “last clear chance” to avoid the accident.

In the many personal injury cases our firm has handled, this is the first time we have had this doctrine asserted. We had to do legal research to understand, what, if anything, it meant in our case. What we learned is that the doctrine has not been applicable in Florida personal injury cases since 1973. Moreover, when it did apply years ago it was always used by Plaintiffs against Defendants, not by Defendants against Plaintiffs. Hence, the affirmative defense in our case is hogwash.

Prior to the Florida Supreme Court’s holding in Hoffman v. Jones, 280 So.2d 431 (Fla., 1973), Florida was a contributory negligence jurisdiction. Hoffman turned Florida into a comparative negligence (or fault) jurisdiction.

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Price gouging for medical services is the scourge of personal injury cases. Hospitals are the worst offenders.

By ambulance from the accident scene to admissions for surgery, accident victims wind up in hospitals. The hospital charges are always staggering.

The charges are phony, having no relationship to either costs or value. Average pricing at Florida hospitals is a minimum of 500 percent of Medicare allowable amounts (which amounts to roughly three to four times more than hospitals negotiate as reasonable rates with commercial health insurers).

The gouging is especially problematic in personal injury cases for the uninsured and those with large deductibles or unpaid charges. Large outstanding balances can stand in the way of resolving cases involving low policy limits or of questionable value because of causation issues.

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Personal injury plaintiffs and defendants battle over past and future damages. One frequent battleground concerns the amount a plaintiff should be awarded for future medical expenses.

Not infrequently, plaintiffs have sources such as health insurance, workers’ compensation, PIP, Med Pay, Medicaid, and Medicare to cover some or all of their future medical expenses. Almost always, these sources pay less than the usual and customary rates charged by most medical providers. Moreover, by accepting payments from these sources, medical providers are barred, in most instances, from balance billing beyond a small copay.

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Florida’s civil justice system allows accident victims to seek damages from those alleged to be at fault. Damages awardable fall into two broad categories: Economic and non-economic.

Economic damages include medical expenses (past and future), past lost income, and the loss of earning capacity in the future. In some instances, Florida law allows these economic damages to be offset, or reduced, by or to the amount the victim received from other sources for the same loss. See §786.76 Florida Statutes and Florida Standard Jury Instruction 501.8.

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