West Palm Beach car accident lawyer

Concretely, in the order it happens. Several of these stop being possible after a few weeks.

What you do: get treated, keep every appointment, and forward anything that arrives in the post. That is the list.

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Everything a person reasonably wants to confirm before calling a law firm, in one place.

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This is the single most expensive mistake people make after a Florida crash, and it has nothing to do with lawyers.

Florida is a no-fault state. Your own personal injury protection coverage pays first, whoever caused the crash. Under Florida Statute 627.736, those benefits are available only if you receive initial services and care within 14 days of the accident.

Be clear about what that deadline does and does not do. Missing it costs you your PIP benefits. It does not automatically end your claim against the driver who caused the crash, and it does not end a claim on your own uninsured motorist coverage. Those are separate routes with separate rules. If you are reading this on day sixteen, the right move is still to get treated and then ask what remains available, rather than assuming nothing does.

There is a second condition inside the same statute. The full $10,000 is only available if a qualifying provider determines that you have an emergency medical condition. Without that determination, reimbursement is capped at $2,500. A chiropractor cannot make the determination; a physician, osteopath, dentist, or a supervised physician assistant or advanced practice registered nurse can.

Read that table twice, because it tells you something most people miss: PIP never covers your bills in full. Even in the best case, 20 percent of your medical expenses and 40 percent of your lost wages sit with you, your health insurer, or the at-fault driver’s carrier. Recovering that balance is the actual work of a claim.

If the crash was less than two weeks ago, that 14-day window is the most urgent thing in front of you. A call today is worth more than any paperwork a month from now. Call Paul and he will review what happened for free, with no obligation and no fee unless he recovers compensation for you.

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This surprises almost everyone. Florida requires $10,000 of PIP and $10,000 of property damage liability. It does not require most private drivers to carry bodily injury liability coverage at all. A driver can destroy your spine, comply with every registration requirement in the state, and have no coverage that pays you a cent for the injury.

Uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage is what fills that hole, and you buy it from your own insurer. Under Florida Statute 627.727 an insurer must offer it, and a rejection or a reduction below your bodily injury limits is only effective if it was made in writing on the approved form. Checking whether a valid written rejection exists is one of the first things worth doing when a policy appears to carry none.

Coverage may also be stacked across the vehicles on a policy, which multiplies the limit. Many people are carrying more protection than they believe they are, and a few are carrying none because of a form someone signed years ago without reading.

What a policy review covers

Reading a declarations page properly is one of the first things a claim needs, and it is not a formality. The questions that change the outcome are these:

• Is uninsured motorist coverage present at all, and at what limit? It is often lower than the bodily injury limit on the same policy.
• Is it stacked or non-stacked? Stacked coverage multiplies the limit by the number of insured vehicles, which on a three-car policy is the difference between $100,000 and $300,000.
• If none is shown, is there a valid written rejection? Section 627.727 makes a rejection effective only on the approved form. Where the form is missing or defective, coverage can be treated as if it were never rejected.
• Whose policies might also respond? A resident relative's policy, an employer's vehicle policy, a commercial policy behind a work truck, an umbrella policy above any of them.
• What are the notice and cooperation conditions? These are shorter than the statute of limitations and a breach can forfeit coverage you otherwise had.

On a serious injury caused by a minimally insured driver, this review is usually worth more than any argument about the value of the damages, because it determines whether there is money to argue over at all.

How uninsured motorist claims work →

Most Florida negligence claims must be filed within two years of the date the cause of action accrued, under Florida Statute 95.11(5)(a). Wrongful death runs two years from the date of death under section 95.11(5)(e). This is a recent change: before HB 837 took effect on 24 March 2023, the negligence period was four years, and claims that accrued before that date are generally still governed by the older rule. Which rule applies to your crash is worth confirming rather than assuming.

A claim against a city, a county, the state or a government employee follows a different track entirely. Under Florida Statute 768.28(6) the claim must first be presented in writing to the appropriate agency — and, for state agencies, also to the Department of Financial Services, though not for municipalities or counties. The written claim must be presented within three years of accrual, or two years for wrongful death. Suit cannot be filed until the claim is denied in writing, and under section 768.28(6)(d) a failure to dispose of it within six months counts as a denial. Section 768.28(5)(a) also caps recovery at $200,000 per person and $300,000 per incident, absent a legislative claim bill. These rules are easy to miss and fatal when missed.

In practice, though, the limitation period is almost never what loses a case. What loses cases is evidence nobody preserved: intersection camera footage on a short retention loop, a commercial vehicle’s telematics data overwritten on schedule, a witness who has moved and changed numbers, a vehicle repaired or scrapped before anyone photographed the crush pattern. Those disappear in weeks, not years.

Because of the threshold in section 627.737, the medical picture does not just determine what your treatment costs. It determines whether a category of damages is available to you at all. These are the injuries that come up most, and what each one tends to turn on.

One practical point runs through all of it. Tell every treating provider that this began with a motor vehicle crash, and be specific about what hurts, including the thing that seems minor. A symptom that first appears in the record eight weeks in is a symptom the carrier will argue came from something else.

Palm Beach County recorded 26,550 crashes, 207 deaths and 16,564 people injured in 2024 — crashes up 1.14 percent on 2023 and deaths up 6.70 percent (FLHSMV, Florida Traffic Crash Facts Annual Report 2024). Within that, place matters for procedural reasons rather than atmosphere: where a crash happened decides which agency writes the report, which records exist, who else may be responsible, and where a suit would be filed.

• I-95 and Florida’s Turnpike. Usually Florida Highway Patrol. Limited-access highways produce chain-reaction crashes and higher speed differentials, and commercial vehicles are common, which raises the chance of a federal-rules layer and a larger policy.
• Okeechobee Boulevard, Southern Boulevard, Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard. Major arterials that pass through city and unincorporated stretches, so the responding agency can change along their length. Signal-phase data for intersection crashes is held by the relevant road authority.
• Military Trail, Australian Avenue, Belvedere Road, US-1 and Dixie Highway. Multi-lane roads with frequent driveways and turn movements, where lane-change and left-turn disputes are the recurring pattern.
• Blue Heron Boulevard and the Riviera Beach corridor. Port traffic puts heavy commercial vehicles into a mixed-use road environment.
• The Royal Park and Flagler bridges. Crossings between West Palm Beach and Palm Beach, which matters because the two are separate municipalities with separate policing. A crash on one side is not handled by the agency on the other.

Where you were treated matters to the file. Palm Beach County has exactly two state-approved trauma centers, both Level I: Delray Medical Center and St. Mary’s Medical Center. If you were taken to either, those records carry the two things the claim later turns on and nobody thinks about at the time — the emergency medical condition determination that unlocks the full PIP limit, and the baseline imaging a treating physician needs before anyone can give a permanency opinion. Obtain them complete, imaging included, not just the radiology reports.

Where a suit would be filed. Most Palm Beach County claims resolve without anyone filing anything, but venue is part of what an insurer prices against. A suit here goes to the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit, whose main courthouse is the Judge Daniel T. K. Hurley Courthouse at 205 North Dixie Highway in downtown West Palm Beach, a few minutes from this office on North Olive Avenue. The circuit also sits at PGA Boulevard in Palm Beach Gardens, West Atlantic Avenue in Delray Beach, and State Road 15 in Belle Glade. Where the other driver was working for an out-of-state company and the amount in dispute is large enough, the case can instead be removed to the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida, which sits at 701 Clematis Street.

None of this is a claim that any particular road is dangerous, and nothing here is a statement that Paul has handled a case at any given intersection. It is a practical point about where to direct a records request.

This is the part that surprises people at the end rather than the beginning, and it is worth understanding early because it affects what actually reaches you.

Your medical treatment is typically paid in some combination of PIP, your own health insurance, and in some cases a provider agreeing to wait for payment out of any recovery. Where a health plan, Medicare or Medicaid has paid for crash-related treatment, it will generally have a right to be reimbursed from a settlement. Federal law gives Medicare a particularly strong right of recovery, and ignoring it creates a problem that outlives the case.

Two practical consequences. First, the headline settlement figure is never the figure you receive; fees, case costs and reimbursement claims come out of it, and the only honest way to discuss a number is net. Second, these amounts are frequently negotiable, and reducing them can put more in your pocket than squeezing the last few thousand out of the carrier. Ask how reimbursement claims will be handled before you sign anything, not after.

Florida law also places limits and disclosure requirements on how medical damages are presented in litigation, which is another reason it is better to have the billing structure understood at the start of a claim rather than reconstructed at the end.

None of this is required to call. It simply makes the first conversation more useful if you happen to have it to hand.

Any firm can assert these things. This is the evidence behind them, and where it is not yet published, this page says so rather than implying otherwise.

Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Every case turns on its own facts, its venue, and the insurance coverage that actually exists.

All frequently asked questions What to do after a crash

Each of these is answered in full, with the statute, on its own page.