Broward Injury Lawyer Blog

April 5, 2016

De La Torre v. Gallardo – Florida Dram Shop Law

By Ansara Law Personal Injury Attorneys

When a drunk driver crashes into your vehicle in Florida, what recourse do you have to recover damages?

The answer depends on the underlying circumstances, but generally, you will want to explore:

The at-fault driver/ insurance;
The owner of the vehicle/ insurance;
The employer of the at-fault driver (if he or she was working);
The establishment that served the at-fault driver alcohol.

That last one – which falls under Florida’s dram shop law – will only work if the drunk driver was either under 21 or known to the establishment to be habitually addicted to alcohol. Per F.S. 768.125, those are the only circumstances under which an establishment may be held accountable for the injurious actions of a drunk driver. Continue reading

April 2, 2016

Premises Liability for Dangerous Spring Break Gathering

By Ansara Law Personal Injury Attorneys

A huge spring break party in Plantation that involved a residential home packed with 400 people ended tragically in gunfire, the death of one man and the serious injury of four others.

The Sun-Sentinel reports the body of Serge Pierre Dumas, 28, was later located inside by authorities, who combed the five-bedroom, two-story property shortly after receiving complaints about noise and parking. As the officers were standing outside, shortly before midnight, gunfire rang out. In addition to the one decedent, three women and one man were transported to Fort Lauderdale’s Broward Medical Center with gunshot wounds.

The shooter, who has not yet been identified, allegedly escaped as people started pouring out of the house. Continue reading

March 31, 2016

Senators Demand Action on Nursing Home Abuse on Social Media

By Ansara Law Personal Injury Attorneys

Late last year, journalism non-profit ProPublica revealed a troubling trend: Nursing home abuse and exploitation in the form of social media posts. The images and video clips are taken by staffers and show elderly and dementia patients captured in degrading and dehumanizing poses, conversations and actions.

Staffers post these images to various forms of social media, but mostly to Snapchat, a platform in which images are supposed to vanish after a certain period of time. But aside from the fact that such a violation can do damage no matter how long they are posted, the images are not actually impermanent because users can screen-shot and copy them.

ProPublica revealed at least 37 known instances from December 2012 through December 2015. Many more instances likely never came to light. More than half of those documented cases involved Snapchat.

Now, a number of lawmakers are calling for action from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service’s Civil Rights division, as well as the U.S. Department of Justice. Continue reading

March 25, 2016

Rish v. Simao – Low Impact Car Accident Defense

By Ansara Law Personal Injury Attorneys

Just because a Fort Lauderdale car accident occurs at relatively low speeds does not mean it cannot cause serious injuries. Consider that a typical passenger car weighs about 2,000 pounds. If that vehicle makes impact at 10 mph, it’s going to strike with 3.7 tons of force.

Of course, this has the potential to cause injuries.

Still, that won’t prevent the at-fault driver from asserting the low-impact defense if they can help it. They will try to introduce as evidence pictures of the minimal amount of damage to the vehicle. They may also introduce witness testimony to illustrate the crash occurred in stop-and-go traffic or while vehicles were not traveling fast. They may also highlight the fact that plaintiff refused medical attention immediately after the crash, insinuating that plaintiff may be exaggerating the extent of his or her injuries. Continue reading

March 20, 2016

Report: U.S. Drivers are Distracted More Than Half the Time

By Ansara Law Personal Injury Attorneys

One of the biggest and most precise studies to date on the problem of distracted driving in the U.S. has been released. The results are not good.

Researchers with the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, in a new paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that Americans are in some way distracted more than 50 percent of the time when they are behind the wheel. Of all the crashes the study authors observed, almost 70 percent involved some type of “observable” distraction. That means the actual number is probably even higher, as humans can be easily distracted even by their own thoughts.

But it gets worse: The U.S. used to be one of the safest place for motorists. Prior to the early aughts, we had fewer traffic deaths per mile traveled than most other developed countries. Today, we rank 17th out of 29. Continue reading

March 16, 2016

Family Wins $124M for Car Accident Injury From Seat Defect

By Ansara Law Personal Injury Attorneys

A defective car seat resulted in permanent and profound injuries to a then-7-year-old boy.

Now, a jury in Texas has awarded his family $124 million, assigning 55 percent of the blame to the car manufacturer. Another 25 percent of the blame was assigned to the driver who rear-ended the car he was in. His father was assigned 20 percent liability, because neither he nor his son, who was seated directly behind him, were wearing a seat belt.

This tragic case highlights not only the estimated 100 serious injuries – mostly to children – that resulted from this specific defect since 1989, but also the fact that defective vehicles resulted in a record 900 recalls last year. In total, 51 million vehicles were taken off the market for a myriad of dangerous aspects, from defective airbags to dysfunctional brakes. Continue reading

March 14, 2016

Florida Supreme Court: Insurers Can’t Unreasonably Delay

By Ansara Law Personal Injury Attorneys

The Florida Supreme Court recently made it clear that auto insurance companies don’t have the right to ward off bad faith lawsuits after years of unreasonable delays, denials and non-response by paying the policy limits at the last minute.

In Fridman v. Safeco Ins. Co. of Ill., the court denied a bid by the insurer to assert it couldn’t have acted in bad faith because it did finally pay the insured. But bad faith by insurers can be revealed as much as much by the timing of the payment as the amount.

And in this case, the plaintiff – a man who was injured in a car accident by an underinsured driver – waited four full years to get a check from the insurance company. And even then, it came with settlement agreement language that effectively barred him from taking further action to collect anything further. He refused to accept it, and it was another six months before the insurer sent him another check with no such language.

But by that time, plaintiff was set on pursuing a bad faith insurance action. In Florida, people can file either a first- or third-party lawsuit against insurance companies for delaying or denying reasonable claims for benefits under the policy. If the court finds the insurer was liable for the underlying claim and acted in bad faith toward the insured, it can be made to pay triple damages. That’s not three times the policy limit – that’s three times the actual damages. Continue reading

March 9, 2016

Nursing Home Arbitration Agreements: Tossing the Keys to the Courthouse

By Ansara Law Personal Injury Attorneys

Attorneys are slated to argue this month that a nursing home in Massachusetts should not be able to force arbitration in a lawsuit over the death of a 100-year-old woman allegedly killed by her 97-year-old roommate.

The decedent’s son argues he did not have the legal authority to forfeit her right to remedy through the courts when he signed his name arbitration agreement stuffed into the thick stack of nursing home admissions paperwork.

He now says the roommate, a dementia sufferer who reportedly strangled his mother, had a history of problems and the facility should not have allowed her to live with another resident. Continue reading

March 6, 2016

Brown v. Davis – $3 Million Accident Verdict Upheld

By Ansara Law Personal Injury Attorneys

A $3 million damage award for the wrongful death of a husband and father killed in a car accident was upheld recently by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.

In Brown v. Davis, decedent was killed on a bridge crossing over the Mississippi River between Illinois and Missouri. His injuries occurred when a huge “log skidder” tractor fell off of a large truck and onto his vehicle.

The truck was driven by one defendant for his uncle, another defendant, who owned a logging company, also named as defendant. Plaintiff was decedent’s wife and mother of his two children. She alleged defendant’s were negligent because driver failed to exercise due caution, the owner of the vehicle failed to block oncoming traffic and the company was vicariously liable. Continue reading

March 2, 2016

Study: Technology Could Curb Florida Rear-End Accidents

By Ansara Law Personal Injury Attorneys

Just weeks ago, a driver operating a passenger car rear-ended a Broward County public school bus on Northeast Ninth Avenue in Fort Lauderdale. The entire hood of the black Acura TSX was underneath the bus.

No one was seriously injured, but as evidenced by news reports, these kinds of incidents aren’t all that common. If someone could miss a large yellow bus looming in front of them, it stands to reason smaller vehicles stopped in traffic are at higher risk. AAA reports distracted driving accounts for between a quarter and half of all crashes, and likely an even larger chunk of rear-end crashes.

Drivers simply aren’t paying attention to what’s happening in front of them. In fact, a recent Virginia Tech study, “Second Strategic Highway Research Program Naturalistic Driving Study,” found after analyzing three years’ worth of footage that 75 percent of crashes are due to driver error and people are engaged in distracted behavior 68 percent of the time they are behind the wheel. Continue reading