Auto Accident Attorneys

A Florida auto accident starts two clocks at the same time. The first is the 14-day window under Florida's no-fault statute to seek initial medical treatment, without which your $10,000 PIP benefit collapses to $2,500 — or to nothing. The second is the two-year statute of limitations that the 2023 tort reform put on negligence claims arising after March 24, 2023 (a shorter window than the four years many people still believe applies). Our personal injury attorneys work both clocks from day one, and represent clients across Volusia, Flagler, and Central Florida. Call us at (386) 255-1400 24 hours a day for a free consultation.

The two clocks that matter immediately

Florida law now puts two hard deadlines on every auto-injury case, and both start running long before most people call a lawyer:

• 14 days, from the date of the crash, to seek initial medical services under the Florida Motor Vehicle No-Fault Law, Fla. Stat. § 627.736. The standard is initial treatment — emergency room, urgent care, physician, dentist, chiropractor, or qualified hospital — within fourteen days of the accident. Miss it and PIP benefits are unavailable for the rest of the case, no exceptions. This catches people whose pain or symptoms only emerge a week or two later.
• 2 years to file suit on a negligence claim that accrued on or after March 24, 2023, under Fla. Stat. § 95.11(4)(a), as revised by HB 837. Causes of action that accrued before that date may still carry the prior four-year deadline; the cutoff is fact-specific and worth confirming with counsel before assuming either rule applies to your case.

We file the PIP paperwork and lock the SOL math the day you retain us.

What Florida's 2023 tort reform changed for your case

The 2023 tort reform package (HB 837) made the most significant changes to Florida personal injury law in a generation. Two of those changes touch nearly every auto case:

The practical effect on an auto case is that fault apportionment now decides whether the case has any value at all. A plaintiff at 49% fault still recovers (reduced); a plaintiff at 51% recovers zero. That makes early scene work, witness statements, and accident reconstruction far more important than they were under the old pure-comparative regime, where any fraction of the other driver's fault still produced a recovery.

How recovery works after a Florida auto crash

There are typically four sources of recovery in a Florida auto injury case, in roughly this order:

What we work first on a new auto case

The early days of a Florida auto claim are when value is gained or lost. Our first-week priorities on every new auto case:

• Open the PIP claim and confirm the 14-day treatment window is met, with an EMC determination if one is medically supported
• Lock down scene evidence — police report, crash report supplements, body-cam, dash-cam, scene photos, witness contacts — before they age out
• Identify every available policy: at-fault BIL, your own UM/UIM stack, resident-relative policies, MedPay, employer policies in commercial cases
• Place the at-fault driver, their insurer, and any commercial owner on notice of preservation
• Document the injuries with the right specialists, so the demand later rests on real medical evidence rather than retrospective reconstruction

Florida's auto-injury law moved in 2023. The defense playbook moved with it.

HB 837 changed the math on Florida auto claims. The SOL is shorter, the comparative-negligence calculation is harder on plaintiffs, the rules around bad-faith claims have been rewritten, and the admissibility of medical-bill evidence has been narrowed. Cases built on the pre-2023 playbook — long SOL runways, fault percentages that don't decide recoverability, traditional bad-faith leverage — leave money on the table or, worse, miss deadlines. We work cases on the current statute, with the current case law, and with an eye on how Volusia and Flagler insurers are valuing crashes this quarter.