Florida Law
Florida Personal Injury Defense Law: General
Personal Injury Defense Law: General
Tort Law Generally
Degree of Fault
Each of the three kinds of torts--negligence, intentional misconduct, and strict liability--has its own degree of fault that a plaintiff must prove in order to collect from a defendant.
Negligence
Proving that someone else was negligent hinges on the following question: Was the party who allegedly caused the injury behaving as a reasonable person would have behaved under the same circumstances? If not, then that party was negligent and has committed the tort of negligence. Examples of negligence include a reckless driver causing an automobile accident, or a store owner failing to repair a defective door, thereby causing a customer to fall and be hurt. If a reasonable person would have driven more prudently, or if a reasonable store owner would have repaired the defective door, then the negligent party could be found liable by a judge or jury.The outcome of a lawsuit in which negligence is alleged can be difficult to predict because determining how much care a reasonable person would have exercised in the same situation is difficult. The reasonable person standard is vague, imprecise, and apt to be interpreted differently by different people. Often, a practice that seemed reasonable in the past may appear unreasonable with the benefit of hindsight. Finding an attorney who has experience with how juries typically interpret the reasonable person standard is, therefore, one of the most important steps in successfully defending a personal injury lawsuit in which a plaintiff alleges that a person acted unreasonably.
Intentional Misconduct
Intentional misconduct is a deliberate action resulting in an injury to another person or damage to another person's property. For example, if a manufacturer deliberately sells products it knows to be defective, it is causing harm on purpose. A plaintiff alleging intentional misconduct need not compare the defendant's actions to those of a reasonable person; he or she only must show that the defendant intended his or her actions. In a civil lawsuit in which the plaintiff alleges intentional misconduct, the plaintiff can recover punitive damages in addition to awards for injuries, pain, and suffering. Punitive damages, designed to punish people or organizations for unlawful acts, are often very large sums of money. Until recently, there were few limits on the amount of money a jury could award as punitive damages. However, Congress and state legislatures recently have passed laws putting caps on punitive damage awards in certain types of cases. Even without statutory limits, judges have long had the authority to reduce many types of punitive damage awards. For example, a punitive damage award of more than three times the amount of compensatory damages usually is considered excessive and subject to reduction. In Florida, 35 percent of every punitive damage award goes to the state. The remaining 65 percent goes to the plaintiff. Businesses wanting to avoid the payment of punitive damages should institute specific safety procedures for their employees to follow to reduce the risk of injury.
Strict Liability
The final theory of tort liability, strict liability, applies only to very dangerous situations. If someone does something extremely dangerous, such as demolish a building, and someone gets hurt as a result, the injured person can sue for damages without having to prove the defendant acted negligently or with intent to cause harm. The principle behind strict liability lawsuits is that some activities are so dangerous that, in exchange for permission to engage in the activity, the actor must assume total responsibility for any resulting damage.
Burden of Proof
The burden of proof in a tort case, as in most civil law cases, is lower than the proof required in criminal law cases. In a criminal case, the state must prove a person's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. To win a personal injury lawsuit based on tort law, the plaintiff need only prove that a majority of the evidence shows that an injury was caused by the defendant's tortious actions. This standard of proof is called "the preponderance of the evidence." The different burdens of proof mean that a company might be acquitted of criminal charges stemming from its actions but be found liable in a civil lawsuit stemming from the same actions.
Comparative Negligence
Tort law attempts to compensate victims if their injury is caused by another person. When one person clearly causes all of another person's injury, it is easy to place blame. In many other cases, however, the victim's actions help cause the injury or make it worse than it would be otherwise. This is known as contributory or comparative negligence. For instance, a negligent driver might injure a pedestrian who is negligently walking in the street, instead of on a sidewalk where a reasonable pedestrian normally walks. The pedestrian negligently contributed to his or her injuries. A prudent person might suffer minor injuries from using a defective chainsaw, whereas a less prudent person who negligently fails to wear safety goggles while using the chainsaw might incur more severe injuries. In these cases, a judge or jury must calculate how much each party is at fault. Each state has its own rules for calculating damages that can be recovered when a victim is at least partially to blame for his or her own injury.
Florida has a comparative negligence rule. Under the comparative negligence rule, the judge reduces the amount of any damage award by the percentage of the victim's contribution to his or her own injuries. For example, if a jury finds that a plaintiff suffered $100,000 in damages, but was 30 percent at fault, the judge reduces the damage award by 30 percent to $70,000.
Vicarious Liability
There are several ways that a business can be held liable for the actions of its employees. All are known as vicarious liability. A company might be held responsible for damage caused by an employee if the company knows that the employee is likely to injure someone but negligently fails to exercise adequate control over the employee. The owner of a vehicle can be held responsible for negligently entrusting the vehicle to another driver whose driving causes an accident. Generally, however, a business owner is not responsible for acts committed by independent contractors.
The most common form of vicarious liability is known by the Latin term respondeat superior. Under respondeat superior, an employer is responsible for torts committed by employees within the scope of their employment. For example, if a pedestrian is struck and injured by a person driving to a party, the victim has a claim against the driver. However, if the pedestrian is hit by a person driving a delivery van for his or her employer, then respondeat superior allows the pedestrian to bring claims against both the driver and the employer.
Frequently, personal injury plaintiffs cannot recover anything from negligent employees because they have no money. Because employers usually have more money or better insurance, plaintiffs often focus their recovery efforts on the employers. An employer may have a cause of action against the employee who exposed the company to liability, but such actions are rarely pursued either because the employee has no money or the employer assumes that to do so would create ill will among remaining employees.
Premises Liability
Premises liability is an area of tort law that governs the duties owed by landowners to persons on their property. Generally speaking, a landowner is liable for anyone injured on the landowner's property and a jury can award damages to the injured person. However, a landowner may not be liable if he or she had no way of knowing about a hazard that caused an accident. No one is responsible if an accident was truly unavoidable, and, as described above, a plaintiff cannot recover from someone unless the plaintiff can prove fault (strict liability is the only exception to this principle). In general, a landowner is not liable for injuries to a trespasser, although a landowner must take reasonable care to protect persons who are likely to approach a property for legitimate purposes, such as letter carriers or delivery persons. Anyone, even a trespasser, can sue a landowner if he or she is injured by an unjustified hazard on the property, such as a trap designed intentionally to injure people.
Florida recognizes the attractive nuisance doctrine, which is an exception to the general rule that property owners are not liable for injuries to a trespasser caused by the negligence of the owner. Under the attractive nuisance doctrine, an owner is liable for the injuries of a child trespasser if (1) the owner knows or has reason to know that the dangerous condition exists where children are likely to trespass, (2) the condition is known or should be known to be an unreasonable risk of death or serious injury to trespassing children, (3) the child, because of his or her age, does not discover the condition or realize the risk involved, (4) the burden on the owner of eliminating the risk is slight compared to the risk posed to children, and (5) the owner fails to take reasonable care to remove the danger or protect the child. In addition, the dangerous condition itself must have enticed the child onto the property.
If someone is injured on public land adjacent to a landlord's property, the landlord generally is not legally liable unless he or she did something to cause the injury, such as hitting a passerby with the falling branches of a tree being cut down on the landowner's property.
Business owners always can be sued if their own carelessness or negligence causes others to be injured. Historically, this meant landowners were not liable for the actions of third parties they did not control. However, today business owners sometimes are liable for injuries caused by third parties committing crimes on their property. An increasing number of crime victims are winning lawsuits filed against business owners who did not, in a jury's opinion, take appropriate measures to ensure the safety of their customers. This type of lawsuit extends the landowner's duty to foresee, and take steps to prevent, possible illegal activity on his or her property. An example of this type of case is one in which a person who is attacked in a parking lot sues the lot's owner for failing to provide security measures that might have prevented the attack.
Whether a lawsuit based on premises liability will succeed largely depends on a jury's opinion of whether a reasonable business owner would have foreseen the probability of the crime occurring. For example, if tenants of an apartment building complain several times to their landlord that their security system is not working, and burglars later break in to several apartments, the tenants might have grounds for a successful lawsuit against their landlord for negligently failing to fix the security system.
Dram Shop Laws
Dram shop laws are laws imposing liability on a business owner for injuries caused by an intoxicated person, if the business is responsible for allowing that person to become intoxicated illegally. In Florida, any person who willfully and unlawfully sells or furnishes alcohol to a minor, or who knowingly serves an alcoholic, may be held liable for injury or damage caused by the recipient's intoxication. In all other instances, the injured party must sue the intoxicated person rather than the bar who served the intoxicated person.