Our client was driving on his motorcycle south on US. 301, when a sports car pulled out in front of him and sent him flying several yards over the front left area of the vehicle. His helmet flew off before his head made contact with the road’s asphalt. He suffered severe and life threatening injuries including but not limited to, a coma, open book pelvic fracture, and a fractured wrist.
LEGAL ISSUES
Florida is a comparative fault state and therefore any recovery that a plaintiff makes in a personal injury case is reduced by the percentage of fault they are held responsible for. In many personal injury cases, the defense seeks to place blame on the plaintiff for causing part of the accident.
Here, several eye-witnesses and our own reconstructive experts, estimated that our client was driving approximately 70-75 miles per hour when he made contact with the sports car that pulled into his lane. The speed limit on that section of 301, was 40 miles per hour.
Therefore, a jury could find that our client was significantly at fault for causing this accident even though the other driver was in violation of a Florida Safety Statute and was the but/for cause of the harm suffered by our client.
We were able to achieve this fantastic result for our client with a process known as mediation. The insurance company agreed to use a local mediator that we felt very comfortable with based upon his reputation in the community and our own personal successful results for previous clients.
When the mediation started the defense counsel openly admitted that the injuries in this case were severe and life threatening but they postured that the accident was the fault of our client and made an initial offer of $50,000 to start the process.
We then spect the next six hours going back and forth with the mediator to see if we could obtain a result that would make sense without the necessity to file a lawsuit. At the closing stages of negotiations that insurance company wanted us to take about 1.3 million as a final take it or leave it type offer. We held firm and said that we would not be comfortable with taking a penny less than $1.55 million.
In the end we got the $1.55 million and our client would not have to spend another 2-3 years time to wait for his case to get in front of a jury. Further, we would not have to risk a jury holding our client responsible for the accident and giving him $0 because there was a significant chance that a jury would apportion a huge percentage of the fault of the accident to him and reduce his damages by that percentage of fault.
Tom Harris, Florida Injury Attorney, has over 39 years of experience, including 17 years of defending insurance companies before reinventing his law practice to represent injured people as a personal injury attorney.
Kyle Harris is a Florida licensed attorney who joined the family practice after starting his career as a licensed attorney in California