A rideshare crash is not an ordinary car accident, because the moment an Uber or Lyft is involved, who pays for your injuries turns on a corporate insurance structure the companies built to control what they owe. If you were hurt as a passenger, as another driver, or as a...
Florida is one of the better states in the country to be a dog bite victim, because the law does not give the owner a free pass for the first bite. If a dog bit you, the owner is responsible whether or not the dog had ever shown a mean...
The most useful thing to know after a bicycle crash in Florida is that the law is already on the rider’s side of the road. A cyclist is not an intruder in traffic. Under Florida law, a person on a bicycle has the rights and the duties of the driver...
People walk all over Tampa Bay, and every year the roads here prove how dangerous that is. In Smart Growth America’s Dangerous by Design report, the Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater metro has ranked among the deadliest in the nation for pedestrians and the most dangerous in Florida. If a...
A motorcycle crash is not just a car crash on two wheels, and a rider’s legal situation is meaningfully different in Florida, in ways that can cut for the rider. The trouble is that riders often walk into a claim carrying assumptions from car cases that do not apply, and...
It surprises many people to learn that after a Florida crash, the first coverage to pay your medical bills is usually your own, even when the other driver was clearly at fault. Florida’s no fault system is built that way, and understanding the order of who pays helps you avoid...
A settlement offer lands a few weeks after the crash, the bills are piling up, and the check would make the pressure stop. The pull to just take it is real. But a first offer is rarely a fair one, and once you sign the release that comes with it,...
Many people assume that if they were even a little to blame for a crash, they have no case. That is not how Florida works, though a 2023 change did raise the stakes. Being partly at fault reduces your recovery, and past a certain line it now ends it, so...
If your sense of the deadline comes from anything you heard before 2023, it is probably wrong, and that mistake can be fatal to a claim. Florida used to give injury victims four years to file. It does not anymore. A sweeping change in the law cut that window in...
Within a day or two of a crash, the other driver’s insurance company often calls, friendly and helpful, asking for a quick recorded statement to process the claim. It sounds routine. It is not. That call is one of the most consequential moments in the early life of a claim,...
The choices you make in the first hours and days after a crash can shape both your recovery and any claim you bring, and Florida has one deadline in particular that catches people off guard. Here is the practical order of operations, written for the person still sitting at the...
It is the first question almost everyone asks after a crash, and the honest answer is that no one can hand you a number on day one. Anyone who promises a figure before the medical picture is clear is guessing. What a good lawyer can do is tell you what...
The other driver’s story often changes between the roadside and the insurance claim, and by the time an adjuster is on the phone, a clear rear end or a plain failure to yield has somehow become your fault. The good news is that the physical evidence does not change its...
When a drunk driver injures someone, many folks assume the impairment will simply speak for itself. In a civil case it does not. The impairment has to be proven, and the proof lives in the same evidence a DUI prosecution runs on, the breath test and the machine’s records, the...
Early in 2026, the FDA announced a recall that swept up more than two thousand products from brands as familiar as Tylenol, Advil, and Coca-Cola, after a Minnesota facility was found operating under insanitary conditions. Recalls that large make national news, and they leave a lot of people asking the...
For years, Florida law put a hard ceiling on the pain and suffering a medical malpractice victim could recover, no matter how severe the harm. A patient left permanently disabled by a preventable error could see a jury’s award for their suffering slashed by hundreds of thousands of dollars, purely...
Florida leads the country in registered vessels and in boating accidents, and the risk peaks in exactly the weeks when the water is most crowded, the summer weekends and the holidays. Around Tampa Bay, the passes and sandbars fill with a mix of jet skis, rental boats, and first time...
After a shooting at an apartment complex, a nightclub, or a parking garage, the coverage focuses on the person who pulled the trigger, and rightly so. But the criminal is often never caught, or has nothing to pay, and that is not where the story ends for the victim. Florida...
Every so often a video or a news story out of a care facility goes viral, and families across Florida feel the same cold worry about the person they placed in someone else’s care. Pinellas County has one of the largest older populations in the country and a dense supply...
When a family loses someone to another person’s carelessness, the legal questions arrive at the worst possible time, and the answers are not obvious. Florida channels every one of these cases through a single statute, the Wrongful Death Act, and that statute decides who may recover, what they may recover,...
A crash with a fully loaded tractor trailer is not just a bigger version of a car accident, and treating it like one is how injured people leave the real case on the table. A loaded commercial truck can weigh twenty to thirty times what a passenger car weighs, so...
One of the roughly ninety new Florida laws that took effect on July 1, 2026, is aimed squarely at a problem many injured drivers already know too well. Known as Isaiah’s Law, House Bill 35 adds driving without a valid license to the list of offenses that can push a...
This article first appeared in The Paraclete, the magazine of the St. Petersburg Bar Association, May/June 2026 edition, pages 16 and 17. Republished here by the author, with citation to the original. Immigration enforcement has become an increasingly visible part of daily life across Florida and the rest of the...
This article first appeared in The Paraclete, the magazine of the St. Petersburg Bar Association, March/April 2026 edition, pages 40 and 41. Republished here by the author, with citation to the original. Florida residents regularly encounter law enforcement during traffic stops and other brief interactions. While many people know they...
On Court TV, February 19, 2026, discussing the Guthrie case forensics. On February 19, I joined Court TV to break down the forensic turning point in the Nancy Guthrie case: DNA recovered from gloves found near the scene was run through CODIS and came back with no match, and investigators...
The National Trial Lawyers has selected Rory Safir of Safir Injury & Criminal Defense Law PLLC for its Top 40 Under 40 list for criminal defense in Florida. What the Top 40 Under 40 recognizes Membership is by invitation and is limited to 40 attorneys under the age of 40...
