If you think a doctor, hospital, or someone on a medical team hurt you or someone in your family, you’ve probably already heard “these things just happen” or “it’s a known complication.” Sometimes that’s true. A lot of the time it’s not. The legal question isn’t whether something went wrong. It’s whether the provider failed to meet the standard of care a reasonably careful doctor in the same specialty would have provided in the same situation.
Medical malpractice cases have a reputation for being impossible to bring. That’s not because they can’t be won, it’s because of the procedural rules. Florida requires a 90-day pre-suit investigation before anyone can file a med mal lawsuit. Before that window even opens, the medical records have to be pulled, reviewed by a qualified medical expert in the same specialty as the defendant, and supported by a verified written medical expert opinion (Fla. Stat. § 766.203) corroborating that there are reasonable grounds to believe negligence occurred. No expert opinion, no case. The statute of limitations is two years from the date the injury was discovered or reasonably should have been discovered. These rules are why most general personal injury lawyers won’t touch med mal, and why good cases get missed when nobody moves in time.
That 90-day pre-suit period is also a negotiation window. A lot of Florida medical malpractice claims settle during pre-suit, without a lawsuit ever being filed, once the provider’s insurer sees the expert opinion and the damages. We file suit when the insurer refuses to pay what the case is actually worth.
Our office is in North Miami Beach, and we take Florida medical malpractice cases statewide. When you call (305) 694-2676, you’ll get a real attorney, not an intake screener, and most of the time that means me, either on that call or later the same day. Free consultation, and we can usually tell you in one phone call whether your case is worth investigating further. No fee unless we recover.
Why Hire a Miami Medical Malpractice Lawyer
Most medical malpractice callers have already been turned away by another firm, or never got past an intake screener at all. At Prosper Injury Attorneys, the person who evaluates your potential medical malpractice case is the attorney who would handle it, and that conversation usually happens the same call.
You will talk to the attorney, not an intake department
When you call my office about a potential medical malpractice case, you will usually have me on the phone during that first call. Worst case, if I am in a deposition or at trial, you will hear from me by about the next day. That is not how most firms handle medical malpractice intake, and it is worth understanding why.
Medical malpractice cases are expensive to investigate and most callers do not have one. So many firms route these calls through an intake department that applies screening criteria nobody ever explains to the caller. If your case does not clear the screen, the firm goes quiet. You wait a week for a callback that never comes, and you never learn whether the problem was your case or their criteria. If that has already happened to you, it does not necessarily mean you have no case. It means nobody with a law license has actually looked at it yet.
An honest answer about whether you have a case
I tell callers the truth on the phone, including the truth they do not want to hear. Three misconceptions come up over and over:
- Negligence without real damages is not a case. A doctor can make a genuine mistake, and if you recovered fully and quickly, there is usually nothing to pursue. The cost of proving a medical malpractice case means the harm has to be serious and lasting.
- Your theory of what went wrong is not a medical opinion. You may be right. But Florida law does not let me file based on what either of us believes happened. A qualified medical expert has to corroborate it, so my job at intake is to figure out whether the records could support that opinion.
- Bad customer service is not malpractice. Rudeness, long waits, and a doctor who would not listen make people call a lawyer, but the claim rises or falls on whether the care fell below the professional standard and caused real harm.
When I decline a case, I say so directly, and I encourage people to get a second opinion from another attorney. Malpractice lawyers evaluate risk differently, and a no from me is an assessment, not a verdict.
Finding the malpractice coverage other firms miss
Whether a doctor carries malpractice insurance is a threshold question in every case, and the public data on it is unreliable. Florida physician profiles maintained by the Department of Health sometimes say a doctor carries no malpractice coverage when the doctor actually does, and sometimes the reverse. I have seen both. Part of what makes the picture murky: Florida does not require physicians to carry malpractice insurance at all. Under Fla. Stat. § 458.320, a doctor can satisfy the state’s financial responsibility rules with an escrow account or a letter of credit instead of a policy, or claim an exemption and practice without any of it, so “no insurance” on a profile is the beginning of the coverage question, not the end of it. So my office verifies coverage directly instead of taking a database’s word for it. A case another firm declined after a thirty-second profile check can turn out to have real coverage behind it.
The limited investigative agreement for borderline cases
Some cases cannot be honestly accepted or declined on one phone call. For that narrow band, fewer than one in ten of the cases I take on at Prosper Injury Attorneys, I use a limited investigative agreement: a written engagement that authorizes my office to pull your medical records and have them evaluated before either of us commits to full representation. You get a real answer built on the actual records. I get to make the accept-or-decline decision on evidence instead of intuition. If the records tell us there is no case, that answer costs you nothing. The firm absorbs the investigation, and the client never comes out of pocket. Most firms make that decision on the phone. I would rather make it on the chart.
The chronology built before the records arrive
From the first substantive conversation, my office builds a provider-by-provider chronology of your care: every facility, every physician, every date, what was said, what was ordered, what changed. We build it before the records arrive, then test it against the records when they come in. The gaps between your memory and the chart are often where the case lives. The chronology also captures what the injury is doing to your life right now, work missed, functions lost, care you now need, because damages are proven forward from today, not just backward from the incident.
Florida Medical Malpractice Numbers to Know
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| Number | What it means |
|---|---|
| 2 years | Time to sue, running from when the malpractice was discovered or reasonably should have been, under Fla. Stat. § 95.11(5)(c) |
| 4 years | The outside limit (statute of repose) measured from the incident itself. Exceptions: fraud or concealment, and children’s claims, which this limit does not bar before the child’s eighth birthday |
| 90 days | The mandatory presuit investigation window after we serve a notice of intent, under Fla. Stat. § 766.106 |
| 10 business days | How fast a prospective defendant must produce your medical records once we invoke Fla. Stat. § 766.204. One narrow exception: an independent special hospital taxing district that owns two or more hospitals gets 20 days |
| 90 more days | The automatic statute-of-limitations extension we can secure by petition under Fla. Stat. § 766.104(2) |
| 2 to 3 weeks | What each specialty’s expert review typically takes once records are in hand. Our practice number, not a legal deadline |
| 20 to 50 days | Roughly how long it takes my office to give you a real viability answer when we have to request every record, depending on volume and complexity. Our practice number, not a legal deadline |
How Florida’s Presuit Process Actually Works (Chapter 766)
Florida requires a complete presuit investigation before a medical malpractice lawsuit can be filed, and how a firm runs that investigation decides most cases before a courtroom is ever involved. Here is how my office actually runs it. For the statutory mechanics section by section, see our Florida presuit requirements article.
The two-track records phase
Records are the whole case at this stage, so we request them on two tracks at once. Prospective defendants, the providers we may end up suing, get statutory presuit requests, which puts them on the short clock: 10 business days to produce your records. Every other provider in your treatment history gets conventional requests, which run slower and need follow-up. Where a hospital or practice offers a patient portal, we use your portal access to pull what is available immediately rather than waiting on a records department. The difference between a firm that works the records phase and one that just mails requests and waits is measured in months.
The expert review that decides the case
Before we can serve a notice of intent, Florida law requires a verified written medical expert opinion corroborating reasonable grounds to believe malpractice occurred, under Fla. Stat. § 766.203. This is where most medical malpractice cases are actually decided. My office contracts reviewing physicians by specialty, matched to the care at issue. That matching is not a preference: for a specialist defendant, Florida law requires the reviewing expert to practice in the same specialty and to have spent the three years before the care at issue in active clinical practice or teaching in it, under Fla. Stat. § 766.102. Each review typically takes two to three weeks once the expert has the records. When a case involves multiple specialties, we run the reviews in parallel when they are independent, and staggered when one opinion depends on another, for example when causation turns on what a second specialist says the imaging shows.
The honest part nobody puts on their website: many Florida medical malpractice cases die at this expert-review stage. If no qualified expert will corroborate the claim, there is no case to file, no matter how wrong the outcome feels. When that happens I tell the client exactly what the expert said and why it ends the case, because you are owed the reason, not just the result.
The notice of intent and the 90-day window
When an expert corroborates the claim, we serve a notice of intent to initiate litigation on each prospective defendant. That starts a 90-day window during which suit cannot be filed and the defense must investigate. It is not dead time. Presuit discovery runs during the window: documents move, unsworn statements get taken, and my office coordinates who says what and when. Some cases resolve inside the window, because a carrier that reads a corroborated file and a documented damages picture sometimes decides not to test it. Most do not resolve there, and I build every file through the window on the assumption that this one will not. By day 90 the case is angled toward the courthouse, not toward a stalled negotiation.
There is a third path that surfaces during this window: the defense can concede liability and offer voluntary binding arbitration on damages alone, under Fla. Stat. § 766.207. The offer comes with strings. Inside that optional arbitration track, non-economic damages are capped at $250,000 per claimant under Fla. Stat. § 766.207. Rejecting the defense’s arbitration offer carries its own consequence: if the case then goes to trial, non-economic damages are capped at $350,000 under Fla. Stat. § 766.209. Both caps exist only when an arbitration offer is on the table. Outside this framework, Florida has no cap on non-economic damages in medical malpractice cases. Whether to accept is one of the most consequential decisions in a Florida medical malpractice case, and it turns on the mix of economic and non-economic damages in your particular file. It is exactly why the damages picture has to be fully built before the window closes, not after.
The 90-day extension we file as a cushion
Whenever the statute of limitations will run within roughly a year of engagement, my office petitions the clerk of court for the automatic 90-day extension under Fla. Stat. § 766.104(2) as a matter of course. It costs a small filing fee, requires no court order, and buys the investigation room to be done right instead of fast. Filing it early, before it is needed, is cheap insurance against the calendar.
Types of Medical Malpractice Cases We Handle in Miami
Prosper Injury Attorneys handles medical malpractice claims of every kind, not just the ones listed here. These are the case types we see most often, and each has its own detailed page. If what happened to you is not on this list, that does not mean you do not have a case: call and ask.
- Surgical errors, including nerve damage caused by surgery, objects left in the body, amputation errors, gynecological surgical malpractice, hip replacement errors, and hernia mesh complications.
- Misdiagnosis and delayed diagnosis, the largest category we see, including missed cancers, infections, and cardiac events.
- Emergency room malpractice, where triage and discharge decisions go wrong under time pressure.
- Anesthesia errors, from dosing mistakes to airway management failures.
- Medication errors, wrong drug, wrong dose, wrong patient, or missed interactions.
- Hospital negligence, where the facility itself, not just an individual clinician, failed: nursing errors, monitoring failures, credentialing problems.
- Compartment syndrome, usually a failure-to-diagnose emergency measured in hours.
- Dental malpractice and ophthalmologist malpractice.
- Radiation burns from imaging and treatment overexposure.
Injuries to a baby or mother during labor and delivery are their own practice area: see birth injuries.
Do I Have a Medical Malpractice Case?
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You have a medical malpractice case in Florida if a healthcare provider fell below the professional standard of care, that failure caused your injury, and the injury produced serious, lasting damages. All three have to be there, plus a qualified expert willing to say so in writing. In plain terms:
Standard of care. The question is never whether the outcome was bad. It is whether a reasonably careful provider in the same specialty, facing the same situation, would have done something different. That standard comes from physicians, not lawyers, which is why the expert review controls everything. The same framework covers every licensed provider and facility, not just doctors: nurses, anesthesia providers, technicians, dentists, and hospitals themselves are each measured against the standard of care for their own profession, and we match the reviewing expert to the provider being evaluated.
Breach. The provider has to have actually departed from that standard. A known complication of a properly performed procedure is not a breach, even a devastating one. This single distinction disposes of more angry callers than any other: the consent form you signed lists complications precisely because they can happen without anyone being negligent.
Causation. This is the element that kills more cases than breach does. It is often easy to show a mistake and hard to show the mistake changed the outcome. If a diagnosis was missed but the disease was already past the point where earlier treatment would have mattered, there may be negligence and no case. My expert sequencing exists mostly to answer causation honestly before we are committed. A pre-existing condition does not disqualify you either. Defense lawyers reach for the illness you already had, but Florida law allows recovery when negligent care made an existing condition worse or accelerated it. The question is the difference between where the negligence left you and where competent care would have.
Damages. The harm must be serious and lasting enough to justify what a medical malpractice case costs to prove. Full recoveries and near misses, however frightening, generally are not cases.
For a deeper treatment of the definition, see what constitutes medical malpractice in Florida, and for the arguments defendants raise, see the most common defenses to medical malpractice cases.
How Much Is a Florida Medical Malpractice Case Worth?
The value of a Florida medical malpractice case is driven by three things: how permanent the harm is, how clean causation is, and how much coverage exists to pay the judgment. Everything else is detail.
Damages come in two categories. Economic damages are the countable losses: past and future medical care, lost earnings, and lost earning capacity. In catastrophic cases the future-care number, built out through life-care planning, usually dwarfs everything else. Whenever there is a life-care plan or a wage claim, I retain an economist to put defensible numbers on lifetime care costs and lost earning capacity. Non-economic damages compensate pain, suffering, and loss of enjoyment of life. Florida’s statutory caps on non-economic damages in medical malpractice cases were struck down as unconstitutional by the Florida Supreme Court, in Estate of McCall v. United States (2014) for wrongful death and North Broward Hospital District v. Kalitan (2017) for personal injury, so no cap applies today, although the Legislature revisits the question regularly.
I do not quote averages or dollar ranges, because they mislead in both directions. What I can usually do is tell you, once the records and expert reviews are in, what the realistic range for your case looks like and why. At Prosper Injury Attorneys, that conversation happens with the attorney who is actually valuing the file.
How Long Do I Have to Sue for Medical Malpractice in Florida?
You have 2 years to sue, and the clock usually starts when you discovered, or reasonably should have discovered, that malpractice may have occurred, not on the date of the procedure. There is also an outside limit: 4 years from the incident itself, called the statute of repose, with exceptions for fraud or concealment by the provider and for children: a claim brought for a child on or before the child’s eighth birthday is not barred by the 4-year limit. The statute is Fla. Stat. § 95.11(5)(c). The discovery rule, the repose exceptions, and the special rules for minors have enough moving parts that you should not do this arithmetic alone; the full breakdown is in our Florida medical malpractice statute of limitations article. If you call past the deadline, I will tell you that directly rather than take your records and go quiet.
What if I’m close to the deadline?
Call anyway, today. Florida law has a tool built for a medical malpractice case that is close to its two-year filing deadline: the automatic 90-day extension of the statute of limitations, secured by petition to the clerk of court under § 766.104(2), no court order required. We file it immediately when the calendar is tight. A case can be investigated properly on a short runway, but only if the runway is not wasted deciding whether to call.
How Long Does a Florida Medical Malpractice Case Take?
The honest answer is records-driven. If you arrive with your records in hand, I can usually get you a viability answer fastest, sometimes within days if the file is clean. If my office has to request everything, expect roughly 20 to 50 days to a real answer, depending on how many providers are involved and how complex the care is. Each expert review adds two to three weeks per specialty, run in parallel where possible. If the case is viable, the presuit notice starts the mandatory 90-day investigation window. That window is the dividing line between the two phases of a Florida medical malpractice case. The investigation phase, everything described above, runs weeks to months. If the case does not resolve in presuit, the litigation phase begins: filing suit, written discovery, depositions of the parties and the experts, and the mediation Florida law makes mandatory in medical negligence cases before trial. That phase runs months to a few years depending on the defendants and the court. What I do not do is let a file sit. Every one of those clocks is being worked, or you will know why.
What to Do If You Suspect Medical Malpractice
- Get your medical records now, or at minimum set up portal access with every provider involved. Records you already hold can cut weeks off the investigation.
- Write the chronology while it is fresh: every provider, every date, what you were told, what you noticed. Your memory is evidence, and it degrades.
- Keep treating. Do not stop care to make a point or out of distrust; untreated gaps hurt both your health and your damages case.
- Do not post about it, and do not confront the provider in writing beyond requesting your records. Angry messages become defense exhibits.
- Mind the clock. The 2-year period runs from discovery, and building a presuit case takes months. Late calls force compressed investigations.
- Call before deciding you do not have a case: (305) 694-2676. The evaluation is free, you will talk to the attorney, and if the answer is no, you will hear the reason. Before a consultation, our guide to meeting a medical malpractice lawyer covers what to bring.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is a bad medical outcome the same as malpractice?
No. Medicine has known complications that occur without anyone being negligent, and Florida law compensates negligence, not bad luck. The test is whether a reasonably careful provider in the same specialty would have done something different, and whether that difference caused the harm. A qualified medical expert has to corroborate both in writing before a case can even be filed.
What does it cost to hire a medical malpractice lawyer?
Nothing up front. We work on contingency: the fee is a percentage of the recovery, and if there is no recovery there is no fee. Case costs, records, expert reviews, filing fees, are advanced by the firm and reimbursed from the recovery. If the investigation ends the case, or there is no recovery, you owe nothing, including for the costs we advanced. You will see the fee agreement in writing before anything starts, and I will walk you through it.
Can I sue the hospital for a doctor’s mistake?
Sometimes. Many physicians working inside Florida hospitals, especially in emergency rooms, are independent contractors rather than employees, which can put the doctor’s own coverage, not the hospital’s, on the hook. The hospital can still be directly liable for its own failures: nursing errors, monitoring, credentialing. Naming the right defendants is a presuit decision with permanent consequences, and it is one of the first things we get right. More on our hospital negligence page.
I signed a consent form. Can I still sue?
Usually yes, if there was negligence. A consent form covers the disclosed risks of properly performed care. It does not excuse carelessness, and it is not a waiver of your right to competent treatment. Defendants raise consent forms constantly; they end far fewer cases than people fear. For how consent actually works in Florida, see implied versus express consent.
How long do I have to file?
Two years, generally from when you discovered or should have discovered the malpractice, with a 4-year outside limit from the incident. The main exceptions: fraud or concealment by the provider, and claims for young children, which the 4-year limit does not bar before the child’s eighth birthday. The safe move is to treat the earliest possible date as your deadline and call well before it.
Will my case settle without a lawsuit?
It might. Florida’s mandatory presuit window is a real negotiation period, and a corroborated expert opinion attached to a documented damages picture sometimes settles a case in those 90 days. Sometimes the resolution takes a different form: the defense admits fault and offers binding arbitration on the damages alone. That offer triggers caps on part of the recovery and has consequences whether you take it or turn it down, so it is a decision we make together and carefully. Most cases that resolve well do so because they were built to be filed, so that is how we build every one of them.
Who can bring a wrongful death case for medical malpractice in Florida?
The rules are narrower than most families expect. The lawsuit itself is filed by one person, the personal representative of the estate, who recovers on behalf of everyone eligible. A surviving spouse and children under 25 can recover full damages, including pain and suffering, and the estate can recover economic losses such as medical and funeral expenses. The combined effect of Fla. Stat. § 768.21(8) and the statute’s survivor rules is that adult children (age 25 or older) cannot recover pain-and-suffering damages in a medical negligence death, and neither can parents of an adult child. These rules have exceptions, and the Legislature debates changing them nearly every year, so call before assuming either way.
Call Miami Medical Malpractice Lawyer Prosper Shaked
If you believe a medical provider hurt you or someone you love, call (305) 694-2676. You will talk to me, usually on that first call, and you will get a straight answer: yes, no, or exactly what it will take to find out. At Prosper Injury Attorneys, we have recovered millions of dollars for medical malpractice clients, including multiple seven-figure recoveries in catastrophic injury cases. The consultation is free, and there is no fee unless we recover for you.