Florida Personal Injury Lawyer Blog

Business owners have a legal duty to provide safe premises for their patrons and guests. This includes a duty to protect them against any harm caused by the criminal acts of third parties when those criminal acts are foreseeable. Such criminal acts are foreseeable when their occurrence can reasonably be expected under the circumstances. Such was the case in the following Florida premises liability case.

One evening in December at about 9:00 p.m., a young paralegal and two of the partners at the law firm where she was employed had worked late at the office and were concluding a late meal at a restaurant in Riviera Beach, Florida, prior to departing for home. They had all come in separate cars. While the two attorneys had parked toward the front of the restaurant, the victim in this case had parked on the east side of the restaurant as there were no other spaces left. The restaurant faces south and is near I-95.

After consuming their meal, one of the attorneys and the paralegal walked out of the front of the restaurant and went to their cars while the other attorney was paying the bill.

As the paralegal pulled out and swung around the back of the restaurant to go toward the only available exit way, two young black males walked up to her vehicle. One stood in front of her vehicle to prevent her from pulling forward and the other walked up to her window. At that point, the individual that walked up to her window shot through her drive side window, striking her in the neck area as the bullet entered the left portion of her neck and lodged in her right shoulder area. The victim was able to crawl out of her car and get back to the front door of the restaurant as the suspects fled. At the front door of the restaurant, she collapsed into the arms of the second attorney with blood spurting out of her neck and onto the floor. The attorney provided a tourniquet pressure on her neck but the victim thought she was going to die as an artery had been hit and she was suffering substantial loss of blood. Fortunately, paramedics arrived in time and took her to St. Mary’s Hospital and she survived this horrible ordeal.

After recuperating, the victim in this Florida premises liability case contacted Attorney Richard D. Schuler who realized that the restaurant was responsible for this injury as a result of their failure to provide adequate security in the restaurant parking lot premises. The restaurant was aware, prior to the date of this incident, that there already had been three armed robberies over a three year period prior to this incident, along with other
multiple assorted crimes including purse snatching, car thefts, tearing up the inside of the restaurant, and other crimes too numerous to mention. In spite of this notice proving foreseeability of this crime, the restaurant failed to take any security measures whatsoever.

Continue reading " Young Paralegal Shot in Restaurant Parking Lot in Riviera Beach, Florida " »

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Posted In: Premises Liability Litigation

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Imagine being on vacation with your family and receiving a phone call from one of your neighbors telling you that a sign had been posted on your home and that your home was in foreclosure. What an upset!

Our clients in this case believed that their properties (including two extra lots) were paid in full and were free and clear of any mortgages. And in fact, they were.

For some reason, the bank that had held the mortgages for all three properties made an error and retained a law firm to file a foreclosure complaint against our clients on one of the vacant lots that they owned which was adjacent to the lot with their homestead. The only improvement on this adjacent lot was a storage shed.

After the County Clerk issued a Certificate of Title to the bank, another law firm was hired to proceed with an eviction on this adjacent lot. Unfortunately, due to errors in the legal documents, when the County Sheriff executed the Writ of Possession, they erroneously executed it on the clients’ homestead instead of the vacant lot. When the victims telephoned the Sheriff’s Office they were told that nothing could be done to stop this eviction.

The locks on the victims’ home were changed and the door to their residence was padlocked. All of their personal possessions, furnishings and property were removed from their home by strangers and placed on the lawn of their residence for all their neighbors to see. In fact, the neighbors were told that they could take whatever they wanted, and some did. Some took things to safekeep them for the victims and returned them later. Some of the items were never returned. One of the items found in the street was the victims’ marriage certificate. All of this resulted in damage to furnishings, destruction and/or theft of property and loss of irreplaceable documents and personal possessions collected during the victims’ lifetime.

The victims had to retain an attorney just to be able to get back into their home, and they still were not able to return to their home for approximately three months. When they did, they found items still outside in the yard, holes in the walls of their home where, rather than carefully removing items, they had been torn off the wall. There were scratches and gouges on many of the walls from the furniture being removed. Many of their possessions, along with the food items in the kitchen, were tossed into sheets or tablecloths, or put in garbage bags and dragged out of the home. Some of their possessions had been placed in a storage area and had gotten wet and ruined.

Continue reading " Victims’ Lifelong Possessions Destroyed in Highlands County, Florida When Property Erroneously Placed in Foreclosure by Bank " »

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Are you one of the countless Floridians who have been surprised by receiving a traffic ticket and you had no idea that you had done anything wrong? Don’t feel alone, there are 22 municipalities in the State of Florida that are currently using red light cameras/speed vans to issue tickets to vehicles that violate the traffic law. The ultimate problem is that these cities have to pass a law to allow this type of enforcement activity to occur. The ordinances the cities have passed shifts the presumption of innocence on to the vehicle owner so that they are forced to disprove their guilt. Our constitution’s guarantee of due process and being able to rely on “innocent until proven guilty” is no longer the case in this set of circumstances.

For example, if someone used your car for the day and ran a red light, you would receive the ticket (as the vehicle owner). From there, you would have to prove to the city that the person that borrowed your car was driving it and did not have your permission.

The law firm of Schuler, Halvorson and Weisser, P.A. is filing class action suits in each of these jurisdictions seeking that the court declare the ordinances unconstitutional and refunding all ticket monies collected to those who were cited. We feel strongly that this course of conduct is in direct violation of the U. S. Constitution, the Constitution of the State of Florida and statutory law and our experienced and dedicated attorneys are willing to do what it takes to assure that each and every individual’s rights are protected.

If you or someone you know has received one of these traffic tickets as outlined above, please do not hesitate to contact our office and join the class action lawsuits that are being filed. The firm of Schuler, Halvorson and Weisser, P.A. will not represent you in your direct challenge of the citation. We cannot show up in municipal court for you on your traffic charge, nor can we advise you on how to proceed if you have not yet paid the citation. However, our firm will represent you in a class action lawsuit challenging the actual ordinance itself and thereby attempting to change these unconstitutional methods currently being utilized by so many Florida municipalities, and thereby assuring fair and proper business practices in the future in this regard in our state.

At Schuler, Halvorson and Weisser, P.A., there is no fee to you unless we make a recovery for you. We anticipate that we may be able to get back the money you paid for the ticket, and perhaps more, and we have asked that these unconstitional activities by these municipalities be stopped.

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Posted In: Traffic Ticket Cases

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Rear-end collisions are one of the most common types of collisions. According to statistics, there were 1.8 million of them in 2006, or approximately 29% of all injury crashes in the United States. These rear-end crashes accounted for more than 2,000 deaths and 800,000 injuries.

As in most rear-end collisions, the victim in this Florida automobile accident case had no idea another driver was about to carelessly plow into the rear of her vehicle as she was attempting to make a right turn into the church parking lot one Saturday. The other driver was found to be 100% at fault in this incident and fortunately, the victim was wearing her seatbelt when the accident occurred. Unfortunately for our victim, she had already been involved in a prior automobile accident wherein she sustained a significant neck injury (including surgery), which was seriously aggravated due to this accident. In fact, he victim’s medical bills in this case totaled over $97,000.00.

The victim was taken via ambulance to the emergency room at Bethesda Memorial Hospital in Boynton Beach, Florida. She complained of pain in the neck and back and was concerned about the effect of the accident on her prior injuries/neck surgery. Eventually, after undergoing numerous tests and diagnostic studies, she was released with instructions to follow up with a physician.

Subsequently, the victim in this case came under the care of an orthopedic surgeon who found her neck and back in a very fragile condition and that she was a patient in severe pain with constant soreness and stiffness. She underwent MRI’s of the lumbar, cervical and thoracic spine which revealed two herniations of the neck at C3-4 and C4-5 levels, a large central and right paracentral disc herniation with effacement of the ventral spinal cord at the C4-6 level and a C6-7 disc bulge and central herniation with effacement of the ventral spinal cord. In addition, a lumbar spine MRI revealed two disc bulges at the L2-3 and L5-S1 levels. Finally, the thoracic MRI revealed that the victim is now suffering from a T1-2 broad based posterior herniation, a T2-3 posterior herniation with cord displacement and possible cord flattening and a T6-7 right-sided disc herniation.

The orthopedic surgeon referred the victim to a pain management specialist, who began a process of lumbar facet injections under fluoroscopic guidance.

This collision victim contacted the offices of Schuler, Halvorson & Weisser, P.A. and requested that Attorney Jason D. Weisser assist her in pursuing a claim against the at fault driver in this matter. Since the at fault driver’s insurance coverage was not even enough to pay this victim’s medical expenses, Mr. Weisser also pursued a claim against the underinsured motorist carrier and was successful in obtaining a settlement of several hundred thousand dollars from these two insurers without the necessity of a trial to help in this client’s recovery and future medical expenses.

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Posted In: Automobile Accidents

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