Miami Car Accident Lawyer — Felicetti Law Firm
If you were hurt in a crash in Miami-Dade, your lawsuit is a Miami-Dade case from the first day — filed here, heard here, and tried in front of a jury drawn from this county. This page explains where that happens, what the roads around you have to do with it, and the two Florida rules that decide more cases than anything else.
Where a Miami crash claim is actually filed
Injury claims worth more than $50,000 go to the Circuit Civil division of the Eleventh Judicial Circuit of Florida, which covers Miami-Dade County. Circuit Civil is the division that handles tort actions — car crashes, premises claims, products liability and malpractice.
Worth knowing: Miami-Dade circuit civil cases are no longer heard at the historic Dade County Courthouse on West Flagler Street. Civil moved to the Osvaldo N. Soto Miami-Dade Justice Center, 20 NW 1st Avenue. A surprising number of law firm websites still name the old building.
The roads behind most of the calls we take
The Golden Glades Interchange in north Miami-Dade is where I-95, the Palmetto Expressway, Florida’s Turnpike, SR 9 and US 441 all meet. FDOT puts more than 400,000 vehicles a day through it and expects that to climb by half again by 2040. Five facilities merging in one place produces exactly the weaving, last-second lane changes and rear-end chains that fill our intake calls.
Away from the expressways, the county’s own Vision Zero crash data points at surface intersections: NW 17th Avenue at NW 127th Street and SW 88th Street at SW 112th Avenue among the worst for fatal and serious-injury crashes, with Bird Road at SW 87th and SW 97th Avenues repeatedly named in analyses of South Florida collision reports.
Across Miami-Dade in 2025 there were roughly 55,610 crashes, 271 deaths and more than 26,000 injuries. Pedestrians and cyclists made up about a third of the deaths. The county has identified 100 high-crash sites, 19 of them inside City of Miami limits.
Freight, cruise traffic and the trucks nobody counts
Miami International is the busiest freight airport in the United States, moving close to 3.5 million tons of cargo in 2025. PortMiami handled over 1.1 million TEUs the same year. Every ton of that arrives or leaves behind a truck, and those trucks share the Dolphin, the Palmetto and surface streets with ordinary commuters. A collision with a commercial vehicle is a different case from a two-car crash: there is a carrier, an insurer with far higher limits, driver logs, and maintenance records that start being overwritten if nobody asks for them early.
The deadline changed in 2023, and plenty of people still have it wrong
Until March 2023 Florida allowed four years to bring a negligence claim. House Bill 837 cut it to two years. We still take calls from people working off the old number, or off advice a relative gave them years ago. If you were hurt after 24 March 2023, work to two years and treat it as hard.
The fault rule changed on the same day. Florida had been a pure comparative state, where partial blame merely reduced what you recovered. It is now modified comparative negligence, and being found more than half responsible ends the claim entirely. At exactly fifty percent you still recover half your damages. Medical malpractice was carved out and still follows the older rule.
Ryder Trauma and your medical record
Serious Miami crashes tend to end at the Ryder Trauma Center at Jackson Memorial Hospital, a Level I centre — though not the county’s only one. What matters for your claim is that the trauma record created in those first hours becomes the backbone of it. Gaps between the crash and treatment, or between discharge and follow-up, are the first thing a defence adjuster looks for. If you are hurting, keep going to appointments, and say plainly what hurts each time.
Speak to the Felicetti Law Firm
Consultations are free and there is no fee unless we recover money for you. Call (800) 333-1988 at any hour, or contact us online. Se habla español. You can read some of the firm’s past results on our results page.
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Other Felicetti Law Firm areas: Fort Lauderdale · West Palm Beach · Tampa · Atlanta
Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. This page is general information about Florida law, not legal advice, and does not create an attorney-client relationship. Deadlines and fault rules have exceptions; only a review of your own facts can tell you which apply. Cases are handled by attorneys licensed in the local jurisdiction.