What can I do in Florida if a dog bites me?

Dog bite law in the state of Florida is very similar to any other kind of injury law with one notable exception, and that is strict liability. Strict liability is a legal term that means just by the occurrence of the dog biting then the owner and the dog themselves are liable. Strict liability comes into play if either my client, the injured party, is in a public place, and the dog bites my client, or in a private place with permission and receives the dog bite.

An example of a public place that we all know of is the sidewalk of a county road. A private place would be perhaps your neighbor’s backyard with their permission. If we do not have the strict liability, it’s not the end of the world. We just then revert back to traditional negligence and proving all of those different aspects of a negligence case. That all may sound complicated because it is and we don’t want our clients to run through that in evaluation, to worry about that investigation, call us and let us do all that work.