A business that invites you in owes you more than a product. Florida law requires property owners to take reasonable steps to protect lawful visitors from foreseeable criminal acts. When a bar, a gas station, or an apartment complex ignores a danger it knew about and someone gets hurt, the owner can be held responsible in civil court. Even if the attacker is never caught.
Negligent security is premises liability applied to violence: the owner who knew crime was coming to the property, did nothing reasonable to stop it, and now answers for the injury in civil court. That's the definition. The full explainer, including how foreseeability works and what the criminal case does and doesn't have to do with yours, is in our post on what negligent security means in Florida.
The attacker never being arrested does not end the civil case. The criminal case is the State of Florida against the person who did it, and it stalls whenever the police can't identify a suspect. The civil case is yours, and it targets the owner, not the attacker. You don't need an arrest. You don't need a conviction. You don't even need to know who did it.
Nobody plans to read a page like this. If you're here, something has probably already happened, at a place you never thought twice about. So this page is about how we handle these cases: where they happen, what Florida law now requires of property owners, what a claim can recover, and why the investigation has to start early. If the violence happened at a bar or club, we also wrote a companion piece on suing a nightclub or bar after a shooting. And these cases do something beyond compensating one family. They push businesses to fix the conditions that got someone hurt: the complex that finally repairs the gate, the club that finally staffs the door.
The failures repeat. Broken lighting. Cameras that don't record. Gates that don't close. An entrance nobody staffs, at a property where the owner already knew about prior incidents and did nothing. These are the places where that pattern turns into an injury.
Florida rewrote much of this area in 2023 with House Bill 837. The duty survives, but the rules around it changed, and they now differ by property type. These are the ones that shape every case.
Compensation is built category by category, from medical records, employment records, and the testimony of the people who know what the injury took from you. Every case is different, and no result can be promised. These are the categories Florida law recognizes. Assembling the proof for each one is our work, not yours; yours is treatment and recovery.
Surveillance footage gets overwritten. At most properties the system records over itself in days or weeks, and the video of the incident, the empty guard post, and the propped-open gate goes with it. Once it's gone, no lawsuit gets it back.
So the first days follow a checklist of our own. The preservation letter goes out before the footage cycles. A public-records request goes in for the prior 911 calls to that address, stretching back years, because that call log is how an owner's notice gets proven. We pull the crime data for the parcel and the blocks around it. We photograph the property at the same hour the attack happened, since a parking lot at noon says nothing about that lot at 1 a.m. And the incident reports, security logs, and staffing schedules get demanded before they're purged or "lost." Owners don't volunteer any of it.
And witnesses scatter. The bartender quits. The guard moves to another site. The neighbor who saw the gate broken for months moves out. Memories fade fastest in the first weeks, which is exactly when nobody in a grieving family feels like calling a lawyer. We understand that. It's also why we say this plainly: the two-year deadline is the outside limit, not the plan. The case that gets investigated in week one is a different case than the one that starts in year two.
Negligent security is part of our personal injury practice, handled the same way: on contingency, prepared for trial from day one, with no fee unless we recover for you.
"Outstanding job handling my family's case with professionalism and exceptional attention to detail."
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"Attention to detail was impeccable, ensuring every aspect of my case was thoroughly reviewed and addressed."
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You've seen what has to happen in the next few weeks: preserve the video, demand the records, document the property. That is work we already know how to do. If this happened to you or someone you love, call our office and tell us what happened. We will tell you what we think. The consultation is free, and there is no fee unless we recover for you.
954-998-4567