Practice Area
Larmoyeux & Bone has been successfully recovering compensation and protecting the financial future of dog bite accident victims in West Palm Beach for decades.
Our trial lawyers have over 70 years of combined experience winning millions of dollars for victims of personal injury accidents, just like you.
We devote 100% of our practice to helping victims injured due to the negligent, reckless, and intentional actions of others. Here’s a sample of the most common types of dog bite accident claims that we routinely handle:
Accidents and injuries occur in the blink of an eye, and victims often aren’t even aware of the cause and that they are, in fact, victims with a viable personal injury claim.
They may not know what caused the accident and their injuries, but they know they need help getting medical treatment, dealing with insurance companies, and obtaining compensation for their injuries and medical bills.
If you have any doubt whether you are a victim with a viable personal injury claim, don’t decide on your own or let insurance companies convince you that you don’t have a claim and thus don’t need a lawyer.
Don’t accidentally forfeit compensation for your injuries to which you and your family are legally entitled and desperately need.
If in doubt, call us and we will:
When you call our accident investigators will help determine if you have a case.
We will begin the investigation, negotiation, mediation, or lawsuit.
Most cases are settled before going to trial. If yours isn’t, we will fight your case in court.
Not Sure If You Have A Claim? If In Doubt, Contact Us
Most dogs offer companionship, security, and fun. However, an out-of-control, untrained dog is an entirely different matter.
Statistically, dog bite accidents occur far more frequently than the average dog owner would imagine. With the capacity to attack at any given moment, Florida residents must recognize the potential dangers of owning and interacting with any dog.
According to research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 4.5 million dog bites occur annually in the United States. West Palm Beach, FL, is a hub for dogs. With beautiful beaches and a warm climate, dogs seem to be the perfect Florida pet. While it is something that no dog owner likes to think about, dog bite attacks are much more common than one would imagine.
Approximately 800,000 Americans must seek medical care to treat wounds from a dog attack yearly, half of which are children. Thirty percent of dog bites involving children in Florida occur with either a neighbor’s or a family’s dog.
Due to the unpredictable nature of these animals, parents and dog owners must exercise caution when it comes to dog bite accidents. If you or someone you love is a dog bite victim in Florida, contact us for a free case evaluation.
Dog bite accident cases are a matter of strict liability. If a dog attacks and injures someone, the owner is responsible, whether they knew the dog was dangerous. If you have been attacked by a dog or other animal, contact us immediately.
The sooner you call, the sooner we can track down the owner and get you the compensation you deserve. We believe that owners of dogs who attack must be held liable for the damages they cause to innocent individuals. Our dog bite accident lawyers are fully prepared to fight for your fair settlement.
While each personal injury case is unique, most cases typically involve the following basic steps.
Step 1: Determine if there’s a viable claim—after accepting the case, the personal injury lawyer will perform an initial investigation into the plaintiff’s injury to determine whether the facts and circumstances genuinely support a claim for damages.
Step 2: Demand letter—once a good-faith basis for a personal injury claim has been established, plaintiff’s lawyer sends a demand letter notifying the defendant’s insurance company of the claim, including a demand for a specified dollar amount to resolve the matter.
Step 3: Response and negotiation—upon receiving the demand letter, the insurance company will respond in one of three ways: (1) agree with the demand letter and promptly settle, (2) make a counteroffer and negotiate for an amount less than specified in the demand letter, or (3) deny the claim outright and refuse to pay any amount. Negotiating a settlement is the most common response, and most cases are resolved this way.
Step 4: Filing a lawsuit—if the parties can’t reach a settlement, the plaintiff’s lawyer files a lawsuit. During the pre-trial phase, the parties obtain evidence from each other, witnesses, and third parties in a process called “discovery.” The pre-trial phase can take several months or even years.
Step 5: Mediation—nearly all personal injury cases in Florida will be ordered to mediation by the court. Mediation is the process in which a neutral mediator facilitates discussion between the parties in an effort to resolve the case before going to trial. The parties can settle the case at any time, even after a lawsuit has been filed.
Step 6: Trial—if the parties can’t reach a settlement during mediation, the case goes to trial where a jury will generally determine liability and damage awards, if any.
Step 7: Appeal—a party who is unhappy with the final verdict can appeal, but there must be a legal basis for doing so, i.e., some material error that prevented a fair trial. Simply being unhappy with the outcome isn’t sufficient for an appeal.
The laws governing personal injury cases in Florida are extremely complex and highly specialized. To ensure that your legal rights to full and fair compensation are adequately protected, you must have the assistance of an experienced local personal injury lawyer, especially for cases involving particularly complex legal issues such as wrongful death, medical malpractice, and catastrophic injuries.
There are very strict and complicated filing deadlines that must be followed, or your case will not even be allowed to proceed, regardless of the actual merits of your case. Similarly, for many types of personal injury claims, there are numerous legal technicalities and complexities in place that make successfully prosecuting a personal injury claim virtually impossible for anyone other than a highly experienced and knowledgeable personal injury lawyer.
Various business and insurance interests have lobbied lawmakers aggressively over the years to get legislation enacted that often makes it difficult to hold the responsible parties and their insurance companies accountable for victims’ injuries and property damage they cause. This is especially true when victims attempt to take on the at-fault parties and their insurance companies by themselves.
Fortunately, our personal injury lawyers have the experience, knowledge, and resources to successfully navigate the complexities of Florida’s personal injury laws as well as the insurance claims process in order to obtain full and fair compensation for our clients.
We’ll provide an objective knowledge-driven, experience-based professional assessment of the viability of your personal injury claim at no cost to you. You have absolutely nothing to lose and potentially an awful lot to gain by calling us today.
We’ll give you straight, simple answers to all your questions, including medical payment coverage, personal injuries, property damage, and lost income, as well as assist you with completing necessary paperwork and guide you every step of the way through the legal and insurance claims processes.
And we do so with integrity, compassion, and understanding.
Florida Personal Injury Law Is Complex
The laws governing personal injury cases in Florida are extremely complex and highly specialized. To ensure that your legal rights to full and fair compensation are adequately protected, you must have the assistance of an experienced local personal injury lawyer, especially for cases involving particularly complex legal issues such as wrongful death, medical malpractice, and catastrophic injuries.
There are very strict and complicated filing deadlines that must be followed, or your case will not even be allowed to proceed, regardless of the actual merits of your case. Similarly, for many types of personal injury claims, there are numerous legal technicalities and complexities in place that make successfully prosecuting a personal injury claim virtually impossible for anyone other than a highly experienced and knowledgeable personal injury lawyer.
Various business and insurance interests have lobbied lawmakers aggressively over the years to get legislation enacted that often makes it difficult to hold the responsible parties and their insurance companies accountable for victims’ injuries and property damage they cause. This is especially true when victims attempt to take on the at-fault parties and their insurance companies by themselves.
Fortunately, our personal injury lawyers have the experience, knowledge, and resources to successfully navigate the complexities of Florida’s personal injury laws as well as the insurance claims process in order to obtain full and fair compensation for our clients.
Contact us today for a no-cost initial consultation and preliminary case review. Remember, time is not on your side. Each day you delay in seeking legal help is one day closer to you being time barred from ever bringing a case for your injuries.
Chris Larmoyeux and Bill Bone have devoted their over 70 years of combined legal experience to helping personal injury accident victims like you.
They are among the 1% of all lawyers who are Board Certified in Civil Trial Law by The Florida Bar, have been awarded the highest possible rating for Legal Ability and General Ethical Standards by Martindale-Hubbell—the preeminent independent lawyer rating service, and consistently earn annual inclusion in the entirely peer-review lawyer rating service Best Lawyers. And, yes, they’ve won numerous $1 million+ recoveries for victims and their families.
Chris Larmoyeux and Bill Bone are trial lawyers.
Not all personal injury lawyers are trial lawyers. Many personal injury lawyers have never taken a case to trial. There’s an extremely important distinction between lawyers who are ready, willing, and able to go to trial and those who won’t and settle 100% of their cases.
The ability and willingness to take on insurance companies at trial is a critical consideration when choosing a top personal injury lawyer, especially when very serious or catastrophic injuries are involved. When facing a lawyer who will actually litigate the case in court if necessary, insurance companies know that if their pretrial settlement offer is unreasonably low they risk having a jury award a much higher amount at trial. This helps keep settlement offers, for the most part, fair and reasonable.
In contrast, insurance companies are more willing to extend lowball settlement offers to those lawyers who will never go to trial (and there are many of them), and insurance companies know exactly who they are. Trials are expensive, time-consuming, and require high-caliber litigation skills for victory. Many lawyers lack the financial resources, patience, and/or legal ability to take insurance companies to court and win, so they make a career out of settling every single one of their cases.
But is this the type of personal injury lawyer you want and need representing you? Think about it—even if the final settlement offer is objectively and insultingly low, what’s the lawyer going to do? He or she may negotiate a slight increase but still way below full and fair value. Without the legitimate threat of going to trial, the insurance company knows that eventually the offer will be accepted.
This makes the insurance company happy because it saves money, and it makes the lawyer happy because he or she gets a portion of the settlement. It’ll likely even make the injured client happy because a settlement amount is received, but unbeknownst to the client, it’s likely a lot less than if he or she had a personal injury lawyer ready, willing, and able to go to trial.
Chris Larmoyeux and Bill Bone are trial lawyers. They are both experienced litigators who are ready, willing, and able to go to trial to fight for full and fair compensation for their clients.
Don’t Take On Insurance Companies By Yourself
To receive full and fair compensation for your injuries and property damage, you need an experienced personal injury lawyer on your side.
The truth is the likelihood of you receiving full and fair compensation is relatively low if you decide to take on the insurance companies by yourself. There is a maze of incredibly complex legal rules and insurance claims procedures in place that make it very difficult for you to obtain everything to which you are entitled under the law on your own.
Insurance companies are in the business of making as much profit as they can. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but they do this by paying out as little as possible to accident victims and their families. That’s why they sometimes aggressively fight even obviously legitimate and deserving claims. This is true for both victims’ own insurance company as well as those of the at-fault party or parties involved in the accident.
Victims who don’t have an experienced personal injury lawyer representing them are at a tremendous disadvantage. They generally don’t know how to realistically value their claim, how to maximize the amount of any settlement offer, and how best to prove their case. Insurance companies and their lawyers take advantage of this inexperience and lack of knowledge to deny victims’ claim outright or pay a mere fraction of what they would have paid if an experienced personal injury lawyer were representing the victims.
Unfortunately, some insurance companies are notorious for establishing claims procedures and institutional mechanisms that make it as difficult as possible for victims to obtain fair compensation. They have been known to deliberately make the claims process as complex and frustrating as they can in the hopes that victims will feel overwhelmed, give up, and accept lowball settlement offers. This strategy is highly effective with respect to victims who don’t have an experienced personal injury lawyer on their side.
To make the situation even worse, victims are faced with this seemingly impossible task at a time when they are likely at their most vulnerable and desperate point in their life. Even under the best of circumstances, it is virtually impossible for the average person alone to successfully battle insurance companies and their army of lawyers and paid expert witnesses. No matter how obviously deserving of compensation a victim may be, no insurance company is going to simply provide a fair and reasonable settlement offer to the victim merely because he or she deserves it.
Don’t let the insurance companies decide what your claim is worth. And don’t let them bully you into giving up valuable rights or accepting less than what you are entitled to under the law.
Contact us today for a free initial consultation and case evaluation. We have the experience, knowledge, and resources to successfully take on the insurance companies for you.
Yes! We’re here for you 24/7.
Our lawyers personally handle every case they agree to take and treat every client with compassion and understanding. We don’t hand victims off to junior associates or recent law school grads once victims have entrusted their claim and hopes for the future to them.
We understand the enormous trust clients place in them and would never do anything to violate the sanctity of that trust.
We know that the aftermath of a personal injury accident is an incredibly traumatic and stressful time for you. You may be suffering from agonizing, potentially life-threatening and life-altering physical, mental, and emotional injuries; facing the prospect of financial ruin; and experiencing a catastrophic disruption to your way of life.
Your focus should be on your physical, mental, and emotional recovery, not dealing with medical bills and trying to navigate the complex maze of the insurance claims process and fighting for compensation from the at-fault party.
Thankfully, you don’t have to. You focus on healing. We’ll do all the work. We handle the coordination of your medical bills, navigate the insurance claims process, and fight for the compensation you deserve. We keep you updated and informed through the entire process, ensure you have all the information you need to make the necessary decisions, and advise you of any changes or new developments in your case.
We firmly believe that consistent and timely communication with you is an essential part of our representation and critical for your peace of mind.
If You Don’t Need a Lawyer, We’ll Tell You. if We Can Help, We’ll Get Started on Your Claim Immediately.
There are so many West Palm Beach dog bite accident lawyers that it’s nearly impossible for the average person to identify and choose one truly among the area’s top practitioners. It’s true—in fact, there are far too many … but it’s equally valid that there aren’t enough really good ones. So how do you identify and choose one of the really good ones?
Each year 1,000 people in the U.S. are sent to the emergency room to treat dog bite wounds. While some dog bite attacks are far more serious than others, any dog bite can potentially carry life-threatening diseases.
Dogs can carry infections within their saliva, passing these diseases to the dog bite victim. As a result, Florida residents must understand what to do in a compromising situation with a dangerous dog.
If you have been bitten by a dog or other animal, these steps will help:
While each dog bite attack varies, accident victims are warned to act fast, as the time it takes to receive medical care can significantly impact the potential to eliminate dog bite disease or illness.
A medical professional can assess the wounds and screen the victim for dog bite diseases imperceptible to an untrained eye.
Following medical attention, dog bite accident victims must consult with a Florida dog bite lawyer to understand what legal options are available.
Larmoyeux & Bone provides legal services in Palm Beach County Florida including the towns and cities of Boca Raton, Belle Glade, Boynton Beach, Delray Beach, Greenacres, Hypoluxo, Juno Beach, Jupiter, Lantana, Lake Park, Lake Worth, Loxahatchee, Palm Beach Gardens, Riviera Beach, Royal Palm Beach, Tequesta, West Palm Beach, and Wellington.
