What Do I Do if I am Hit by A Drunk Driver in Bonita Springs Florida?

By David B. Pittman, Esq. — Founder, Pittman Law Firm, P.L. | Last updated May 12, 2026

Florida does not require drivers to carry bodily injury liability coverage. That single fact shapes nearly every drunk-driver case we handle out of our Windsor Place office on Bonita Beach Road. A driver who blows through a red light on Old 41 at 11 p.m. and puts someone in Lee Memorial may be carrying nothing beyond the state-minimum $10,000 in property damage and PIP. The family has a hospital bill, a totaled car, and a Lee County sheriff’s case number, and no one has explained what options are actually on the table.

The criminal side of a DUI case and the civil side are two different rivers. The State of Florida handles the criminal charge. We handle getting you paid for what happened to your body, your car, your missed work, and the months that come after. Both run at the same time, and your civil case does not have to wait for the State to finish.

What Florida law actually says about a drunk-driving crash

A few statutes do most of the heavy lifting in these cases. I will give you the section numbers so you can find them yourself, and then I will tell you what they actually mean.

• §768.81, Florida Statutes — modified comparative negligence. Florida changed this rule in 2023. If a jury decides you were more than 50 percent at fault for your own crash, you collect nothing. If you were 30 percent at fault, your recovery is reduced by 30 percent. In a drunk-driver case the impaired driver almost always carries the lion’s share of the blame, but the defense will still hunt for any fault to push onto you. That is one reason we move fast on evidence.
• §95.11(4)(a), Florida Statutes — statute of limitations. For a negligence claim, the 2023 reform cut the window from four years down to two years. Miss it, and the case is dead, no matter how badly hurt you are. If your crash was on a Saturday night in Bonita Springs, the clock started Sunday morning.
• §627.736, Florida Statutes — Personal Injury Protection. Florida is a no-fault PIP state. Your own auto policy pays the first $10,000 of medical bills and lost wages, regardless of who caused the crash. You have to get treated within fourteen days of the crash to keep that coverage open, which is a deadline a lot of people miss because the soreness only really sets in two weeks later.
• §627.727, Florida Statutes — uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage. Florida does not require drivers to carry bodily-injury liability coverage. Read that sentence again. The drunk driver who hit you on Bonita Beach Road may carry no liability coverage at all. Your own UM coverage is often the policy that actually pays. We have settled many drunk-driver cases primarily out of our client’s own UM stack.
• §316.066, Florida Statutes — crash reports. A law enforcement officer at the scene is required to complete a long-form Florida Traffic Crash Report when there is injury or death. That report has the citations, the diagram, the witness names, and any field-sobriety notes. We pull it the same week.

One more piece I want you to know about, even though it is not a statute. If the at-fault driver pleads guilty or no-contest to the DUI in criminal court, that plea can come into the civil case. It changes the temperature of the negotiation, and it sometimes opens the door to a punitive damages claim under §768.72.

Five patterns we see in Bonita Springs drunk-driver cases

Bonita is not Miami. The drunk-driver crashes we see here have a handful of recurring patterns, and the scenario usually drives the strategy. We have seen these come through the door over and over:

1. The late-night rear-end on Bonita Beach Road or Old 41. The bars and restaurants on the Bonita Beach Road and Old 41 corridor empty out around the same time, and the impaired driver is usually the one who plowed into a stopped car at a light. Easy liability, but the injuries are often whiplash and disc injuries that show up later.
2. The wrong-way driver on Interstate 75 near Bonita Beach Road or Corkscrew. These are catastrophic. The injuries are severe and the at-fault driver is often killed or critically hurt, which makes UM coverage on our client’s policy the main source of recovery.
3. The Imperial Parkway or US-41 / Tamiami Trail t-bone. Impaired driver runs a red light. We see these around the major intersections that funnel traffic toward Bonita Bay, Pelican Landing, and Spanish Wells. Almost always a clear-liability case on the criminal side, but the civil damages take real work.
4. The parking-lot stumble crash. Driver gets in the car after a long lunch and clips someone in a strip-mall lot off Bonita Beach Road. No police report sometimes, because everyone agreed to handle it later. Then the driver disappears. We end up pulling surveillance video to identify the vehicle.
5. The repeat offender with no insurance. The driver has a history, no bodily-injury coverage, and no realistic ability to pay. Recovery here is almost entirely from our client’s own UM coverage, the dram-shop angle if a bar overserved a habitual drinker, and sometimes an employer policy if the driver was on the clock.

Drunk-driver claims — why they are harder than they look

People assume a drunk-driver case is a guaranteed payday because the other driver was so clearly wrong. It is not. Here is what makes these cases more complicated than a regular fender-bender:

The criminal case can slow down the civil case. Defense lawyers in the civil suit will sometimes ask the court to stay the civil case while the criminal one is open, because the at-fault driver wants to plead the Fifth in any deposition. That delay can stretch a case out by a year if we let it.

The insurance company knows about punitive damages. When we plead a punitive damages claim under §768.72, the carrier’s calculus changes. Their bad-faith exposure goes up, and so does the pressure to settle. But they also fight the punitive pleading hard, because if we win that fight the verdict ceiling goes up.

PIP coordination is messy. The drunk driver’s PIP does not pay you. Your own PIP does, even though they caused the crash. People do not believe me when I tell them this. They want the at-fault driver’s insurer to pay their ER bill. That is not how Florida works.

UM coverage is where the real money lives. Most drunk-driver settlements we close in Bonita Springs lean heavily on the injured client’s own UM coverage, because the at-fault driver does not carry enough liability insurance. People often do not know they have UM, or they think using it will raise their rates. It will not, for a claim that was not their fault.

An Estero DUI case — $500,000

We represented a client in Estero who was hit by a drunk driver. The impact left our client needing neck surgery. The at-fault driver’s coverage was inadequate to cover the medical costs and wage loss. We worked the claim through both the at-fault driver’s available liability coverage and our client’s own underinsured motorist policy. The matter resolved at $500,000. The lesson from that file is the same one I give every drunk-driver client who walks into our Windsor Place office on Bonita Beach Road: the instinct is to chase the bad actor, the discipline is to find every policy that pays. In a drunk-driver case, that usually means looking at four potential sources, not one.

What to do if you are the one who was hit

This is the part I want you to actually use. Not generic advice. The things I have watched matter, over thirty years of these cases:

1. Get medical care within fourteen days. Not for the lawsuit. For your PIP. If you wait longer than fourteen days, your no-fault medical coverage is gone. I have watched clients lose ten thousand dollars of guaranteed coverage by toughing it out for two weeks and then going to the doctor.
2. Get the long-form crash report number before you leave the scene. Ask the deputy or trooper for it. Write it on your phone. The report itself takes seven to ten days to be available, but the case number is what we use to pull everything.
3. Photograph the other driver’s face and the car. If they are clearly impaired, the photos will tell that story months later when a defense lawyer argues otherwise. I am not asking you to confront them. Stand back and take pictures.
4. Save the gear. The clothing you were wearing. The shoes. The phone with the dash-cam app still recording. Do not wash anything, do not throw anything out, do not let the body shop release the car for at least a week. Evidence walks out the door faster in these cases than any other.
5. Do not give a recorded statement to the at-fault driver’s insurer. Their adjuster will call. They are polite. They will say it is routine. It is not routine. They are building the defense to your claim, and you do not have to give them that interview. Tell them to call our office.
6. Look at your own auto policy declarations page. Find the line that says UM or UIM. If it is there, that is often the policy that ends up paying you the most. If it says you rejected UM, we still have other doors to open, but UM is the first place I look.
7. Call us before you call the at-fault driver’s insurer. Not because I want the case. Because every conversation you have with that carrier is on a recording somewhere, and they will use it later. The free consultation is genuinely free, and you will get straight answers about whether you even need a lawyer.

Key Takeaways

• The criminal DUI case and your civil personal-injury case run separately. Do not wait for the State to finish.
• Florida’s statute of limitations for negligence is now two years under §95.11(4)(a). Miss it and the case is gone.
• Florida does not require bodily-injury liability coverage. The drunk driver who hit you may carry nothing, which makes your own UM coverage under §627.727 the real source of recovery.
• Get medical care within fourteen days of the crash or you lose your $10,000 in PIP benefits under §627.736.
• A guilty or no-contest plea in the criminal DUI case can be used in your civil case and may open the door to punitive damages.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q1. Do I have to wait for the criminal DUI case to end before I file my civil claim?
No. The civil personal-injury claim and the State’s criminal DUI case run on separate tracks. Under §95.11(4)(a), Florida Statutes, you generally have two years from the crash to file the civil suit. We usually start the civil work right away while the criminal case is still moving, because evidence, witnesses, and surveillance video disappear quickly.

Q2. What if the drunk driver only carries the Florida minimum coverage?
Florida only requires $10,000 in PIP and $10,000 in property damage. There is no mandatory bodily-injury liability minimum. If the at-fault driver is underinsured, we look to your own uninsured/underinsured motorist coverage under §627.727, any household stacking, employer policies if the driver was on the job, and in some cases a dram-shop claim against a bar that served a habitual drinker.

Q3. Can I get punitive damages because the driver was drunk?
Often, yes. Florida allows punitive damages against a driver whose voluntary intoxication caused the crash. We have to plead and prove it under §768.72, and the court has to allow the claim to proceed before we can ask a jury for that money. Punitives are one of the reasons drunk-driving cases settle differently than ordinary negligence cases.

Q4. The officer at the scene gave me a DUI packet and a case number. Is that enough proof?
It is a strong start, but it is not the whole file. We pull the Florida Traffic Crash Report under §316.066, the body-cam footage, the field-sobriety video, the breath-test maintenance records, and any blood-draw chain of custody. A guilty plea or no-contest plea in the criminal case can be used in the civil case, which gives our client a stronger position at the negotiation table.

Q5. Do I share fault if I had one drink at dinner before the crash?
Possibly, and that matters under Florida’s modified comparative negligence rule in §768.81. After the 2023 reform, if a jury finds you more than 50 percent at fault you recover nothing. One drink with a meal is not by itself a fault finding, but the defense will look for it. We address it head-on with the insurer rather than letting them frame the story.

Talk to us before the carrier calls

If you or someone in your family was hit by a drunk driver in Bonita Springs, Estero, Naples, Fort Myers, or anywhere in Lee or Collier County, call our office at 239-992-8259. The consultation is free, and there is no fee unless we recover for you. I will sit down with you in our Windsor Place office on Bonita Beach Road, or by phone, and tell you straight whether you need us. Sometimes the answer is no. When the answer is yes, we move quickly, because the evidence in a drunk-driver case starts disappearing the morning after the crash.

About the Author

David B. Pittman, Esq. is the founder of Pittman Law Firm, P.L., and has practiced personal injury law from the firm’s Windsor Place office on Bonita Beach Road for more than thirty years, representing injured clients across Lee and Collier Counties, with a particular focus on commercial-vehicle, complex-liability, and serious-injury cases. Bonita Springs is home for the firm, and most of its child-pedestrian, premises, and family-injury cases come from the residential corridors off Old 41 and Imperial Parkway, the school zones around the Bonita Beach Road corridor, and the surrounding Lee County neighborhoods.

His undergraduate years were at The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina. His law degree is from the University of South Carolina School of Law. He carries an AV-Preeminent rating at Martindale-Hubbell and Multi-Million Dollar Advocates Forum membership.

David has held a Florida real estate broker license for twenty-five years, a credential that shapes how the firm reads the property side of premises cases. The firm handles personal injury cases across Lee and Collier Counties, serving Fort Myers, Bonita Springs, Naples, Cape Coral, Estero, and Lehigh Acres, with offices at Windsor Place in Bonita Springs (main) and Fort Myers (satellite). Call 239-992-8259 for a free consultation.

The information on this website is for general information purposes only and is attorney advertising. Nothing on this page is legal advice for any individual case. Reading this page does not create an attorney-client relationship with Pittman Law Firm, P.L. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.