Area we serve · Miami-Dade County
Car accident lawyer in Coral Gables
Its own city, its own police department, and a different set of rules if the city is the defendant
A crash in Coral Gables is a Miami-Dade County claim, and the law that decides it is the same law as anywhere in Florida: the fourteen-day deadline for initial care, the injury threshold, two years to sue. What is different here is who you are dealing with. Coral Gables is an incorporated city with its own police department, which means its officers write the report. It is also its own government, which matters enormously in the smaller number of cases where the city itself is the defendant, because those run on deadlines and limits that have nothing to do with the ordinary ones. Everything the statutes require is set out on the Florida car accident page. What follows is particular to the city.
01 What a Coral Gables crash actually looks like
A commercial grid, a university, and US-1 cutting across all of it
South Dixie Highway, US-1, runs along the northeastern edge of the city at speeds that belong to a highway, through intersections that belong to a city. It carries the Metrorail above it and the busway beside it, which means the crossings are long, complicated and the place where the serious ones happen.
Ponce de Leon Boulevard and Le Jeune Road are the north-south pair that carry everything else, and between them sits the business district where Miracle Mile and Giralda Avenue produce a steady run of low-speed collisions: backing out of an angled space, a door opened into traffic, a turn across a lane someone could not see past.
Bird Road and Sunset Drive run east-west through residential blocks with four-way stops, mature trees and sightlines that are genuinely obstructed rather than theoretically obstructed. Fault in those cases is usually decided by who had the stop sign and who can prove it.
And the University of Miami is here, which puts several thousand people on bicycles and scooters on streets designed around cars, concentrated at the start and end of the academic day. A bicycle claim in Coral Gables is not a rare event; it is a recurring one.
The business district produces the most collisions. US-1 produces the worst ones.
02 The part nobody tells you about Coral Gables
When the city is the one being sued, every deadline changes
Coral Gables is an incorporated city of 49,248 people, by the 2020 Census, and it runs its own police department out of 2151 Salzedo Street with 205 sworn officers. That is who writes the report for a crash inside the city limits, not the county, and the report comes from them rather than from the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office.
It is also its own sovereign, and that is the part that catches people. If the claim is against another driver, nothing here applies. If the claim is against the City of Coral Gables — a city vehicle, or an injury caused by a dangerous condition on a street or a sidewalk the city maintains — it runs under Fla. Stat. § 768.28, and almost every number changes.
Written notice of the claim must be presented to the city before suit, within three years of when the claim accrues. The city then has six months to respond, and a suit filed before that window closes is filed too early. Recovery is capped at $200,000 for any one person and $300,000 for everyone arising out of the same incident, and anything above that takes an act of the Legislature.
The one deadline that moves the other way is the limitation period. Section 768.28(14) gives four years to file against a government defendant, where an ordinary negligence claim gets two. That sounds generous until you notice the notice requirement sitting inside it, and that nobody can tell you which set of rules applies until it is established who is responsible for the thing that hurt you.
A Coral Gables case is filed in the Eleventh Judicial Circuit, in the Miami-Dade County Circuit Court at 73 West Flagler Street. Most injury claims never get there, because they resolve with the insurer before a suit is filed.
03 The roads
Where the claims actually come from
South Dixie Highway, US-1, along the northeastern boundary. Highway speeds, city intersections, and the Metrorail and busway corridor running through the middle of it.
Ponce de Leon Boulevard and Le Jeune Road, the north-south pair, carrying commuter traffic through the business district.
Miracle Mile and Giralda Avenue, where angled parking, deliveries and restaurant traffic produce low-speed collisions all day and a different kind after dark.
Bird Road and Sunset Drive, east-west through the residential sections, where the four-way stops and the tree canopy do most of the damage.
The University of Miami campus and its approaches, which add bicycles, scooters and foot traffic to streets that were not laid out with any of them in mind.
04 What to do now
The things that can only be done in the first two weeks
This is a checklist, not advice about your case, and following it commits you to nothing.
Get seen within fourteen days
Personal Injury Protection pays nothing at all if the first treatment falls outside fourteen days — not a reduced amount, nothing. It is the deadline that expires before most people have decided what to do.
Note which agency responded
Inside the city limits it is the Coral Gables Police Department. A few blocks in some directions it is a different city or the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office, and on US-1 it may be the Florida Highway Patrol. Write down the agency and the report number, because asking the wrong one costs two weeks.
Establish whether anything public is involved
A city vehicle, a county bus, a utility truck, a traffic signal that was not working, a sidewalk defect. If any of that is in the picture, the notice requirement in § 768.28 starts running and it is not the same as the deadline for suing a driver.
Photograph the intersection, not just the cars
In the residential sections the question is almost always sightlines: what the hedge, the tree or the parked van actually blocked. That evidence is trimmed, moved or rebuilt within weeks and cannot be recreated afterward.
Get names at the scene
The business district is full of people who work there and will still be there next month, which is the best kind of witness. Ask anyway, because nobody goes back a month later to look.
Pull your own declarations page
Uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage, and whether it stacks. Florida does not require any driver to carry bodily injury liability, so your own policy is often the ceiling on what can be recovered.
Do not give the other insurer a recorded statement
You are not required to. The answer given in the first week gets quoted back for the next two years.
05 The kinds of crash this covers
The same streets, five different claims
Miami-Dade County recorded roughly 60,000 traffic crashes in 2024, with 29,359 people injured, according to the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles. That is a county figure: there is no published count for Coral Gables alone, and anyone quoting one is estimating. What is specific to here is which of these the city’s streets produce, and the law on each is on the page it links to.
Car accidents
The bulk of it, and in the business district the pattern is parking and turning rather than speed — backing out, doors, and turns across traffic that could not be seen past.
The fourteen-day deadline applies to every one of them, whoever was at fault.
Bicycle accidents
The university puts thousands of riders on these streets, and a bicycle has no Personal Injury Protection behind it, so the coverage analysis starts somewhere different from the first day.
A cyclist may be able to claim under a household auto policy, which is the thing most riders do not know and nobody tells them at the scene.
Pedestrian accidents
US-1 is wide and fast, with long distances between signals, and the restaurant blocks put people in the street after dark in a way daytime traffic engineering did not anticipate.
These turn on how fault is divided, and more than half the fault means recovering nothing at all.
Motorcycle accidents
The turning traffic that leaves two cars with a dented fender puts a rider on the road, and serious trauma in Miami-Dade goes to Ryder at Jackson Memorial or to HCA Florida Kendall, the county’s two Level I trauma centers.
Motorcyclists are not required to carry Personal Injury Protection, which changes the coverage question from day one.
Uninsured drivers
Florida requires no driver to carry bodily injury liability coverage at all, so the underinsured case — limits smaller than the harm done — is the common one rather than the exception.
The claim moves to your own policy, which makes the declarations page the most important document in the file.
06 Also for Coral Gables
The other matters this office takes from here
Injury work is most of this practice. These are the rest, each handled from the same South Miami office and each with its own page.
Immigration
Removal defense, bond, asylum, family petitions and citizenship. Coral Gables is minutes from the Miami immigration court and about half an hour from Krome, which are two of the three in Florida.
Family law
Divorce, time-sharing, support, property and protective orders in the Eleventh Judicial Circuit, filed downtown at the Lawson E. Thomas Courthouse Center rather than at the civil courthouse.
Criminal defense
Bond and release conditions, DUI, drug charges, theft and domestic violence. A Coral Gables arrest is made by the city’s own officers but prosecuted by the Miami-Dade State Attorney like any other.
Property insurance claims
A denied or underpaid claim on a Coral Gables property, where a lot of the housing predates the current codes and the argument becomes what the damage is attributable to.
07 How this works
The consultation, the documents, and what it costs
The first conversation is with Jose A. Dapena, not with an intake department. On an injury matter it is free and commits you to nothing, and it can happen by phone.
The Miami office is at 5975 Sunset Drive, Suite 102, in South Miami, which is the next municipality over and a few minutes from most of Coral Gables. There is parking on site.
Fees differ by practice and are stated before anything is signed. Injury work is contingent, normally payable only if there is a recovery, with costs governed by the written agreement. Family and immigration are hourly, with payment plans and separate government filing fees. Criminal is a flat fee set by the charges and the scope, with no payment plans. The free consultation is an injury term and does not travel to the others.
08 Who you deal with
Jose A. Dapena
Admitted to The Florida Bar in 1998, number 152358, and admitted to the United States District Courts for the Southern, Middle and Northern Districts of Florida.
Before representing injured people he was in-house counsel for a Personal Injury Protection carrier, reviewing claims on the insurer’s behalf: the same analysis a claim meets now, learned from the other side of the file.
09 The law behind this
- Fla. Stat. § 627.736 Personal Injury Protection
80% of medical expenses and 60% of lost wages up to $10,000, and the fourteen-day deadline for initial care.
- Fla. Stat. § 768.28 Claims against a city or county
Written notice to the city within three years, six months for it to respond, and recovery capped at $200,000 per person and $300,000 per incident.
- Fla. Stat. § 768.81 Comparative fault
More than 50% at fault and the claim recovers nothing, which is the whole argument in a pedestrian case.
- Fla. Stat. § 95.11 Deadlines
Two years to sue on most negligence claims accruing on or after March 24, 2023 — four years where the defendant is a government.
10 Official resources
- FLHSMV crash portalWhere a crash report is requested, whichever agency wrote it
- Coral Gables Police DepartmentThe agency that works crashes inside the city limits
- Eleventh Judicial CircuitThe court a Miami-Dade case is filed in
- Miami-Dade Clerk of the CourtsFiling, case search and the forms a self-represented party needs
Questions
Who writes the crash report in Coral Gables?
The Coral Gables Police Department, for anything inside the city limits. It runs its own department of 205 sworn officers out of 2151 Salzedo Street. Outside the limits it is another city or the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office, and the Florida Highway Patrol works parts of US-1.
Is there an office in Coral Gables?
No. The office is at 5975 Sunset Drive, Suite 102, in South Miami, the next municipality over and a few minutes from most of the city. It is the office that serves Miami-Dade.
A city vehicle hit me. Is that different?
Very. A claim against the City of Coral Gables runs under Fla. Stat. § 768.28: written notice to the city within three years, six months for the city to respond before suit, and recovery capped at $200,000 for one person and $300,000 for the incident. The limitation period is four years rather than two. None of that applies to a claim against another driver.
I was hit on my bicycle near the university. What covers that?
A bicycle carries no Personal Injury Protection of its own, so the first question is whether a household auto policy reaches you — it often does, and most riders have never been told. The fourteen-day treatment deadline still applies to whatever coverage does respond.
Where would my case be heard?
In the Eleventh Judicial Circuit, at the Miami-Dade County Circuit Court, 73 West Flagler Street. Most injury claims are resolved without a lawsuit.
My matter is not a car accident. Do you take those too?
Yes — immigration, family law, criminal defense and property insurance claims are all handled from the Miami office, each with its own page and its own fee terms. The free consultation is an injury term and does not apply to those.
How long do I have?
Fourteen days to get initial care for Personal Injury Protection to pay anything, and two years to sue on most negligence claims. If a government is the defendant, four years to sue but written notice within three. The fourteen-day one is the deadline that expires before most people have decided anything.
Talk to Jose A. Dapena about a Coral Gables crash
The Miami office on Sunset Drive in South Miami is minutes from most of Coral Gables, and the first conversation about an injury costs nothing. If the matter is not an injury, the fee terms are set out in writing before anything begins.