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See the 60-second demo →Florida med-mal practice is one of the procedurally heaviest in the country. Chapter 766 imposes pre-suit investigation requirements, corroborating affidavits, mandatory 90-day notice, and informal discovery — all before the complaint is filed. The substantive expert framework moved from Frye to Daubert in 2019. And the statutory non-economic damages cap was struck down in Estate of McCall (2014) and North Broward Hospital District v. Kalitan (2017), leaving an unusually plaintiff-favorable damages posture for a tort-reform state.
This is the 2026 working overview for plaintiff firms running Florida med-mal — Chapter 766, Daubert, and the damages framework that actually controls today.
Fla. Stat. § 766.106 requires the prospective plaintiff to conduct a pre-suit investigation of the claim before filing suit, including obtaining a corroborating written opinion from a medical expert that there are reasonable grounds to believe the alleged negligence occurred and proximately caused the injury. § 766.203. The corroborating expert has to satisfy the qualification requirements of § 766.102(5)–(6), which require the expert to be:
The "same specialty" requirement is enforced rigorously. Holmes Regional Medical Center v. Dumigan, 151 So. 3d 1282 (Fla. 5th DCA 2014), held that a corroborating opinion from a physician in a different specialty was insufficient. Subsequent decisions have not relaxed the rule. Plaintiff firms that engage a generalist for pre-suit corroboration in a subspecialty case face dismissal of the suit before any defense answer is filed.
Practical implication: the pre-suit expert engagement is the gating event. Get it right or the case does not exist. The expert qualification documentation has to be in the engagement file at the corroborating affidavit stage — not three months later when the defense moves to dismiss.
After the corroborating affidavit is in hand, the plaintiff serves the § 766.106 notice of intent to initiate litigation. The notice triggers a 90-day pre-suit period during which the parties exchange informal discovery and the defendant has the option to settle, reject, or make a settlement offer. The statute of limitations is tolled during the pre-suit period plus a 60-day extension if the parties so agree.
Two recurring traps:
Florida adopted the federal Daubert standard for expert admissibility in 2019. In re Amendments to the Florida Evidence Code, 278 So. 3d 551 (Fla. 2019), conformed Florida's evidence code to the federal Daubert framework. The pre-2019 Frye "general acceptance" standard was abandoned.
Effect on med-mal practice: defense Daubert motions in Florida now run on the same machinery as federal Daubert motions. The four-factor reliability inquiry (testability, peer review, error rate, general acceptance) applies, as does the post-2023 FRE 702 amendment posture under which reliability is admissibility, not weight. Plaintiff expert reports that read as the expert's clinical impression plus a literature appendix — the kind of report that may have survived Florida Frye review — do not reliably survive Florida Daubert review.
The 2026 plaintiff-side response is the same as the federal-court response: build the methodology section in named steps, cite peer-reviewed sources for each step, articulate the differential-diagnosis analysis with ruled-in and ruled-out alternatives, and document the expert's foundation for each opinion.
Fla. Stat. § 766.118 capped non-economic damages in med-mal cases at $500,000 against practitioners and $750,000 against non-practitioners (with aggregate caps). The Florida Supreme Court struck down the wrongful-death portion in Estate of McCall v. United States, 134 So. 3d 894 (Fla. 2014), and extended the holding to non-fatal cases in North Broward Hospital District v. Kalitan, 219 So. 3d 49 (Fla. 2017). Both decisions found the caps violated the Florida Constitution's equal protection clause.
Post-Kalitan, Florida is one of the few traditionally tort-reform states where non-economic damages are not statutorily capped in med-mal cases. The legislature has not enacted a constitutionally durable replacement. The damages posture is therefore unusually plaintiff-favorable for a state with Florida's procedural overhead — provided the case survives pre-suit and Daubert.
Practical implication for case selection: the post-cap Florida med-mal practice is the inverse of pre-AB-35 California. Procedural cost is high, gating expert qualification is strict, and the substantive damages ceiling has been removed. The case-selection economics reward firms with the procedural infrastructure to pass the pre-suit gate cleanly.
Fla. Stat. § 95.11(4)(b) sets the limitations period at two years from the date of incident OR from the date the incident was discovered or should have been discovered through the exercise of due diligence, but in no event more than four years after the date of the incident. The four-year statute of repose has exceptions for fraud, concealment, intentional misrepresentation, and minors under eight years old. § 95.11(4)(b).
The discovery rule's "should have been discovered" component is where most late-discovered cases get strangled. As in PA, the protective practice is to build a timeline from raw records that documents what the plaintiff actually had access to, what was redacted from discharge summaries, and what specialist follow-up was offered. That timeline is the evidence that defeats a summary judgment motion on repose grounds.
MedLegal AI's Daubert workup tool builds plaintiff expert reports to the Florida standard: methodology articulated in named steps with peer-reviewed citations, alternative-cause analysis ruled in and ruled out, expert qualifications mapped to § 766.102(5)–(6)'s same-specialty requirement, and pre-suit affidavit documentation tied to engagement records. The tool flags reports that don't satisfy the pre-suit corroboration requirements and reports that don't survive Daubert reliability review. It maintains a state-specific precedent library that includes In re Amendments, Holmes, Estate of McCall, and Kalitan — so the case posture can be aligned to the gatekeeping and damages framework the trial court will apply.
You can run a free Daubert workup on your expert here. Three minutes, no credit card.
Florida med-mal practice in 2026 is high-overhead, high-ceiling. The pre-suit gate is strict; the Daubert standard is now federal; the non-economic damages cap is gone. Firms that have the procedural infrastructure to pass pre-suit cleanly AND the expert posture to survive Daubert capture an unusually plaintiff-favorable damages framework. Firms that don't, get filtered out at pre-suit and never see the substantive case.
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