FLORIDA INJURY ATTORNEY BLAWG

A pharmacy owes a customer a duty of reasonable care. Reasonable care is the degree of care that an ordinarily prudent pharmacist would exercise under the same or similar circumstances. Marjorie A. Shields, Annotation, Exemplary or Punitive Damages for Pharmacist’s Wrongful Conduct in Preparing or Dispensing Medical Prescription—Cases Not Under Consumer Product Safety Act, 109 A.L.R.5th 397, § 2 (2003); see Pittman v. Upjohn Co., 890 S.W.2d 425, 434 (Tenn. 1994) (stating pharmacists have duty to exercise standard of care required of pharmacy profession in same or similar communities); Schaerrer v. Stewart’s Plaza Pharmacy, Inc., 79 P.3d 922, 933 (Utah 2003) (reiterating that pharmacist has generally recognized duty to possess and exercise reasonable degree of skill, care, and knowledge that would be exercised by reasonably prudent pharmacist in same situation).

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Personal injury plaintiffs bear the burden of proving the defendant was negligent. See Florida Standard Jury Instruction 415.11 – Civil Cases. Negligence is determined by measuring the defendant’s conduct against the behavior of a “reasonable person” under similar circumstances. In Florida, the burden requires proof by the greater weight of the evidence. Standard Jury Instruction 401.3 – Civil Cases.

The reasonable person standard, also known as the standard of care, can be established by statutes, ordinances, codes, rules, industry standards, and a company’s own policies & procedures. The violation of a statute, ordinance, code, or rule may constitute negligence per se; violation of industry standards and policies & procedures cannot. When the trial judge decides that a violation is negligence per se, the jury will be instructed to determine if the defendant violated the statute and whether such violation was a legal cause of the injury or damages complained of. deJesus v. Seaboard Coast Line Railroad Company, 281 So.2d 198 (Fla. 1973).
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Earlier this year our law firm participated in a one week jury trial against a condominium association and a general contractor seeking damages for personal injuries sustained by our client, an elderly woman. The association hired the general contractor to rebuild a wood dock that ran, unimpeded, behind each condo unit in the community alongside a North Miami Beach canal. The first thing the contractor did was remove every other wood plank through the entire length of the dock. It then undertook to replace every plank, beginning in a small section and working east and west in each direction as the work progressed. After the GC had laid down 100 linear feet of new wood, it got into a dispute with the association over payment issues. This resulted in a complete work stoppage in late July of 2012; the GC performed no more work on the site after this point. Our accident happened on November 11, 2012, nearly four months later.
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