Determining Damages in Your Florida Lawsuit

Calculating damages in your Florida lawsuit. Are you involved in a trust or estate lawsuit? You need to prove damages at your trial. Whether it’s a jury trial or a bench trial, you’re in probate court or you’re not in probate court, you need to know how to calculate damages. That’s the last element of a cause of action. If you’re successful, you’ve got to prove it. Sometimes you can do it through documents or testimony. Sometimes you bring in an expert to help you with damages.

To read more about how to calculate damages in your Florida estate or trust lawsuit, you could read a Fourth District Court of Appeal case from 2018, 237 So. 3d 419, DFG Group versus Heritage Manor. It’s not a trust case but it does stand for the proposition of understanding how damages are reviewed on appeal, as well as the goal of damages.

And the Fourth District tells us that the goal of damages, at least in a tort action — and remember, breach of fiduciary duty lawsuit in Florida is a tort action, is to restore the injured party to the position it would have been in, had the wrong not been committed.

That’s an important element that you need to talk to your probate litigation lawyer about, how you’re going to prove damages at your estate trial or your trust trial, and then how you’re going to get that evidence into the record. And then knowing also in addition how to calculate damages, knowing how to calculate interest on those damages.