Practice Areas

Topkin Law, P.L. is a Florida litigation and regulatory firm with two centers of gravity. The first is the defense of insurers, third-party administrators, businesses, and self-insured companies in high-exposure civil litigation. The second is the representation of physicians, medical practices, and healthcare businesses in regulatory, insurance, and business matters. The practice areas below reflect both.

The firm’s attorneys are supported by experienced paralegals, litigation nurse consultants, and private investigators who handle medical-record analysis, damages evaluation, and case development in-house. That structure keeps files moving, keeps costs predictable, and supports the level of preparation that significant matters require.

Across every practice area the approach is the same. Evaluate the matter candidly at the outset, identify the contractual, coverage, and risk-transfer issues that determine where responsibility actually lies, and manage the engagement with discipline from evaluation through resolution.

Insurance Defense

For Insurers, TPAs & Claims Professionals

Claims professionals evaluating Florida counsel are asking a narrow set of questions. Can this firm handle the file without supervision? Will the reporting support a reserve and an authority request? Will the billing comply? Will anything come back as a surprise? This page answers those questions directly. Topkin Law has defended insurers, third-party administrators, and self-insured companies in Florida for more than two decades

Premises Liability & Indemnification Strategy

Our premises and risk-transfer clients include national and regional retailers, supermarket and big-box chains, restaurants and hospitality operators, hotels, multifamily owners, condominium and homeowners associations, commercial landlords and tenants, and the insurers, third-party administrators, and self-insured businesses that stand behind them. The firm has defended this work in Florida for more than two decades, including long-term engagements for major national retail clients.

Negligent Security Defense

Negligent security cases ask a property owner to answer for a crime someone else committed. Florida law changed substantially on that question in 2023, and the current framework gives defendants two tools they did not have before. The criminal actor can now be placed on the verdict form, and owners of qualifying multifamily properties can earn a statutory presumption against liability by implementing specified security measures.

Motor Vehicle & Transportation Defense

The lawsuit after a serious commercial vehicle crash arrives months later. The decisions that shape it are made in the first hours, in the scene inspection, the vehicle preservation, the driver interviews, and what gets said to investigators and to the other side. By the time suit is filed, most of the physical and electronic evidence either exists or does not.

Catastrophic & Product Liability Defense

Our catastrophic and product liability clients include national retailers, manufacturers, distributors, motor carriers, and industrial and commercial defendants, together with the insurers, reinsurers, third-party administrators, and self-insured corporate clients managing the exposure behind them. A meaningful portion of this work comes to the firm as Florida counsel for national defense firms and institutional clients managing matters from outside the state.

Dram Shop Liability

Florida limits when a business that sells alcohol can be held responsible for what a customer does after leaving. Under Section 768.125, Florida Statutes, a vendor who serves a person of lawful drinking age is generally not liable for injuries caused by that person’s intoxication. The statute recognizes two exceptions, one for willfully and unlawfully selling or furnishing alcohol to a person under the lawful drinking age, and one for knowingly serving a person habitually addicted to alcohol

Aquatic Injury & Drowning Defense

Florida has a year-round swimming season, a large inventory of residential and commercial pools, and a tourism economy built partly on water. Drowning and near-drowning claims follow. They are among the hardest cases a property owner can face. The damages are catastrophic or fatal, the victim is frequently a child, and the sympathy in the courtroom runs one direction.

Insurance Coverage & Bad Faith Defense

Coverage questions arrive before liability questions are answered and have to be resolved without the benefit of a developed record. Whether a duty to defend attaches, whether a reservation of rights is adequate, whether an exclusion applies, how much is available across a tower, and whether a demand should be met are all decisions a carrier makes early, under time pressure, with real extracontractual consequences for getting them wrong.

Healthcare

Insurance Audits & Clawback Defense

We represent physicians and medical practices facing insurance audits, clawback demands, and recoupment actions. Our defense is driven by a deep understanding of insurer billing, coding, reimbursement, and medical necessity analysis, allowing us to effectively challenge and limit repayment exposure.

Healthcare Regulatory Compliance

Our regulatory and compliance clients include physicians and physician groups across specialties, medical practices, surgery centers, clinics, pharmacies, home health agencies, and other licensed healthcare entities, together with the management companies that support them. The firm represents these clients before AHCA, the Department of Health, Florida’s professional licensing boards, and state and federal enforcement agencies.

Physician Representation in Depositions

Our deposition clients include treating physicians and treatment teams, retained medical experts, IME and peer review doctors, and the practices, expert witness firms, and institutional clients that employ or retain them. Engagements range from a single deposition to standing relationships with practices and firms whose physicians testify regularly.

Healthcare Practice & Business Counsel

Our healthcare business clients include physicians, physician groups, medical practices, surgery centers, clinics, and the management companies that support them, in matters ranging from a single employment agreement to the purchase, sale, or restructuring of an entire practice. The firm represents practices and individual physicians in different matters, never both sides of the same one.

Healthcare Licensure & Board Representation

A professional license is more than an administrative requirement. For a physician or other healthcare professional, it is the foundation of the ability to practice, accept employment, maintain privileges, participate with payers, and build a career in Florida.

Business

Civil Practice

Topkin Law tries and litigates civil cases in circuit and county courts throughout Florida. Most of that work is defense of premises liability, negligent security, motor vehicle and transportation, product liability, and property damage claims for insurers, third-party administrators, self-insured companies, and corporate defendants. The firm also represents businesses affirmatively in commercial disputes, enforcing contracts, indemnity obligations, and payment rights.

Federal Civil Practice

One of the first strategic questions on a new Florida lawsuit is whether it belongs in federal court. Removal is available on short notice or not at all, and the answer changes the schedule, the treatment of expert testimony, the summary judgment posture, and often the settlement dynamics of the case. For corporate and insurer defendants, that decision is worth making deliberately in the first days of an engagement.

Complex and Multi-District Litigation

Topkin Law handles complex, multi-party, and multi-district litigation for corporate and insurer clients in Florida. That includes service as Florida counsel in MDL and coordinated proceedings, mass tort defense on the retailer and distributor side, and single-event cases with enough defendants, contracts, and carriers that the indemnity chain matters as much as the merits.

Class Actions

Certification decides the case. Before it, the defendant faces one plaintiff’s claim, often a modest one. After it, the defendant faces the class. Everything that happens in between should be built with that hearing in mind, and defendants who litigate a class complaint as ordinary commercial litigation tend to discover the difference too late to fix it.

Contracts

Topkin Law drafts, reviews, and negotiates agreements for Florida businesses. The work is shaped by what the firm’s litigators see afterward. They have litigated the indemnity clause that did not cover the claim it was written for, the insurance requirement nobody enforced, the buy-out formula that made sense until two partners read it differently, the notice provision that quietly forfeited a right.

Commercial Contracts

Most of the commercial contract losses this firm ends up litigating trace back to uncapped indemnity, a duty to defend, insurance requirements the company cannot actually satisfy, and a one-sided fee clause. They are also the four provisions most often skimmed, because they sit near the back of the document and read like boilerplate.

Breach of Contract

Topkin Law prosecutes and defends breach of contract actions for businesses in Florida’s state and federal courts. By the time one of these cases is filed, the document has already resolved much of it. What remains is execution. The breach or the defense has to be framed around the language that governs, the performance record assembled, and the damages claim proved or dismantled.

Social Security Disability

Most disability applications are denied at the first level. An initial denial is usually not a judgment that the claimant can work. More often it reflects a finding that the file, as submitted, does not prove otherwise under the standards the Social Security Administration applies. What follows is a deadline-driven administrative process in which the medical record, and how it is presented, generally decides the outcome.

Who We’ve Worked With

bis (1)

Sedgwick (1)

Advance Auto Parts (1)

Exxon

Bloomingdale’s (1)

Macy’s (1)

logo_lg

mobil

7-11 (Franchise)

Gallagher-Bassett-copy

Let's Talk About Your Case

Contact Our Office
to Discuss Your Matter

954-422-8422