Lawyers love rules, especially ones that come with catchy titles. One such rule in negligence law is the “Impact Rule.” But as Florida’s Fifth District Court of Appeal recently said, the Impact Rule is “easily stated, but often difficult to apply.” Today I’ll be discussing what the Impact Rule is and spotlighting a case from last week in which it was applied.
What is the Impact Rule?
To understand the Impact Rule, it helps to understand the reason for its origin. The Florida Supreme Court was grappling with a thorny question in the field of negligence law—how can we ensure that certain, non-physical injuries claimed by a plaintiff (i.e., mental or emotional injuries) are legitimate? Or, put another way, if we allow plaintiffs to seek damages for mental or emotional injuries (which can’t be seen), how can we protect against “fictious or speculative claims”?
The Florida Supreme Court’s answer was the Impact Rule. Although stated as a “rule,” the Impact Rule is probably best understood as the first branch of a decision tree. If you represent a victim of negligence who has suffered mental or emotional injuries, you should first ask the “impact question”: during the incident that led to these injuries, did the victim suffer an “impact”? If the answer is “yes,” Florida law “permit[s] recovery for emotional distress stemming from the incident during which the impact occurred, and not merely the impact itself.” Willis v. Gami Golden Glades, LLC, 967 So. 2d 846, 850 (Fla. 2007) (cleaned up).
That bears emphasis. Even if the impact—whatever it was—isn’t what caused the emotional or mental damages in question, you can still recover those damages if they flowed from the subject incident. In this way, an “impact” is like a key that unlocks the door to the courthouse where you can seek all mental or emotional damages that flowed from a defendant’s negligence.
If the answer to the “impact question” is “no,” then you have what might be termed a pure negligent infliction of emotional distress claim. In such an instance, the plaintiff has to jump through three more hoops. First, the plaintiff must have been “involved in the incident by seeing, hearing, or arriving on the scene as the traumatizing event occurs.” Id. Second, “within a short time” of the incident, the plaintiff must suffer mental distress. Id. Third, this mental distress must be “manifested by physical injury” (to be clear, this physical injury must also manifest within a short time of the incident in question). Id.
What qualifies as an impact under the Impact Rule?
In a way, though, the impact question—whether the victim has suffered an impact—begs another question: what qualifies as an “impact” under Florida law? The answer: a lot.
Of course, the most obvious impacts are ones where lawyers probably don’t even think twice about the Impact Rule’s applicability. Your client trips on some unsafe condition and their body hits the ground, resulting in broken bones. Impact of ground on body. A car crashes into your client. Impact of car on body. Your client is shot by some third-party because of negligent security at an apartment complex. Impact of bullet on body.
But the universe of impacts that qualify under the impact rule is quite large and go well beyond these obvious examples. The key is this: the outside force or substance “must touch or enter the plaintiff’s body.” Id. That’s it. The outside force or substance can be “large or small.” Id. It can be “visible or invisible.” Id. It just has to touch or enter the plaintiff’s body.
The Fifth District Court of Appeals’ recent decision in Murphy v. Heritage II Holdings, LLC, No. 5D2024-1853, 2025 WL 1667775, at *2 (Fla. 5th DCA June 13, 2025) demonstrates the wide breadth of impacts that will qualify under the impact rule.
The victim in Murphy was a woman who lived in a rental property owned and managed by the defendants. The defendants’ poor upkeep of the property resulted in all kinds of problems—raw sewage backing up in the victim’s bathtub and toilet, sand in the running water, electrical issues that caused periodic electric outages and smoke. The victim suffered a heart attack and died, leading her estate to sue the defendants. The defendants moved for summary judgment, arguing that the impact rule barred her lawsuit. The trial court agreed.
On appeal, the Fifth DCA reversed. The court found that the facts satisfied the impact rule. Explaining that many courts had recognized that inhaling or otherwise absorbing harmful substances qualifies as an impact, the court pointed out that, in addition to physically touching the sand in the water and feeling the heat from the faulty electric wires, the victim had “inhaled into her body microscopic particles” from the raw sewage and “smoke from the wires.” According to the court, these impacts fit within “the Supreme Court’s broad definition of impact.”
Takeaways
For personal injury lawyers, knowing how the Impact Rule works is critical to both investigating and properly alleging negligence claims. In most cases, the impact at issue will be obvious. But you must take care not to overlook more subtle or even invisible impacts, like odors, radiation, soundwaves, and the like.