FLORIDA LOWERS BAR FOR EMPLOYEES SHOT AT WORK TO GET COMPENSATED

Florida courts can’t block workers shot on the job from receiving injury compensation, the state high court ruled Thursday.

The justices rejected a call from Normandy Insurance Company to place heightened burdens on workers to prove that those who shoot them on the job weren’t bringing a non-work vendetta to the jobsite. Adopting that test, Justice Carlos G. Muñiz said for the 6-0 court, would require workers to go beyond the requirements of state workers’ compensation law.

Focusing on whether the shooter’s act caused the worker’s injuries “wrongly introduces tort causation into the analysis of occupational causation,” Muñiz said. Given the workers’ compensation law’s broad language, an injury “arising out of work performed” and “occupational causation” is better understood to mean that the injuries must be work-related, such that there’s a link to the employee’s work, he said.

The ruling rewrites the test for workers who previously had to prove that their job site was more prone to violence than their home lives in order to collect payments for injuries. Now to collect under the state workers compensation system, a worker assaulted by a third party must establish only that their overall job duties and work environment caused exposure to an increased risk of assault, the court said.

The case centered on the injury claims of hotel rental car worker Mohammed Bouayad, who was nearly killed in a shooting when he was walking at night between a hotel and an outbuilding. In a June 2025 oral argument Normandy called on the court to uphold an appeals court ruling requiring workers to bring evidence that an on-the-job attack wasn’t the result of a personal grievance.

“Because proof of risk exposure can be sufficient to satisfy the occupational causation requirement in workplace assault cases, proof of a work-related motive for the assault (again, as in a robbery) is not required,” Muñiz said.

Justice Adam Tanenbaum didn’t take part in the case, which was argued before he joined the court.

Winer Law Group and Charles Smith of Orlando, Fla. represent Bouayad. HR Law represents Normandy.

The case is Bouayad v. Normandy Ins. Co., Fla., No. SC2023-1576, 7/9/26.