Everyone has limits

It's Friday, everyone, so I'm going to keep it short.
Everyone has heard the adages about diligence, saving time and acting promptly. Amongst us lawyers, we like to throw around the "Justice delayed is justice denied" maxim. Then, someone usually throws us out of the room.
The point is, the law feels the same way about acting promptly. If you have some legal right to assert, you need to assert it within a certain amount of time. You cannot come out twenty years after something happens to you to seek redress.
How long you have very much depends on what it is that happens. Causes of action arising from a breach of contract, for instance, have to be brought within 5 years. The timeframes are all set out in Section 95.11 Fla. Stat. This is known as a statute of limitation. There are a few others scattered around Florida's statutory law, but this is the principal one.
Now, are you asking yourself "Five years from what?" That's the million dollar question. A limitations period (the time you have to assert your claim) starts to run from the moment your cause of action accrues. When it accrues can be a complicated and messy situation and everyone's messy situation will be different. But accrual is defined as that moment when the last of the elements necessary to establish your cause of action takes place. Not very helpful, right? Seems to reinforce the idea that lawyers make all this stuff up so that they have something to do and all the non-lawyers have to use us. Well, that's what my parents think, too.
Have a great weekend!