The Florida legislature ended its 2020 session this week with no major victories for either tort-reform supporters or advocates for plaintiffs’ attorneys as the coronavirus outbreak began to overshadow the state’s governance.
“While there were several opportunities to further chip away at Florida’s bottom-five legal climate, the legislature largely punted on sweeping lawsuit abuse reform efforts this session,” Edie Ousley, the Florida Chamber of Commerce’s vice president of public affairs, told the Florida Record in an email.
But the session, which ended on Thursday as lawmakers completed a $93.2 billion state budget, was not a total loss for needed civil litigation reforms, according to Ousley.
“Lawmakers did agree to targeted vicarious liability reform, limitations on the statute of limitations for discrimination lawsuits and positive changes to the appellate system,” she said. “And we didn’t see any marked steps backward in the form of new causes of action or other anti-business legislation.”
The chamber did congratulate those lawmakers who filed important bills, some of which advanced substantially as the session neared its closing days.
One legislative proposal, Sen. Jeff Brandes' SB 914 and its companion bill, HB 7071, passed the Florida House 72 to 46 but stalled in the upper house. The bill would have cracked down on the use of contingency risk multipliers in property insurance claims, which allow attorneys to collect more in fees. Supporters said this puts upward pressure on premium costs.
Another bill, SB 1668, would have required medical damages claims to be based on customary charges for procedures, not what is seen as inflated “sticker price tags,” supporters said.
And SB 1288 would have called on the state to better scrutinize certain “medical alert” legal advertising and to require specific disclosures so that viewers don’t immediately stop taking their prescribed medications. Violations would have resulted in penalties listed in the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act.
The Florida Chamber also lobbied to defeat 23 bills during the session that it labeled bad for the business climate, including those that would have created new lines of civil lawsuits.
In addition, proposals that would have added bodily injury coverage to auto insurance and led to the repeal of the state’s no-fault system failed to get the needed support in either house. Plaintiffs’ attorneys supported the idea.
The chamber expects the legal reform issues that it supported this year to come up again once the current coronavirus situation gets under control.
“Given the governor’s public plea for reforms to our legal climate in Florida, and the future legislative leaders’ track records of leadership on these issues, we remain confident that once the larger impacts of Covid-19 are mitigated by current and future legislatures, overdue reform advocated by the Florida Chamber will be back on the menu in future sessions,” Ousley said.