Coronavirus-related lawsuits filed in Florida since the beginning of the year now number 278, the third highest litigation count nationwide behind California and New York, according to a tracking system set up by the law firm Hunton Andrews Kurth.
Nationwide, the law firm’s COVID-19 Complaint Tracker identifies 3,521 such complaints, with New York alone being the location for 787 of the lawsuits. The level of such litigation has prompted many business groups, including the Florida Chamber of Commerce, to seek coronavirus lawsuit protection at both the state and federal levels.
Although Hunton Andrews Kurth did not comment directly on the specifics of Florida’s coronavirus litigation, it did provide the Florida Record with some additional data about Florida’s numbers.
The largest segment of Florida’s coronavirus-related litigation – involving more than 80 complaints, or 31 percent of the total – relates to insurance issues, including scores of firms with business-interruption policies filing suits against insurers that declined to pay their business losses during the pandemic.
Other lawsuits filed by businesses take issue with actions taken by lenders that business owners allege impeded their access to federal Payment Protection Program funds provided in the wake of the health emergency.
COVID-19 civil rights complaints – such as one by Jacksonville residents that challenges the city’s decision to host the Republican National Convention in August, or lawsuits businesses in other parts of the state objecting to mandatory mask ordinances – numbered 35, or nearly 13 percent, according to the tracker data.
Labor and employment issues make up nearly 12 percent of the total. And complaints that involve real property, such as landlord-tenant disputes over delinquent rent payments after the state shut down, made up 11.5 percent of the state’s coronavirus lawsuits.
Another 16 lawsuits that were filed in recent months involve education issues, particularly university students in Florida suing to get tuition payments refunded because they were dissatisfied with the level of online instruction provided during the pandemic.
Meanwhile, a number of cruise lines based in Florida are now defending themselves against lawsuits alleging that they did not do enough to protect travelers from the spread of the virus, and airlines are being sued by consumers who charge they were not compensated for canceled flights.
Hunton Andrews Kurth, which has offices in Miami and throughout the United States and other countries, has a client base that includes companies, individuals and governments.
“(The) COVID-19 Complaint Tracker is a comprehensive database of state and federal litigation involving COVID-19 claims,” the firm states on its website. “We will continue to update the Complaint Tracker as new cases are filed.