Florida has improved its civil litigation environment enough to avoid being listed as a “Judicial Hellhole,” although the Sunshine State remains on the American Tort Reform Association's “watch list,” according to an ATRA report released this week.
The watch list is a kind of judicial system purgatory between the nine hellhole members – including Philadelphia, St. Louis, California and Louisiana – and those jurisdictions with a better sense of equal justice, the ATRA reports.
"I think that the American Tort Reform Association has rightfully recognized that Gov. (Ron) DeSantis has taken huge positive steps, in terms of (appointments to) the Florida Supreme Court," Carolyn Johnson, an economic development expert with the Florida Chamber of Commerce, told the Florida Record. "And this is the second year in row Florida was not labeled a Judicial Hellhole."
The result has been a reversal of past legal decisions by activist judges, the ATRA report says.
Since 2019, the state’s high court has rejected previous jurists’ embracing of “an anything-goes approach to expert testimony” by adopting the so-called Daubert standard, which is also used in the federal courts.
In addition, the state legislature has clamped down on assignment-of-benefits property insurance claims, which critics say have led to abuses and inflated claims by third parties who exploited the AOB provisions in state law.
“Among other things, the law replaces the one-way attorney fee for assignees with a defined prevailing party formula and provides additional protections for insureds in assigning insurance benefits,” the report states.
The lawmakers have also passed legislation to discourage bad-faith litigation against insurers and provide more reasonable ways to resolve disputes between insurance companies and policyholders, according to the ATRA report.
"There are still many areas where Florida has challenges," Johnson said. "... If the legislature doesn't address them, we could move back onto the Judicial Hellholes list."
Some of these issues involve property insurance claims and contingency-fee multipliers that drive up legal costs, she said.
Florida can improve its civil justice system further by reforming the current “no-fault” auto insurance system, in which insurers have to pay as much as $10,000 in medical expenses as a result of auto accidents, the ATRA report says. Rampant fraud characterizes the current system, the report says.
Another part of the civil justice system that is ripe for reform involves medical expenses in court cases, which are often inflated because such expenses are described in terms of the initial “sticker price,” rather than the actual price that is negotiated with health care providers, according to the report.
The ATRA also warns that the avalanche of television and billboard trial lawyer advertisements in Florida is gaming the system because such ads can lead to jury pool bias in civil lawsuit outcomes. The ads can also scare consumers from taking prescription medications due to exaggerated attorney claims about such drugs, the report says.
"Trial lawyer advertising is definitely a huge issue in Florida," Johnson said. "It's no surprise that Florida has some of the biggest amounts of trial lawyer spending compared to other states."