After fluctuating up and down slightly in recent months, the number of litigated property insurance claims in Florida shot up 37% in January, the first significant jump since a high of 6,663 litigated claims in July 2021, new data shows.
The management software company CaseGlide, which tracks the litigated claims of the 17 largest property and casualty insurance firms in the state, released the January figures earlier this month. Five Florida insurers reported month-over-month increases in litigated claims of more than 40%, according to CaseGlide, and only two firms registered claims increases of less than 20%.
The Florida Office of Insurance Regulation (OIR) has characterized the rates of litigation in the property insurance market in the state as “staggering.” According to a report released by Florida OIR in April of last year, the Florida market accounts for just over 8% of U.S. homeowner claims opened in 2019, but the state also accounted for more than three-fourths of all homeowner lawsuits filed against all U.S. insurers.
A reform bill, SB 76, took effect in July of last year to help deal with some of the drivers of property insurance litigation in Florida, and the lawsuit volumes have dropped since the new law took effect, according to CaseGlide.
““January’s steep increase could be the result of a return to normalcy following the holidays, or it could be that claims are now flowing through SB 76’s new process and into litigation,” Wesley Todd, CaseGlide’s CEO, said in a statement emailed to the Florida Record. “It bears mentioning that these numbers alone likely aren’t enough to assess the state of the market.”
Under SB 76, pre-litigation notices must be given before lawsuits are filed. CaseGlide combines the notices with actual lawsuits in its data analysis.
“If you consider the total pre-suit notices and lawsuits, insurers may unfortunately still have a similar total exposure to what they had in 2020 when the legislature first started considering SB 76,” Todd said.
Assignment-of-benefits (AOB) cases represented a slightly smaller percentage of total litigated claims than was the case in December, CaseGlide reported. That percentage went from 33% down to 31% in January. But AOB cases have been rising steadily since the first half of 2021, according to the report.
“It’s still too early to tell if SB 76 will lead to decreased litigation frequency and severity,” Todd said. “... As the data continues to develop, we will get a clearer picture.”