A bill containing tort reforms that a trial attorney association says will threaten Floridians’ right to jury trials was introduced in the Florida Legislature last week with the backing of the governor and legislative leaders.
Rep. Tommy Gregory (R-Lakewood Ranch) introduced House Bill 837 in the wake of an announcement by Gov. Ron DeSantis, Senate President Kathleen Passidomo and House Speaker Paul Renner pledging bold steps to improve the state’s legal climate.
The bill’s supporters say it would build on legislation passed in December that aimed to stabilize the state’s property insurance market, which has been struggling to deal with litigated claims and insurer insolvencies. But the Florida Justice Association, previously known as the Academy of Florida Trial Lawyers, said last week that HB 837 would grant too much power to the state’s insurance industry.
“What is fair about telling a family of eight whose home was destroyed by Hurricane Michael that their insurance company should be allowed to underpay their claim, preventing them from rebuilding the family home that was fully insured?” the FJA president, Curry Pajcic, said in a prepared statement. “... Justice is the only thing preventing the insurance industry from taking over our state, limiting our freedom and irreparably decimating the rights of our neighbors, family and friends.”
Insurance industry officials, however, see the bill as critical to protecting consumers and squeezing out abusive litigation, which they say raises the costs for Florida policyholders.
“This tort reform package is the most consequential in decades,” the president and CEO of the Personal Insurance Federation of Florida (PIFF), Michael Carlson, said in a statement emailed to the Florida Record. “It addresses long-standing weaknesses in Florida’s judicial system and balances the interests of plaintiffs and defendants.”
The state’s executive and legislative branches are now unified in a desire to create a fairer system that will protect consumers and reduce excessive lawsuits filed by lawyers only for profit, Carlson said.
HB 837 would alter Florida’s comparative negligence system so that if a defendant is less at fault for a plaintiff’s injury than the plaintiff, the plaintiff cannot recover damages from the defendant. The bill also aims to provide a more accurate way to calculate medical damages in personal-injury cases, and it would end the use of contingency-fee multipliers for attorney-fee awards in most cases, according to the Florida House of Representatives’ analysis of the bill.