Florida Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse (CALA) is petitioning the public during Lawsuit Abuse Awareness Week about the costs of excessive civil litigation around the state and advocating for new reforms to ease burdens on workers, small businesses and startups.
Tom Gaitens, executive director of Florida CALA, said Oct. 7-11 is a time to shine attention on injustices that have beset the state’s civil justice system.
“This week is about holding attorneys, courts, judges and elected officials accountable,” Gaitens said in remarks emailed to the Florida Record. “... We’re advocating for a more balanced civil justice system that serves the greater good, not the special interests, trial lobby or selected few.”
Lawsuit Abuse Awareness Week, which was originated by the American Tort Reform Association, highlights the cost to society of frivolous lawsuits and offers direction for additional reforms in the future, in Florida and other states.
Last year was a banner year for tort-reform advocates as Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law measures to limit the “predatory practices” of trial attorneys, according to the Governor’s Office. House Bill 837 modified the bad faith standard in insurance litigation to establish that the standard is not based on negligence alone. The bill signed by DeSantis also eliminated one-way attorney-fee provisions and attorney-fee multipliers, and it standardizes how juries calculate medical damages and says a Florida defendant can’t be held responsible for damages if the plaintiff is determined to be more at fault than the defendant.
David Williams, president of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, said in a recent opinion piece that the tort reforms passed in Florida are a sign of commitment to a more transparent legal system. But not all of the legal reforms sought by reformers passed in recent years, according to Williams, adding that the funding of civil lawsuits by third-party financiers remains a concern due to a lack of regulation.
“Third-party litigation financing will continue to cause problems in the legal system until common-sense controls are instituted to make the process more transparent and focused on producing fair judicial outcomes instead of corporate profits,” Williams said.
Reform advocates also point to recent studies by The Perryman Group showing that excess litigation costs individual residents in the Orlando area $1,260 per person annually. In the Tampa-St. Petersburg area, the so-called “tort tax” is $1,324 per person, while the cost reaches $1,378 per person in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale region, according to the Perryman studies.
“A flawed civil justice system which generates exorbitant levels of damages or numbers of awards and which is unpredictable in its outcomes may result in negative impacts through the misallocation of society’s scarce economic and human resources,” the Perryman studies state.
But not everyone is convinced that tort reforms have been beneficial. A recent article in the Florida Bar Journal concluded that despite four decades of tort reforms in Florida’s medical malpractice litigation, the cost of malpractice insurance for Florida physicians is the highest in the nation compared to places such as New York and California.
“In fact, while tort reform measures have been implemented nationwide since the 1970s for the stated purpose of lessening medical malpractice insurance premiums for physicians, the actual data shows there has been no overall decrease in such premiums whatsoever,” the authors of the journal article state.