The number of lawsuits filed against Florida property insurers has plummeted by nearly 24% in the first three quarters of 2024 compared to the same period last year, suggesting that legal reforms passed by the state Legislature are having an impact.
The statistics come from an analysis by Guy Carpenter & Co., a reinsurance brokerage, which compiled the data for a client using public sources such as Florida Department of Financial Services data and the chief financial officer’s website. The statistics were recently published by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
The number of litigated claims dropped by 23.8% between those nine-month periods of 2023 and 2024 (36,639 lawsuits last year vs. 27,923 in the latest figures). Comparing the same periods of 2021 and 2024, the decline is even greater, 58.8%.
Supporters of the tort reform measures enacted in the state, including the executive director of Florida Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse (CALA), say the reduction in lawsuits is a direct result of the reforms passed in the last three years.
“This shows the improvements made in civil justice have paid dividends for Floridians,” Gaitens said in an email to the Florida Record. “... We should not rest on our laurels, but Florida has, through reforms like fixing the one-way attorney fees loophole (and) fixing the assignment of benefits (AOB) provisions, created a more balanced playing field for the civil justice system.”
Despite these reductions in legal costs, which insurers pass along to policyholders, much more is needed to combat the abusive nature of frivolous lawsuits by trial attorneys, he said.
Similar sentiments were expressed in a recent opinion piece by Locke Burt, the founder of Security First Insurance. Florida sustained five years of underwriting losses since the end of 2017 due to a number of factors, including severe weather events, rising reinsurance costs, fraud and a spike in frivolous litigation, Burt said.
This year, however, Florida insurers are reporting underwriting profits, with some of them requesting rate cuts, he said. The turnaround was the result of rising property insurance premiums during the red-ink years, with the average premium now 85% higher than what it was in 2017, according to Burt.
He also credited the Legislature’s decision to eliminate the ability of homeowners to assign insurance benefits to third parties; the demise of the state’s “one-way” attorney fee statute, which benefited trial lawyers; the requirement that lawyers provide insurers with a 10-day notice before filing lawsuits so that further negotiations might avoid court actions; and the limitation of attorney-fee multipliers to only the most extreme circumstances.
In turn, new capital and new insurance companies have been entering the Florida market, while the state-run insurer of last resort, Citizens Property Insurance Corp., has been able to reduce the number of policies in its portfolio, according to Jerry Theodorou, director for finance, insurance and trade for the Washington, D.C.-based R Street Institute.
Critics, however, point out that the reduction in legal costs has come at a price. Weiss Ratings, which tracks the safety of insurers, banks and credit unions, reported earlier this year that the three largest property insurance companies in the Florida market rejected nearly half of their policyholders’ claims in 2023.
“In the wake of increasing property damage from storms and record insurance company bankruptcies, this high rate of claims denials is severely compounding the hardships for Florida homeowners,” Dr. Martin D. Weiss, founder of Weiss Ratings, said in a prepared statement.
The average property claims denial rate in Florida has been 44.7%, according to Weiss Ratings.