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If the Florida insurance litigation industry was a factory, churning out lawsuits against insurance companies, it would crush competitors — nearly every state — in output.
Examples are myriad: Miami attorney Isabel Arias, with The Cohen Law Group, filed 1,588 lawsuits against insurance firms in the six months from October through March, according to a Florida Office of Insurance Regulation report. Another attorney, Coconut Grove-based Anthony Lopez, filed 1,959 lawsuits against insurance companies in the same period. And Kevin Weisser, with Weisser Elazar & Kantor in Fort Lauderdale, filed 2,081 lawsuits against insurance firms in those six months — roughly an average of 17 lawsuits per each day the courthouse was open.
The OIR report was part of an April 2 letter from Florida Insurance Commissioner David Altmaier to Florida Rep. Rep. Blaise Ingoglia, R-Spring Hill, chairman of the House Commerce Committee. Altmaier is part of a growing number of officials calling for insurance litigation reform, saying it’s one of the core reasons, along with rising reinsurance costs and losses from 2017-2018 storms, millions of homeowners are seeing double-digit property insurance rate hikes. With that in mind, State Sen. Jim Boyd, R-Bradenton, and Rep. Bob Rommel, R-Naples, have each sponsored insurance industry reform bills in the 2021 Legislative session.
Boyd’s bill restricts awarding contingency risk multipliers to a rare and exceptional circumstance; requires policy-holders to file claims within two years, down from three; and creates a “reimbursement schedule” that allows insurers to sell policies with reduced payments for roofs over 10-years-old, according to the Florida Center Square, a Tallahassee news site. Rommel’s bill has some of the same reforms, but doesn’t address contingency risk multipliers — fees attorney collect when they win cases against insurers, or sometimes, when a case is settled before a trial.
Florida, say several of the supporters of insurance reform, is an outlier nationally in allowing contingency risk multipliers that lead to big paydays. That could partially explain why the OIR report found Florida accounted for 76.45% of all homeowners’ lawsuits opened against insurance companies in the U.S. in 2019 — while accounting for just 8.16% of all homeowners’ claims opened by insurance companies. That disparity is part of four-year trend, the report adds.
Altmaier offered additional reforms to the Rommel’s House bill, including curtailing the one-way attorney’s fees statute, which, he writes, “provides an incentive for litigation to come before our judicial system that may not always be legitimate.”
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