What’s behind Florida insurers being battered with lawsuits the last 10 months?
Heading into September, nearly 100 federal lawsuits were filed against property and casualty insurers, according to Law.com Radar.
Property and casualty insurers are getting battered with lawsuits in Florida, according to Law.com Radar, which has found that these companies are increasingly seeking the work of three law firms.
And that includes the law firm Fowler White Burnett in which a partner and head of its insurance practice group, Michael Pennekamp, said he always sees an uptick in litigation following a downturn in the economy and of select major events. Here, State Farm, Allstate and other major insurers are primarily feeling the effect of Hurricane Ian, a deadly Category 5 hurricane.
“You see a major uptick when a hurricane is about a year out, whenever the statute of limitations on it is going to run out,” Pennekamp said, “or, if the legislature changes the rules of the game, which they did recently with the tort reform where they moved up the filing deadlines and the statute of limitations, and they changed the rules about what’s recoverable and what’s not recoverable.”
Hurricane Ian made landfall in Fort Myers, Florida, on Sept. 28, 2022, with howling winds, torrential rains and a surge of ocean surf that caused $60 billion of insured damages and $100 billion in total losses.
Meanwhile, on March 23, the tort reform law, House Bill 837-Civil Remedies, replaced the pure comparative negligence system with a modified comparative negligence system. Proponents of the law said it created uniform standards to help jury members in civil trials determine damages and medical claims in cases of death or severe personal injury.
The law standardized evidence for medical claims, and regulated “bad faith” actions to expedite dispute resolution. However, plaintiff attorneys have overwhelmingly taken issue with the law’s elimination of payments to plaintiffs, if a jury finds them to be 51% at fault. Leading up to the effective date of the legislation becoming law, Florida state courts were initially overwhelmed with filings.
Radar found that since the new law became effective, attorneys have increasingly filed some cases in federal court. Heading into September, nearly 100 federal lawsuits were filed against property and casualty insurers on Radar’s sector watchlist, continuing an upward trend that traces back about 10 months, with the most significant surge starting in April.
During the 10-month period, monthly case counts have increased by almost 50% from the previous 12-month average. And the law firms obtaining the lion’s share of the work are Fowler White, Butler Weihmuller Katz Craig, and Shutts & Bowen.
Fowler White has been in South Florida for eighty years, and Pennekamp, who has been an insurance litigator for over three decades, said he expects the filings to continue in the short term before falling off, likely pending the next natural disaster. He noted that among the reasons insurance companies chose his law firm is that they implement a “triage.”
“We go to every trial with a trial partner, a trial associate, and an appellate attorney, and our insurers know that,” Pennekamp said. “We’re able to take that case from that first moment in time through the appellate process.”