No longer playing nice?
Credit: CherylEDavis
After Governor DeSantis a week ago Friday signed tort reform bill HB 837 into law, some in the trial bar went into a bit of a meltdown, threatening to play hardball with the insurance industry, whom they blame for the bill rather than looking at their own. Lawyer-friendly publication Above the Law published Massive Plaintiffs Law Firm Decides To Play Hardball With Insurance Industry, which includes the full internal email from Matt Morgan (son of John) of the now nationwide Morgan & Morgan law firm. It reads, in part:
I want to make it unequivocally clear that we will not be giving an inch to carriers ever again… Under no circumstances will we be agreeing to any continuances, discovery extensions, or request to extend deadline to answer complaints. We may want to help the human being defense attorney because we know them and maybe like them, but we will not because they work for an enemy who is heartless and ruthless. The enemy who just tried to kill us in FL.
Lest my gentle readers fret, please rest assured that “Lawyers will find ways to adapt,” said Alex Arteaga-Gomez, plaintiff attorney with the Grossman Roth Yaffa Cohen firm in Miami, speaking to the Daily Business Review last week.
As trial lawyers often argue in court, facts are stubborn things. The inconvenient truth is that Florida has 7% of the nation’s homeowners insurance claims yet 76% of the nation’s homeowners insurance lawsuits. That comes from the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation. Morgan & Morgan is throwing a temper-tantrum with their legal antics, filing mass lawsuits before the new tort reform law’s effective date and then refusing flexibility in allowing proper time needed to answer this tsunami of litigation. They are simply proving their opponents’ case on why this tort reform was so desperately needed. To paraphrase Shakespeare’s Hamlet, John Morgan, “Methinks thou dost protest too much.”
This law should end the lawsuit-for-profit schemes crafted by greedy trial lawyers who’ve taken civil justice and turned it into a common commodity to be bought and sold to the detriment of the greater body of Florida’s taxpaying citizens and businesses.
As to the question of when we can expect to see insurance rates come down, one of the goals of this recent tort reform and the 2022 insurance consumer protections and market reforms, Citizens Property Insurance Chairman Carlos Beruff addressed that with Citzens’ Board of Governors last week. “I think it’s important…that when we’re communicating with the public, let them understand this isn’t a quick fix. It’s going to take time. The repercussions to the rates and getting the insurance market healthy, as we’ve discussed internally amongst us is going to take two to three years. So it’s important to communicate that every chance we get so people don’t have expectations of immediate relief. At the end of the day what we can control is customer service….we will endeavor to be the best at customer delivery and customer service in the state.”
Food for thought!
LMA Newsletter of 4-3-23
