Leveling the playing field
Wesley Todd, CEO, CaseGlide. Courtesy, CaseGlide
One of the elements credited in the evolving success of Florida’s recent property insurance reforms is data collection and reporting. Property insurance companies are required to provide regulators with specific data on litigated claims. The number of lawsuits decreased significantly in 2024 as a result and with it, upward pressure on homeowners insurance rates, as we’ve reported in this newsletter edition.
I had the pleasure of chatting after the New Year with Wesley Todd, the CEO of CaseGlide, a Tampa-based firm specializing in litigation analytics and software for the insurance industry. Our conversation was packed with eye-opening revelations and forward-thinking ideas. We recorded it as the latest edition of The Florida Insurance Roundup podcast.
Todd is behind a new effort to implement a litigation data standard among insurance companies nationwide. He said that the insurance industry today faces “an inflection point.” Nuclear verdicts, social inflation, and judicial activism have driven unprecedented litigation costs, destabilizing insurance companies’ ability to fulfill their fiduciary obligations. Meanwhile, plaintiff attorneys have transformed their practices with analytics, funding, and transparency, positioning themselves to maximize litigation outcomes “at the expense of insurers,” he said.
“I’m really sort of just giving the industry a heads-up that this is where we’re headed if we’re lucky, right? I mean otherwise it could be too late. It could be that insurance becomes unaffordable and unavailable in major lines like casualty, professional liability, just like we see in commercial auto, just like we saw temporarily in Florida,” Todd said.
We talked about the series of reforms from 2019 to 2023 that have significantly reduced litigation rates in Florida. One of the major ones was the elimination of one-way attorney fees for plaintiff attorneys. The issues we face in Florida though are not unique. A data-driven approach is leveling the playing field in Florida and reducing unnecessary expenses for policyholders. It could do so in other states. Todd’s point is that by providing a standardized data set, used by adjusters as well as attorneys, insurance company executives can make informed decisions and advocate for necessary legal system reforms in other states in which they do business. Proactively capturing and analyzing data can help avoid crises like those we’ve seen in Florida. Read more/Listen here.
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Thank you for being a part of this journey. Let’s continue to learn, grow, and make a difference in this New Year!
See you on the trail,
Lisa
LMA Newsletter of 1-13-25
