Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called for a tightening of the state’s litigation process to make it tougher to file frivolous lawsuits, and to guard against unscrupulous “billboard lawyers.”
Speaking in Jacksonville on Feb. 14, DeSantis was joined by legislative leaders House Speaker Paul Renner and Senate Majority Leader Kathleen Passidomo who vowed to work to shape the legislation and get it passed.
The legislation would seek to end “one-way attorney fees” and “fee multipliers,” which were also targets of the legislature’s December bill reforming property insurance, the governor’s office said in a press release.
Florida has a good business climate, DeSantis said, noting its low unemployment rate and significant population in-migration. But one reason some businesses hesitate to move there, he said, was the state’s reputation as a “judicial hellhole.”
He said businesses get sued a lot, and the court climate forces them to settle when they’ve done little or nothing wrong. That, in turn, drives up costs for the businesses that they must then swallow—lessening profitability, their ability to invest or give employees raises—or pass on to customers.
The Republican leaders put the blame squarely on those lawyers who abuse the process. DeSantis called them “billboard lawyers,” those with their faces on a billboard. “You don’t necessarily see that in a lot of other states.”
“I’d say about 90 percent of the lawyers in this state really do a good job,” said Passidomo. “They care about their clients. They represent all your business people. You oftentimes need a lawyer to represent your interests.”
“Ten percent of them are out there with a business model . . . ‘We represent insurance companies for fees.’ There’s nothing about clients in there.”
DeSantis ticked off some egregious instances where the plaintiff got little or nothing while the plaintiff’s lawyer got a big payday.
He cited an example of a case where the client won $216.67 while the lawyer got over $100,000 in fees. Then there was a case involving a $1.48 interest miscalculation that generated more than $78,000 in attorney fees. In yet another, a client got $2,114.55 while the attorney recovered over eight times as much. In an insurance case, DeSantis said, a $41,000 claim for the policyholder generated $1.2 million for the attorney.
In the governor’s office statement, Renner said a report by the American Tort Reform Foundation shows Florida’s lax litigation environment each year costs every household $5,000 and the state 173,000 jobs.
DeSantis tied the reforms to insurance reforms enacted in December to keep insurance companies from leaving the state.
“Florida had represented 8 percent of all property insurance claims in the United States but accounted for almost 80 percent of all property insurance litigation,” he said. Florida laws have made it easier than in other places to win a nuisance settlement, where a defendant isn’t at fault but finds it cheaper to settle than to fight a protracted court case.
“You have an incentive as a cost of doing business to just do a settlement because it’ll be cheaper than hiring lawyers to prove your innocence,” he said.
DeSantis said his judicial appointments to the state supreme court and lower courts have helped because the state’s litigation climate—“we really had a cottage industry of litigation”—had been driven in turn by “activist court decisions over a number of decades.
“So that genie is back in the bottle. The activism from the courts and state level is gone. But we still nevertheless have a lot of lawsuits.”
DeSantis spoke at the Kenworth of Jacksonville truck dealership, in front of gleaming rows of new trucks. Rob Sandlin, CEO of Patriot Transportation Holding Inc. and Florida Rock & Tank Lines Inc. in Jacksonville, spoke about how the litigation climate had made it difficult to find affordable insurance.
“In many cases, insurance companies have just decided not to write insurance in this state.” In the last five years, Sandlin said, his companies’ insurance rates had gone up 73 percent while they’d reduced their coverage by 60 percent.
“And we also have to have a six-figure self-insurance deductible.”
He said that most trucking firms are small companies with 10 or fewer employees and can be driven out of business if insurance costs too much. This is contributing to the shortage of truckdrivers, he said.
Sandlin said there was one big problem: even a case where the company bears little or no blame will draw a claim and force a settlement with “billboard lawyers.” In one case, one of his trucks had stopped at railroad tracks as legally required and was rear-ended by a motorist. Their company had to pay 20 percent of the medical bills, which were significant, despite their driver not being at fault.
“If we cause an accident and we hurt somebody, we want to do what’s right and we want to pay for those injuries,” Sandlin said. “We don’t think we should be paying for injuries we don’t cause.”
