Opinion: “The Promise of Litigation Reform”

By John C. Kramner

For decades, Florida has been viewed as one of the worst places to do business, mainly because of our litigious justice system.  We seemed to be stuck on the annual “Judicial Hellholes” list put out every year by the American Tort Reform Association.

That all changed in 2023 when Governor Ron DeSantis and the Florida Legislature passed groundbreaking legislation to rein in frivolous lawsuits.  It was a move heralded by the national business community, and it has had an immediate impact on improving the availability of property insurance in the state.

For many years in Florida, lawyers have used loopholes to exploit the question of who is at fault and try to sue deep pockets for damages that were not directly caused by those deep pockets.  That all stopped in 2023, and now, many of the bullying tactics used by attorneys to badger a small business into a settlement are impotent.  The lawsuit reform package is exactly what bounced Florida off the bad list and relegated us only to a watch list.

Small businesses and big businesses alike have to factor in the cost of litigation in everything that they do.  The more frivolous and random the lawsuits are, the less predictability there is for a business model, and any costs associated with litigation is passed along to consumers.  Second, they have to pay out of pocket for additional attorneys every time they are hit with a legal expense.  Third, when they are sued, if the insurance company has to settle to protect itself from a frivolous lawsuit, the insurance premium goes up.  That expense just doesn’t get passed along to that one particular business.  It affects every business in the insurance pool.  All of those businesses then have to pass those costs along to their customers.  Multiply this across the economy with tens of thousands of frivolous lawsuits, and you can understand why then that the costs of lawsuits is often referred to as the tort tax.  That’s because we all pay it.

If one attorney files a frivolous lawsuit and hits it big with a favorable jury, it is not the company paying those big awards, it is all of us: the ratepayers and the consumers in the marketplace.

This is why it was so critical that the legislature deal with this business by bringing commonsense to the process.  We are all tired of paying the tort tax.  There were a few more things that the legislature in this past legislative session failed to address even though they tried.  They failed to address third-party financing of lawsuits and caps on non-economic damages for medical malpractice. 

We have more to do, and we should not stop until fairness reigns across the board, and everyone can work or entertain without fear of a lawsuit hanging over their heads.