Is Your Insurance Claim Still Worth Pursuing After Florida’s 2022 Reform?

The honest answer is yes, but the math has changed, and you deserve to understand exactly how.

If you’ve filed a property insurance claim in Florida recently, or you’re thinking about it, you’ve probably heard some version of this: “There’s no point in hiring a lawyer anymore. The law changed. Attorneys can’t get their fees.”

That’s not quite right. And the data from our own case outcomes tells a more nuanced story: one where claims are still being paid, carriers are still settling, and policyholders are still recovering money to fix their properties. But it would be dishonest to pretend nothing changed. Something did change, materially, and you should understand what it means before you decide how to handle your claim.

What Actually Changed

On December 16, 2022, Florida’s SB 2-A took effect. The law eliminated one-way statutory attorney’s fees under §627.428 for property insurance claims. Here’s what that means in plain terms:

Before the reform: If you hired an attorney, filed suit against your insurance company, and recovered anything at all, even one dollar more than what the carrier offered, the carrier was required to pay your attorney’s fees on top of your recovery. Those fees were separate from your claim. You got your money to fix your property, and the carrier paid your lawyer directly. This gave attorneys significant leverage: the carrier knew that if it lost, it would be on the hook for legal fees in addition to the claim itself. That incentivized settlements.

After the reform: Your attorney’s compensation now comes from a percentage of the recovery itself. If you recover $20,000, your attorney’s fee comes out of that $20,000, not on top of it. The carrier no longer has to pay your lawyer separately.

This is a real, substantive change. We won’t minimize it.

Let’s Be Honest About What the Reform Did

The so-called insurance reform shifted leverage meaningfully in favor of insurance companies. Here’s how it actually plays out in practice:

Before, a property insurance attorney could focus singularly on litigating the case, obtaining the best possible recovery for the client’s damages, because the costs of that litigation would ultimately be borne by the carrier if the case resolved favorably. The attorney could hire experts, depose adjusters, retain engineers, commission supplemental estimates, and pursue every reasonable avenue of recovery knowing that those costs wouldn’t eat into what the client needed to repair their property.

Now, every dollar spent litigating the case is a dollar that comes out of the client’s recovery. That fundamentally changes the calculus. Attorneys still have to do the same work (obtain estimates, retain experts, negotiate with adjusters, file motions) but now they have to do it while maintaining a constant cost-benefit analysis on behalf of the client. The question is no longer just “Can we prove these damages?” It’s “Can we prove these damages in a way that leaves enough recovery after fees and costs to actually fix the property?”

So Why Is It Still Worth It?

Because the alternative is worse.

If your insurance carrier has denied your claim, or offered you a fraction of what the damage actually costs to repair, your choices are:

• Accept what the carrier offered (or nothing, if they denied it outright) and pay the full repair cost yourself
• File a claim, pursue recovery through the pre-suit and litigation process, and recover a portion of what you’re owed, even after fees and costs

Recovering 50% of the cost of repair is still better than recovering zero. That’s not a slogan. It’s arithmetic. If your roof replacement costs $40,000 and the carrier denied your claim entirely, recovering even $20,000 after fees and costs puts $20,000 back in your pocket that you wouldn’t otherwise have. That’s the point of insurance, and it’s the point of pursuing the claim.

The data backs this up. When we compare three years of pre-reform case outcomes against post-reform results using the same methodology:

Three out of four cases still result in the carrier paying something, virtually the same rate as before the reform. And the median case resolves in roughly half the time. That faster timeline is a direct consequence of the cost-benefit discipline the reform imposed: because fees and costs eat into the recovery, cases are being litigated more efficiently, settled more quickly, and resolved without the drawn-out fee disputes that used to add months or years to the process.

The Role of Your Public Adjuster and Contractor

Under the old system, an attorney could sometimes litigate damages into existence by spending heavily on experts and discovery to build a case. Under the new system, the estimate your public adjuster or general contractor prepares before litigation begins is more important than it has ever been.

Here’s why: in the vast majority of cases, the practical result is a settlement based on the estimate presented during the litigation process. Trials are rare. The estimate from your public adjuster, your contractor’s scope of work, your engineer’s report: these documents are the case. When a carrier looks at a well-documented estimate and knows it will hold up under scrutiny, they settle. When the documentation is thin or inconsistent, they push back, and the costs of fighting mount.

This means the quality of your initial damage documentation, not the aggressiveness of the litigation, is what drives the recovery. Public adjusters and restoration contractors who prepare thorough, defensible, Xactimate-backed estimates are putting their clients in the strongest possible position before an attorney ever files suit.

What About Proposal for Settlement?

There is still one significant tool available in certain cases where the carrier is offering nothing or next to nothing: the Proposal for Settlement (PFS) under Florida Statute §768.79. A PFS allows a party to make a formal settlement offer. If the offer is rejected and the case goes to trial, and the result is at least 25% better than the offer, the offering party can recover attorney’s fees.

This sounds powerful, and in theory, it is. But here’s the practical limitation: a PFS only comes into play if the case goes to trial and a judgment is entered. And the overwhelming majority of property insurance cases settle before trial. The carrier knows this. The claimant knows this. Everyone knows this.

So while the PFS creates some settlement pressure, particularly in cases where the carrier has offered nothing at all and the evidence of damages is strong, it is nowhere near the leverage that statutory one-way fees provided. Under the old system, the fee exposure existed from the moment suit was filed. Under PFS, it only materializes if both sides fail to settle and a jury returns a verdict that triggers it. That’s a much narrower window.

What the Data Actually Shows

We analyzed our firm’s case outcomes using a 3-year apples-to-apples comparison window: three years of cases before the reform against the post-reform period, controlling for hurricane vs. non-hurricane claims to avoid skewing the data.

The headline numbers

Post-reform cases result in the carrier paying 75.4% of the time, compared to 75.7% pre-reform. The payment rate is essentially unchanged. What did change: average gross recovery per case is lower ($17,467 vs $24,163), reflecting the shift from carrier-paid statutory fees to percentage-based fees. And cases resolve in a median of 6.4 months vs 12.7 months, nearly half the time.

Hurricane claims

Comparing Hurricane Ian (pre-reform) against Hurricane Helene (post-reform), the post-reform payment rate is actually higher at 83.3% vs 69.3%. Average gross per recovered case is lower ($20,256 vs $34,179), but the core finding is that hurricane claims are still being resolved successfully under the new fee structure.

Everyday (non-hurricane) claims

For routine water damage, roof leaks, plumbing failures, and other daily losses: 72.8% post-reform vs 76.6% pre-reform. Resolution time dropped from a median of 12.9 months to 6.9 months. These are the bread-and-butter property claims, and they’re still viable.

Carrier behavior

Post-reform, several carriers are paying on nearly every case we file against them. Others are more resistant. Knowing which carriers settle, and how quickly, is critical intelligence that directly affects whether your case makes economic sense to pursue. This is something your attorney should be evaluating from day one.

The Bottom Line

We could write a report that says “nothing changed, everything is fine, hire us.” That wouldn’t be true, and you’d see through it.

Here’s what’s actually true:

The 2022 reform made it harder. It shifted leverage to insurance companies. It changed the economics of litigation so that every dollar spent fighting the carrier is a dollar that comes out of what you’d use to fix your property. It removed the single most powerful tool plaintiff attorneys had: the threat of statutory fee exposure from the moment suit was filed.

But it did not make claims worthless. It did not stop carriers from paying. It did not eliminate the obligation of your insurance company to honor the policy you paid for. And the data from our own case outcomes, not hypothetical projections but actual results, shows that three out of four cases still result in the carrier paying, cases move faster, and hurricane claims are resolving at strong rates even under the new rules.

The math changed. The documentation your public adjuster prepares matters more than ever. The cost-benefit analysis is real and ongoing. But the alternative, accepting a denial or lowball offer and paying for repairs entirely out of pocket, is still worse.

Your claim is still worth fighting for. The fight just looks different now.