New law aimed at reducing litigation sparks wave of tens of thousands of lawsuits

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — A new law attempting to cut down on lawsuits has had the opposite effect, at least in the short term.

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Before the law took effect Saturday Florida saw a nearly 700 percent increase in civil suits, with roughly 6,000 new suits being filed in Duval alone.

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Shannon Schott is a local attorney who largely deals with personal injury claims.

In anticipation of a new state law reforming how civil suits are dealt with in Florida, her firm filed nearly 50 suits last week.

“We filed to ensure that the rules of the game didn’t change to their detriment,” Schott said.

It’s a similar story statewide, where tens of thousands of civil claims flooded into clerk of courts offices ahead of the law’s effective date, potentially threatening to cause a litigation logjam.

“It’s not the fault of these defense attorneys, it’s the fault of the insurance companies who lobbied for this legislation,” Schott said.

The Governor unveiled the legislation here in Jacksonville last month, selling it as a way to end Florida’s designation as a ‘judicial hell hole’.

“You have a lot of use of the legal system that’s not being put towards benefiting somebody that was harmed as much as it’s done to benefit lawyers who are involved in the system,” Governor Ron DeSantis said in a Valentine’s Day press conference.

The bill cuts the time people have to file civil claims from four years down to just two, makes it more difficult for attorneys to receive fee multipliers and limits the ability for defendants to have to pay plaintiffs attorney’s fees.

It makes changes to civil cases ranging from personal injury claims to property and auto insurance claim disputes.

Florida House Speaker Paul Renner (R-Palm Coast) argued the changes will lower the cost of doing business, by reducing incentives for frivolous lawsuits.

“Then that gets passed through in the cost of goods and the cost of services,” Renner said during a press availability after the House approved the bill earlier this month.

But Schott argued the law only stands to benefit insurance companies and big business.

“If they can convince six people that you’re at fault and really they did nothing wrong then you get nothing and that creates a real risk, it creates an access to court issues and it’s definitely going to delay this process further,” Schott said.

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Schott said she does anticipate there will be legal challenges to many of the provisions in the new law in the near future.