Florida Supreme Court rules 2021 presuit notice rule does not apply to older property policies

WLRN reported on 23 October that Florida's Supreme Court had ruled unanimously the day before that the presuit notice requirement in section 627.70152 of the Florida Statutes does not apply to suits on property policies issued before the rule took effect on 1 July 2021. The requirement, part of the 2021 insurance bill SB 76, obliges a policyholder to give the insurer 10 days' notice before suing over a claim. According to an analysis by the law firm Butler Weihmuller Katz Craig, the issue date of the policy decides the question, not the date of loss or the date of the suit.

Justice John D. Couriel wrote the opinion, and Justice Adam Tanenbaum agreed with the result in a separate concurrence. The court approved the Sixth District Court of Appeal's ruling and disapproved the Fourth District's contrary decision in Cole v. Universal. Before the ruling, the First, Second and Fifth Districts had treated the rule as applying only to new policies, while the Third and Fourth had applied it to older ones.

The case began with a water damage claim. Universal Property & Casualty insured Rebecca Hughes from April 2019 to April 2020 and paid the claim; she sought more and sued in August 2021, and the trial judge dismissed the suit because she had not given notice. The Supreme Court held that the notice requirement is substantive rather than procedural, and that the statute's reference to "all suits" describes the types of coverage dispute it covers, not when they arose. WLRN reported that the court also found that legislative silence is not clear evidence that a law applies retroactively.

The Florida Justice Reform Institute and three insurance industry groups had filed a brief supporting Universal. The institute's president, William Large, told the Florida Phoenix that the opinion was "probably the clearest articulation" of what is needed to make a law retroactive. According to WLRN, Large expects the ruling to settle future disputes over whether a law can be applied retroactively.