Picture a Florida homeowner in 2019. A pipe lets go inside a wall, and by the time anyone finds it, the kitchen cabinets are swollen and the floor is ruined. Her homeowners policy has been in place the whole time. She files the claim, the carrier sends an adjuster, and a check shows up for a fraction of what three different contractors say the repairs will cost.
She does what the system tells her to do. She argues, she documents, she gets nowhere, and in the summer of 2021 she files suit. The carrier’s answer is not about the damage. It is not about the price of cabinets or flooring. The answer is a piece of paper she never sent: a formal presuit notice that Florida law began requiring in the middle of 2021. Her case gets thrown out, not because her claim was weak, but because she skipped a step that did not exist when she bought her policy, when her pipe burst, or when she filed her claim.
That fact pattern repeated itself all over this state for five years, and last week it finally ran out of road.
Here is the rule at the center of it. Starting July 1, 2021, Florida required a policyholder to send a formal notice of intent to the Department of Financial Services, with a copy to the carrier, at least ten days before filing a property insurance lawsuit. The idea, on paper, was to give carriers one last window to settle before anyone pays a filing fee. Whatever you think of the idea, it was a new rule, written for new claims going forward.
The carrier tactic was to run it backward. Insurers argued the notice applied to every lawsuit filed after July 1, 2021, no matter when the policy was issued or when the loss happened. Homeowners who never recieved fair payment on older claims watched their cases get dismissed over a requirement that nobody on earth could have complied with when their policies were sold. And for about three years, Florida courts split down the middle on whether that was legal. The same facts could survive in one courthouse and die in another, depending on which appellate district the case sat in.
On October 22, the Florida Supreme Court settled it, and the answer favors the policyholder. The presuit notice requirement does not apply to policies issued before July 1, 2021. The reasoning is plain contract sense. A new law governs what comes after it unless the Legislature clearly says it reaches backward, and this law never said that. The court also refused to treat the notice as a harmless formality. A step that delays your right to sue, and that can get your case dismissed when it is missing, changes real rights under a contract that was already signed. Calling it a procedure does not make it one.
So who does this actually help? Anyone whose property policy was issued before July 1, 2021 and whose lawsuit was dismissed, or is being threatened with dismissal, for missing that notice. Older policies still surface more often than people think, in reopened claims, in supplemental claims from storms a few seasons back, and in the long tail of hurricane damage that takes years to price honestly. If a dismissal rested on the missing notice and the policy predates the law, the ground under that dismissal just moved.
What the ruling does not do matters just as much. Policies issued on or after July 1, 2021 still require the notice before suit, full stop. Every other deadline in the process still applies, and those clocks kept running while this fight played out. The decision is also brand new, and decisions like this carry a short window where the losing side can ask the court to reconsider, so read it as the law today with that small asterisk attached.
The practical lesson fits on an index card. Your declarations page, the first page or two of your policy, shows the date your policy was issued, and that date now decides which rulebook your claim plays under. Keep it with your claim letters, your estimates, and your payment records. If a carrier raises the missing notice against a claim sitting under an older policy, you now know that argument has an expiration date stamped on it. And if your claim was dismissed in the last few years, do not assume the file is dead or alive based on the dismissal alone. The policy date is the fact that matters, and it has been sitting in your paperwork the whole time.
Contracts work because the rules are set when the deal is made. A carrier prices a policy, collects the premium, and promises to pay covered losses under the terms that existed at the sale. Letting the carrier rewrite those terms with a law passed years later would make every policy a moving target. The court said no, in plain terms: you cannot be faulted for missing a step that had not been invented yet.
About the Author
Louis P. Meyer, Esq. is a Senior Attorney at Kanner & Pintaluga, P.A., where his practice focuses on first party property damage claims and personal injury cases across Florida, including hurricane, wind, water, fire, and mold losses, and car, motorcycle, and truck accidents. He writes the LouisTheLawyer publication on Substack and hosts the podcast Off The Record by Louis Meyer. He practices from the firm’s Tampa and Boca Raton offices. This article is general information about how insurance claims work in Florida. It is not legal advice about any specific claim or policy.
Louis P. Meyer, Esq., Senior Attorney, Kanner & Pintaluga, P.A., 100 S. Ashley Drive, Suite 610, Tampa, FL 33602. Phone: 561-206-2949. Email: lmeyer@kpattorney.com.
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