In recent years, Sunshine State homeowners have assigned their insurance benefits to contractors repairing their hurricane damaged homes, an act that insurers believe leads to an exploitation of the Assignment of Benefits system through excessive repairs or inflated charges.
The new bill, which will go into effect on July 1, most notably switches Florida’s “one-way” attorney fee rule with a formula that determines an award for either the assignee or the insurer, or neither party.
“The current one-way attorney fee provision was always originally designed to help consumers who don't have the same financial resources as their insurers to go through litigation,” Vecchioli said. “Once these assignments started popping up, though, the insurer was no longer in litigation against a consumer, but against another sophisticated commercial company. It didn't seem fair or right that the insurance industry still had to deal with this one-way attorney fee provision in those situations."
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