Webinar Breakdown: Florida Tort Reform: What’s Your Exposure?
5 Mins
For all those who braved Helene to join us for this webinar, all we can say is “Wow, does your boss know how dedicated you are?!!”
And for those of you who lost power or evacuated, safety comes first, and we got your back! Here are a few highlights of what you missed.
Tort reform for multifamily includes:
Modified comparative negligence. In the past, Florida has always ruled that if there's a slip and fall, and the property has any liability at all, you’re completely liable. That’s pretty extreme. This new modified system now reduces that liability down to 50%. So if the person suing you is more than 50% at fault (perhaps they were drinking, or running in high heels) they cannot recover anything.
Statute of limitations changes from four years to two years. And that’s huge, because it’s hard to even investigate a claim after 4 years. Employees change jobs, tenants move.
Admissibility of insurance paid on medical bills. Previously, in the event a multifamily property was found liable in court and a judgment was assessed, only Medicare and Medicaid payments were deducted from a claimant’s medical bills. Owners weren’t even allowed to ask how much insurance paid. Now, a claimant’s insurance payments are admissible and can be part of the assessment. That can reduce a judgment from $400k to $50k.
Modifications to bad faith: Personal injury attorneys can’t just make unreasonable demands to get a hold of your policy and threaten you with incurring additional costs before you can even investigate. Equally, there are some doctors personal injury attorneys favor in Florida, knowing they can run up a bill. Previously, the courts prevented juries from even knowing about those relationships between a personal injury lawyer and a doctor. Now that can be disclosed.
Disclosing an assailant in a negligent security case. Previously, if there was a criminal assailant that caused someone to file a negligent security claim, the assailant could not be on the verdict form of the trial. The jury did not get to know who that person was and did not get to apportion that person's fault. Now they do.
The presumption of innocence against negligence for compliant companies.
Number six is the single biggest change in the law. If you adopt the security measures in the law and you get those measures CPTED certified, a judge has to presume you are innocent of any negligent security claim.
In fact, if you achieve compliance with the statute’s requirements, it’s highly unlikely that a personal injury lawyer – who typically works on a contingency fee basis – would even take on a false liability claim against you.
Substantial Compliance
The law specifies you must be in “substantial compliance” in order to enjoy the presumption of innocence, but the law as written doesn’t actually define what that substantial compliance is: do you have to do ALL the security measures? Or can you do just some of them really, really well?
Only time will tell as more case law comes in. In the meantime, if you have to pick and choose. what can you do?
According to attorney Amanda Podlucky, the most important measure is surveillance. As a liability attorney she takes a long view of surveillance, because a subpoena can arrive up to two years after an incident.At which point, the employees and neighbors who knew something might’ve moved on. But film, well stored in the cloud, is forever.
She stresses to make sure those cameras are always operational, too. Nothing undermines the strength of a case like a security feature that was not working.
So if you start with surveillance as she suggests, look for a surveillance provider that offers:
Cloud storage
Playlists to keep clips of footage long term
Healthchecks that always tell you when your cameras are down.
Hey, we’ve got all that - and so much more. You can even stop a number of incidents from even occurring in real time with our solutions.
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