November 2020, CaseGlide’s Florida Claims Data Analysis

As the industry’s leading claims litigation management software provider, CaseGlide compiles a broad swath of claims data that represents a variety of segments and geographies. One of the most interesting data sets that we regularly gather and analyze are litigated claims specific to the majority of Florida’s largest P&C insurance organizations.

For the first time in five months, new litigated claims for Florida’s largest P&C insurers dropped. The decline to 4,307 cases was down 19% from the previous month’s figure of 5,340. This is the first significant month-over-month decline since May 2020, in which we observed 3,731 new cases.

Since we began measuring this data in 2014, the traditional annual peak for new litigated claims in Florida has been around August, with a consistent decline through the end of December. In true 2020 fashion, this year threw us a curveball as figures bucked that trend, continuing to steadily increase from May through November.

Only now are we at the point where we’re experiencing the trail-off of new litigated claims that historically occurs after the highs of summer. We expect that the COVID-19 crisis and late push for Hurricane Irma claims due to the September deadline contributed to this year’s deviation in the data.

Of the 17 largest Florida insurers we regularly monitor, all of them experienced a month-over-month decline in new litigated claims. Six insurers posted a greater than 25% month-over-month decline and 10 registered a decline between 10% and 25%.

AOB cases as a percentage of total new litigated cases also declined in November, with AOB cases representing only 18% of the total. November represented the lowest percentage of AOB cases to total new cases in 2020, having gradually declined from 31% registered in December 2019.

As we stated in last month’s analysis, the passing of Florida House Bill 7065 in July of last year looks to be the cause of the AOB percentage decline over time.

Year to date, the top 10 AOB contractors in the state represent 47% of all AOB-related new litigated claims, with the top contractor alone commanding 8.5%.

Geographic distribution of new litigated claims continues to be dominated by the state’s southern counties, with Miami-Dade accounting for 19% of claims, followed by Broward at 17%, and both Lee and Palm Beach at 10%. Those county percentages have been consistent over the course of 2020.

CaseGlide remains committed to observing this data closely, monitoring to see if these patterns persist and how the trends will impact insurers across Florida.