Insurance Bad Faith Lawyer

Insurance bad faith is a legal claim against an insurance company for how it handled your claim, not merely for the answer it gave. Every insurance policy carries a duty of good faith: the insurer must investigate promptly, evaluate honestly, and attempt to settle a claim it could and should settle. When a carrier puts its own financial interests ahead of yours (misrepresenting what the policy says, denying without a real investigation, or stalling a claim it knows it owes), the law provides a remedy beyond the policy itself. That remedy is extra-contractual damages: money above and beyond the policy proceeds, awarded because of the insurer’s conduct.

Bad faith is a specific cause of action with strict prerequisites, not a label for every frustrating claim experience. The remedy runs through a statutory process that requires a formal pre-suit notice, a cure window in which the insurer can fix the violation, and proof of conduct that goes beyond an honest mistake. Some matters may be accepted on a contingency basis. This page explains the mechanism step by step: the civil remedy notice, the 60-day cure period, the reforms enacted in 2022 and 2023, the conduct that supports a claim, and what a policyholder can actually recover.

What Insurance Bad Faith Is, and What It Is Not

Bad faith comes in two forms. First-party bad faith is between you and your own insurer: you filed a claim under your own policy, and the carrier mishandled it. Third-party bad faith involves a liability insurer that exposes its own policyholder to a judgment by refusing to settle a claim against that policyholder. This page addresses first-party bad faith on property claims, the kind that grows out of a hurricane, water, or fire claim the carrier handled improperly.

It is equally important to understand what bad faith is not, because the label gets used loosely:

• A wrong denial, standing alone, is not bad faith. An incorrect denial is a breach of contract, and the remedy is the policy benefits themselves. If that is where your claim stands, start with our page on fighting a denied property insurance claim. Bad faith concerns the conduct surrounding the decision, not just the decision.
• A low estimate, standing alone, is not bad faith. Estimates can be honestly wrong. Persistent lowballing after the insurer has been given contrary documentation is a different matter. Our underpaid claim page covers the payment-gap dispute itself.
• Slowness, standing alone, is not bad faith. Florida sets specific claim-handling deadlines, and violations matter as evidence, but delay has its own remedies short of a bad-faith suit. If silence and delay are your core problem, start with our delayed insurance claim page.
• Negligence is not bad faith. Since 2023, the statute states that mere negligence alone is insufficient. A single miscalculation or missed email will not carry the claim.

What remains is the core of the cause of action: an insurer that fails to attempt in good faith to settle a claim when, under all the circumstances, it could and should have done so, had it acted fairly and honestly toward its insured and with due regard for the insured’s interests. That standard (the actual statutory language) is about process: what the insurer knew, when it knew it, and what it did next.

The Statutory Remedy: Fla. Stat. 624.155

In Florida, first-party bad faith is a creature of statute. Fla. Stat. 624.155 gives any person damaged by an insurer’s violation a civil remedy. The provision that carries most property cases is section 624.155(1)(b)1, the failure to attempt in good faith to settle, quoted above. The statute also makes certain violations of Florida’s insurance trade practices law actionable, including the unfair claim settlement practices catalogued in Fla. Stat. 626.9541(1)(i), which we walk through below.

Why pursue it? Because a breach-of-contract action is capped, as a practical matter, at what the policy owes. A bad-faith action reaches the harm the mishandling itself caused (which can exceed the policy limits) plus court costs and reasonable attorney fees upon an adverse adjudication. For a property owner who spent two years fighting for a roof the carrier should have paid for in month two, that difference matters.

The framework sits across several statutes. Here is the map:

The Civil Remedy Notice and the 60-Day Cure Window

Before any statutory bad-faith action can be filed, Fla. Stat. 624.155(3) requires 60 days’ written notice of the violation to both the insurer and DFS. This filing is the Civil Remedy Notice of Insurer Violation, the CRN. It is submitted electronically on a DFS form and must state with specificity the statutory provisions the insurer allegedly violated, the facts and circumstances giving rise to the violation, the names of the individuals involved, and the policy language relevant to the violation. Vague grievances do not satisfy the statute; courts have dismissed bad-faith actions built on CRNs that lacked the required specificity.

The 60 days that follow are a cure window. If the insurer pays the damages or corrects the circumstances giving rise to the violation within that period, no action lies: the statutory claim is extinguished. That design is deliberate. The CRN is not a lawsuit; it is a formal, public demand that forces the carrier to decide, with its regulator watching, whether to fix the claim or accept bad-faith exposure.

Two practical points follow. First, the CRN is a public record: DFS maintains a searchable database of every notice filed against every carrier, which is also why a well-drafted CRN gets attention inside an insurance company. Second, because the cure window can end the statutory claim, a CRN is most useful when the damages are documented precisely. An insurer that can “cure” by paying a number should be looking at your number, supported by contractor bids and evidence, not a placeholder.

The 2022 and 2023 Reforms Changed the Order of Operations

Two rounds of legislation rewrote Florida bad-faith practice, and older articles you may find online describe a world that no longer exists. Write this sequence down, because it now controls everything.

The 2022 property insurance reforms created Fla. Stat. 624.1551, which applies specifically to property insurance. Senate Bill 2-D established it in the May 2022 special session, and Senate Bill 2-A amended it that December. To pursue extra-contractual damages, the policyholder must first establish, through an adverse adjudication by a court of law, that the insurer breached the insurance contract, and a final judgment or decree must be rendered. In plain terms: you win the contract case first. The bad-faith case is a second phase, built on the record made during the first. The December 2022 amendment also closed two shortcuts: acceptance of an offer of judgment under Fla. Stat. 768.79, and payment of an appraisal award, do not constitute an adverse adjudication.

House Bill 837 (2023) then tightened the substance of Fla. Stat. 624.155 itself. It amended the statute to state that mere negligence alone is insufficient to constitute bad faith. It also imposed a duty on insureds, claimants, and their representatives to act in good faith when furnishing information, making demands, setting deadlines, and attempting to settle, and while a breach of that duty gives the insurer no claim against you, the trier of fact may reasonably reduce the damages awarded.

The appraisal carve-out deserves emphasis, because appraisal is where many property disputes end up. Winning a large insurance appraisal award does not, by itself, open the door to a bad-faith action. The statute does allow the difference between the insurer’s appraiser’s final estimate and the appraisal award to be used as evidence of bad faith (a large gap is powerful proof), but the gap alone is not an adjudication and does not create the cause of action.

Conduct That Supports a Bad-Faith Case

Fla. Stat. 626.9541(1)(i) lists the unfair claim settlement practices that, committed with the required frequency or as part of the insurer’s claim handling, feed a statutory bad-faith case. In plain English, the ones we see most on property claims:

• Misrepresenting pertinent facts or policy provisions: telling you the policy excludes something it covers, or mischaracterizing what your coverage requires.
• Failing to acknowledge and act promptly on claim communications: the file that goes quiet every time you ask a direct question.
• Denying a claim without a reasonable investigation: a denial issued without an inspection, or one that ignores the available information.
• Failing to affirm or deny coverage within a reasonable time after proof-of-loss statements are complete.
• Failing to promptly provide a reasonable written explanation of the policy basis for a denial or a partial payment.

Florida’s claim-handling deadlines give this conduct hard edges. Under Fla. Stat. 627.70131, a residential property insurer must acknowledge your claim within 7 days, begin its investigation within 7 days of receiving your proof of loss, conduct any physical inspection within 30 days, and pay or deny within 60 days, subject to narrow exceptions. Each missed deadline is a dated, documented fact. Our insurer response timeline checker maps your claim’s dates against these requirements, and our article on how long an insurance company has to pay in Florida explains each deadline. A missed deadline is not automatic bad faith, but a file full of them is the skeleton of the case.

How a Bad-Faith Case Proceeds, Step by Step

Because of the sequencing rules above, a Florida property bad-faith case is a chain. Every link has to hold:

1. Preserve the underlying claim. Nothing else matters if the contract claim dies. Initial claim notice is due within 1 year of the date of loss, supplemental claims within 18 months (Fla. Stat. 627.70132), and suit on the policy within 5 years of the date of loss (Fla. Stat. 95.11(2)(e)). Run your dates through our insurance claim deadline calculator.
2. Build the record in real time. Every call summarized in a follow-up email, every estimate kept, every deadline logged. Bad faith is proved with documents, and the documents are created now (during the claim), not later.
3. Resolve the contract dispute. Before suing on the policy, Fla. Stat. 627.70152 requires a pre-suit notice of intent to litigate, which gives the carrier a final chance to respond. Our guide to suing your homeowners insurance company in Florida covers this phase in detail.
4. Obtain the adverse adjudication. Under Fla. Stat. 624.1551, the court must determine that the insurer breached the contract, and a final judgment or decree must be rendered. A settlement, an accepted offer of judgment, or a paid appraisal award does not satisfy this step.
5. File the CRN and let the cure window run. The CRN must be on file at least 60 days before the bad-faith action is brought. Where in the sequence to file it is a strategic decision we make case by case, based on the record and the carrier’s posture.
6. Bring the bad-faith action. With breach adjudicated and the cure window expired, the extra-contractual case proceeds, and the claim file, the missed deadlines, and the appraisal gap become the evidence.

Be realistic about what this chain means: statutory bad faith is a long instrument, not a quick fix. Its practical power is often felt earlier: a carrier that knows a clean record is being built against it values the underlying claim differently.

What You Can Recover

Upon an adverse adjudication, Fla. Stat. 624.155 makes the insurer liable for the damages caused by the violation, together with court costs and reasonable attorney fees. Critically, the damages may include amounts in excess of the policy limits: the losses that flowed from the mishandling itself, not just the benefits the policy owed. For a property owner, that can mean the cost consequences of years of delay: deterioration, financing costs, losses a timely payment would have prevented, proven with documentation.

Punitive damages (damages meant to punish rather than compensate) are available only in narrow circumstances: the insurer’s acts must occur with such frequency as to indicate a general business practice, and must be willful, wanton, and malicious, or in reckless disregard of your rights. That is a deliberately high bar, and no lawyer can promise it. We do not build cases on the hope of punishment; we build them on documented, compensable harm.

What a Bad-Faith Case Costs

Fee arrangements depend on the matter. Some property-insurance bad-faith matters may be accepted on a contingency basis. Under a contingency agreement, no recovery means no attorney’s fee, case costs, or expenses are owed. The written engagement agreement states the terms before any work begins.

Two statutes also shape the economics. Fla. Stat. 624.155 awards court costs and reasonable attorney fees to a policyholder who prevails after an adverse adjudication. And Fla. Stat. 768.79 (the proposal-for-settlement statute) lets either side serve a formal offer that shifts attorney fees if it is rejected and the final judgment beats it by the statutory margin. Used precisely, a proposal for settlement puts real pressure on a carrier that is dragging. For a fuller breakdown of fee structures, see our FAQ on what a property insurance lawyer costs.

Why Cory Cannon

Bad faith is a documents case, and the decisive documents are construction documents: estimates, scopes of work, engineering reports, bids. I am a Florida attorney with a family history in construction for generations, and that shows in how I work a file. I read the carrier’s estimate line by line: unit costs, quantities, overhead and profit, line items that quietly disappeared between drafts. We check the carrier’s figures against real bids from licensed local contractors, because the gap between an adjuster’s desk estimate and what a contractor will actually sign is often the clearest evidence that the insurer did not evaluate the claim honestly.

When causation or structural questions are disputed, we retain independent licensed engineers rather than argue past the carrier’s reports. And because we know what the record has to look like two years from now (specific, dated, and tied to the statutory duties), we start building it on day one. That is what “attempting in good faith to settle” litigation ultimately turns on: a record precise enough that a judge can see exactly what the insurer knew and when.

When the Problem Is a Contractor, Not the Insurer

One caution before you commit to an insurance fight. If your loss traces to defective work (a roof installed wrong, window flashing that was never sealed, stucco that cracked in year two), the responsible party may be the contractor or builder rather than the insurer, or both on separate tracks. Insurance bad faith will not fix a construction defect claim, and the deadlines and procedures are entirely different. Our construction defect practice handles that side of the line, and our guide on suing a contractor in Florida explains where those claims start.

Start With Your Claim File

If you believe your insurer has crossed from a hard dispute into misconduct, the evaluation starts with your paper: the policy, the denial or payment letters, the estimates, and your correspondence timeline. I will tell you plainly whether the record supports a bad-faith track, whether the smarter fight is the underlying property insurance claim, or both in sequence. Request a free consultation and send us what you have: the earlier we see the file, the more of the record we can still shape.