What the law changed
Florida signed HB 837 on March 24, 2023, and lawyers on both sides still call it the most consequential tort reform any large state has passed in a generation. It cut the statute of limitations for negligence from four years to two. It scrapped Florida's pure comparative-negligence rule for a modified one that bars recovery for any plaintiff found more than half at fault. It rewrote the rules on bad-faith claims, on medical-cost evidence, and on the one-way attorney's fees that had driven so much property-insurance litigation. Troutman Pepper Locke and the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation both laid out the changes in detail.
Early commentary split into two camps, the end of frivolous lawsuits or the end of access to justice, depending on who was writing. Three years on, neither camp got it right. The law gutted one kind of insurance work, barely touched another, and left Florida with two insurance defense markets that no longer move together.
The volume practice fell off a cliff
Auto glass tells the story fastest. Lawsuits over auto-glass repair claims dropped from 24,720 in the second quarter of 2023 to 2,613 in the same quarter of 2024, an 89 percent collapse in twelve months, on Florida Department of Financial Services data. United Automobile Insurance Company reported a 13 percent drop in litigated claims, a 10 percent drop in loss severity on the cases that still went forward, and a 10 percent drop in loss-adjustment expense as a share of loss.
Now read that as a staffing chart. The insurance defense firms built on PIP volume, glass volume, and one-way fee shifting lost the math that justified their headcount. Carriers moved just as fast, trimming reserves on the affected lines, tightening panel rosters, and trying borderline claims rather than settling to dodge the old fee exposure. Through 2024 and into 2025 we watched practice groups shrink, panel rates compress, and in a few cases whole teams shift to commercial work or leave the state.
What did not move
Volume work shrank. Complex work did not. Commercial general liability, trucking and transportation defense, construction defect, catastrophe response, large-loss property, product liability, all of it carried steady or rising demand through 2024 and 2025. The reason is mechanical. HB 837 did nothing to the risk on a $30 million trucking case or a hurricane-driven property loss. It changed the math on a $4,000 glass claim.
2026 hiring tracks that split cleanly. Florida firms with real complex-casualty and large-loss benches are hiring at every level, and several now pay above the old Florida range to pull senior trial talent away from regional and out-of-state competitors. Firms still tied to the high-volume work are not hiring, or are losing ground to their own attrition.
What we tell Florida firms hiring now
Our first message to firms scoping searches in 2026 is to stop pricing them against the pre-reform band when the work is complex. A senior commercial casualty defense lawyer in Tampa, Orlando, or Miami no longer lives in the market that existed in 2022, and a range that was fair then now reads as light for the people the firm actually wants. Our second message is that the door into Florida from a regional or southeast practice has opened wider, because firms losing senior partners to retirement or out-of-state moves are not always replacing them at the same level.
The thing we make Florida clients get specific about before we open a search is which side of the bifurcation the role actually serves, because the comp band, the candidate pool, and the pitch all follow from that answer. Most intake calls still describe the practice the firm had in 2022, and the search that gets scoped off that description is the search that stalls at week six.
What we tell candidates
For a candidate weighing a move inside Florida insurance defense, the question is which side of the split the destination sits on, not which name is on the door. A firm with a strong commercial casualty bench in 2026 looks nothing like its 2022 profile, and some of the volume-practice firms have gone the other way. Pay, hours, and trial track all differ across the divide, and the firm name alone no longer tells you which one you are walking into.
The question we tell every Florida insurance defense candidate to ask before accepting: what share of the group's billings last year came from lines HB 837 touched. The answer tells you whether you are joining the side of the market that is hiring or the side that is quietly shrinking, and most candidates never think to ask it.
The reform delivered what its backers wanted in one measurable way and what its critics feared in another, and from a recruiting chair both have been true at the same time for three years. The Florida market in 2026 is the one that came out of that, not the one the statute was written to fix.