Lawsuit Abuse Disguised as Consumer Justice

At a recent charity function I hosted in Washington, I introduced Florida state Sen. Tom Leek (also chief legal officer at Foundation Risk Partners and a member of The Council of Insurance Agents & Brokers’ board of directors) to U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi (a fellow Republican and my daughter’s boss on Capitol Hill).

I told Wicker that Leek had been elected to the Florida Senate in 2024, overcoming a well-funded campaign against him. While publicly identified spending by Leek’s opponents in the Republican primary alone exceeded $10 million, Leek says dark-money funding brought the total amount to $20 million or more.

Wicker responded that his first election to the Mississippi Senate in 1987 cost just $25,000. (That amount would be roughly $73,000 in today’s dollars.)

The difference, other than inflation? You know it: trial lawyers.

While he served as Appropriations Committee chairman in the Florida House of Representatives from 2022 to 2024, Leek was a principal architect of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) transformational tort reforms that have curbed legal system abuse and are stabilizing the state’s insurance market. Plaintiffs lawyers hate that with unparalleled political passion. They made Florida’s District 7 Senate seat the most expensive legislative race in the state’s history, with attorneys contributing to an anti-Leek political committee called The Truth Matters.

The results of the DeSantis/Leek tort reforms are equally unparalleled. The legislation eliminated one-way attorney fees and assignment of benefits scams that previously clogged courts. The statute of limitations for general negligence claims was reduced from four to two years.

Property insurance lawsuits fell by one-third following the reforms, according to the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation. The state’s share of homeowners insurance lawsuits across the country also dropped from 79% in 2020 to 41% five years later, the state agency reported.

The impact on insurance rates has been direct. Homeowners and auto insurance rates have stabilized and even decreased statewide, on average. Dozens of new or returning insurers have been approved to enter the Florida market, increasing consumer choice and competition. Best of all: Reduced litigation costs have generated billions in annual economic value and support for thousands of jobs statewide.

Any reasonable person would conclude that Florida’s reform initiative is a resounding success and should be replicated across the country. But polling and behavioral studies indicate otherwise. The vast majority of the public supports large jury awards, viewing them as a tool for holding corporations— and insurers—accountable.

Corporate defendants faced a record-breaking surge in nuclear verdicts in 2025, with nearly 200 jury awards of $10 million or more totaling over $25 billion. That was a 40.7% increase from 2024, according to Marathon Strategies. The strategic communications firm noted Swiss Re research finding that fewer people believe there are too many lawsuits than did a decade ago, and 76% of respondents now believe that awarded damages in court cases are either “too low” or “about right,” which signals broad acceptance of higher compensation.

It gets worse with younger generations. Millennials and Generation Z jurors exhibit much lower levels of inherent trust toward business. Research points to widespread “fairness rebalancing” and “retribution bias” among these generations. If a defendant is wealthy or powerful, younger jurors view nuclear verdicts as a symbolic way to rebalance the scales of society.

Only three months ago, a federal jury in Oklahoma awarded $40 million to a Tulsa woman against Progressive Insurance (though there are no public reports on the ages of the jurors). The case was entirely about Progressive’s management of a $25,000 claim for underinsured motorist benefits.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for Legal Reform (ILR) responds that public support for large jury awards is driven by strategic courtroom manipulation rather than rational consensus. The organization cites tactics like the “reptile theory” (appealing to juror fear and safety concerns) and “anchoring” (proposing extreme baseline numbers to distort what jurors view as reasonable compensation). The ILR contends that aggressive lawsuit advertising and media coverage desensitize the public and normalize multimillion-dollar figures before trials even begin.

These “tort taxes” are paid by ordinary Americans in the forms of higher prices and lower employment opportunities and product availability, yet polls suggest that most people view lawsuit abuse as genuine consumer justice. The Insurance Information Institute estimates that legal system abuse and litigation trends may have contributed to more than $281 billion in increased liability insurance losses over the past decade. Said Triple-I CEO Sean Kevelighan in 2025: “The severe spikes in liability insurance claims losses go well beyond normal economic inflation. Legal system abuse, manifested through excessive verdicts and litigation behaviors, has fueled a structural rise in claim costs that continues to increase costs for insurers and policyholders alike.”

It’s depressing, but let’s look on the bright side. Florida’s trial lawyers recruited a former sheriff to run in the GOP primary for the open state Senate seat that Tom Leek was seeking. They even secured a Trump presidential endorsement for Leek’s leading opponent, who happened to work at a big plaintiffs law firm. (A former wrestler was also in the mix.)

Leek won his primary with about 20 percentage points to spare, then rolled through the general election. He is on track to become the president of the state Senate in just a few short years.

Now that’s justice.