Jeff Brandes: Florida’s lawsuit reform is working — so why undo it?

Imagine a neighborhood with a broken stoplight. For years, cars have been crashing into each other at the same intersection. Everyone knows the stoplight is faulty. Everyone knows something needs to change. But somehow, no one does anything — until one day, someone finally fixes it.

Accidents decline. Traffic flows. The problem, it seems, is solved.

That’s Florida’s lawsuit system — before and after reform.

For decades, Florida’s legal system functioned like that broken stoplight. Lawsuits — many of them questionable at best — flooded the courts. Insurance premiums soared. Businesses passed those costs along to consumers. Families struggled to keep up. It was a quiet crisis, hiding in plain sight.

Then something rare happened in politics: change. Real, structural, meaningful change. Under Gov. Ron DeSantis and legislative leaders like former House Speaker Paul Renner, Florida passed a package of tort reforms that rebalanced the legal playing field. The goal wasn’t radical. It was practical — bring fairness back to the system and relieve Floridians of unnecessary costs.

And here’s the twist: it worked.

Property insurers stopped fleeing the state. Some began lowering premiums for the first time in years. Auto insurance rates declined by nearly 11%. Consumers, previously stuck footing the bill for a broken system, started to feel relief.

But if you’ve read enough history, you know the next part of the story. Every solution creates new tension. And just as the reforms begin to take hold, a new wave of proposals threatens to undo the progress. Why? Because some powerful interests benefited from the dysfunction. And they’re eager to turn the stoplight back to blinking red.

This is bigger than one policy. Florida’s approach has already sparked a regional movement. Georgia just passed a similar reform package. Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma are considering their own. The ripple effect is real. Florida became the first to act, and others followed.

But the real question isn’t whether the reforms are working. They are. The question is whether we’ll let short-term politics reverse long-term progress.

Let’s be clear: these reforms are not about hurting lawyers. They’re about helping consumers. They’re about protecting the small business owner, the single parent, the retiree on a fixed income — people who’ve been forced to pay more because someone else was gaming the system.

In times of disaster, we praise Florida’s first responders. But in the slow-moving crises — the ones that build over years — it’s the insurance professionals who quietly step in. In many ways, they’re our second responders, rebuilding what storms and lawsuits tear down.

Undoing these reforms now would be like replacing the fixed stoplight with another broken one, just as traffic is finally clearing.

Florida should stay the course. Not because it’s politically convenient. But because it’s working.

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Jeff Brandes is a former Florida State Senator and the founder and president of the Florida Policy Project.