This is not just a Florida thing. It is routine for insurance companies to manipulate facts and policy language to deny and underpay insurance claims. Just last Thursday, my client’s denied insurance claim resulted in a $925,000.00 negotiated settlement. Two weeks before that, I settled another denied insurance claim for $534,000.00. So far this year, two and one half million dollars of insurance company denials have been reversed by my company, alone … and the year is not half over. And I’m just one guy. And Missouri doesn’t even get hurricanes.
The root of the problem can be found in a very unusual phenomenon where otherwise intelligent homeowners will enter into a binding contract worth hundreds of thousands (sometimes millions) of dollars without ever reading it. When it comes to the time for them and the party they contracted with to perform under the terms of that contract, they learn for the first time what those terms are and, as a result, they often find themselves trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube, so to speak.
Your home insurance policy is a contract. Have you read it?