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Case Law Alerts

County Court Denies Motion for Leave to File Amended Complaint, Alleging Bad Faith Handling, Based on Insurer’s Confession of Judgment and Failure to Cure Civil Remedy Notice Within 60 Days.

Gulf Coast Injury Centers, LLC a/a/o Craig Jorden v. Allstate Ins. Co., County Court, 13th Judicial Circuit Hillsborough County, Case No: 2021-CC-115756

January 1, 2024

The instant suit involved a dispute for personal injury protection (PIP) benefits, extended medical payment benefits, penalty, postage, interest, costs and attorney’s fees. After suit was filed, the court issued a General Differentiated Case Management Order, establishing the deadlines in the suit and setting a projected trial date of May 2023. 

Once suit was filed, defense counsel attempted to confer with plaintiff’s counsel. These attempts were ignored, and approximately eight days after defense counsel’s attempts to confer, the plaintiff filed a Civil Remedy Notice (CRN) with the Florida Department of Financial Services. A response to the CRN was timely filed by Allstate. 

Throughout the life of the case, Allstate made more attempts to confer with the plaintiff, all of which were ignored. Finally, Allstate filed a confession of judgment for $1,549.64, stipulating to the plaintiff’s entitlement to attorney’s fees and costs. Following the confession of judgment, the plaintiff filed a motion for leave to supplement and/or amend the complaint for statutory bad faith pursuant to Section 625.155, Florida Statutes. The proposed amended complaint alleged bad faith claims handling, alleging that Allstate did not attempt to cure the CRN within 60 days, after which it filed a confession. 

In deciding whether to grant the amendment, the court analyzed Florida Rule of Civil Procedure 1.190 as well as the standards established by case law in which an amendment may be granted if the court finds that: (1) granting the amendment does not prejudice the opposing party; (2) the privilege to amend has not been abused; and (3) the amendment is not futile. 

With regard to prejudice, the court found that the amendment would prejudice the defendant as the suit had been pending for 19 months and every deadline in the Case Management Order had elapsed. The court also noted that the plaintiff was not precluded from filing a separate cause of action for bad faith should it choose to do so. 

In analyzing whether the privilege to amend had been abused, the court found that the plaintiff’s actions demonstrated “the precise abuse that is intended to be prevented.” The court also took issue with the fact that the plaintiff filed its CRN after litigation had commenced, as opposed to before. The court also took issue with the plaintiff’s actions in ignoring all of Allstate’s attempts to amicably settle the suit, thus, forcing the confession of judgment. 

In analyzing futility, the court noted that the proposed amended complaint would be subject to dismissal as it was legally insufficient, thus, making the amendment futile. This was because the plaintiff did not comply with Fla. Stat. 624.155, which requires a CRN to state with specificity the facts giving rise to the violation, along with the specific policy language relevant to the violation and the specific statutory language that has allegedly been violated. In analyzing the CRN, the court found that it did not satisfy the requirements of Section 624.155, thus, barring the plaintiff from being able to bring a bad faith claim against Allstate. Accordingly, the court denied the plaintiff’s motion. 

This order should prove to be a boon for carriers defending against PIP suits in which plaintiffs attempt to use boilerplate Civil Remedy Notices as further leverage to force settlement. As this is a common strategy utilized by certain plaintiff firms in Florida, this order should give carriers a useful tool to defend themselves against these sort of scorched-earth litigation tactics. 

 

Case Law Alerts, 1st Quarter, January 2024 is prepared by Marshall Dennehey to provide information on recent developments of interest to our readers. This publication is not intended to provide legal advice for a specific situation or to create an attorney-client relationship. Copyright © 2024 Marshall Dennehey, all rights reserved. This article may not be reprinted without the express written permission of our firm.

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Supreme Court of Pennsylvania Holds That Public Policy Does Not Prevent Insurance Coverage for Sex Trafficking Claims

On July 21, 2026, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania issued an opinion emphasizing the limited circumstances in which courts may invoke public policy to bar insurance coverage, holding in Samsung Fire & Marine Insurance Co., Ltd. (U.S. Branch) v. RI Settlement Trust that Pennsylvania public policy does not preclude coverage for claims alleging that insureds enabled or profited from human sex trafficking. The decision rejects a line of federal district court decisions predicting otherwise and reinforces that Pennsylvania courts will invoke the public policy doctrine only in the clearest of circumstances. RI Settlement is particularly significant because it arose on certified questions from the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, giving the Supreme Court the opportunity to resolve an issue on which federal courts had predicted Pennsylvania law differently. RI Settlement arose out of four separate civil complaints in which the underlying plaintiffs alleged that, as minors, they were the victims of human sex trafficking at various hotels in Philadelphia. The plaintiffs claimed that the hotel owners were negligent in failing to stop the sex trafficking from happening at their hotels. After the filing of the lawsuits, the hotel owners sought coverage under their Commercial General Liability policies. The insurers initially defended the hotels under Reservation of Rights letters, though the carriers later filed Declaratory Judgment actions seeking declarations that they did not owe a duty to defend or indemnify. In short, the insurers argued in the alternative that they did not owe any obligation to provide coverage based upon Pennsylvania public policy (because the claims violated the Human Trafficking Law – 18 Pa.C.S. § 3011) and the terms and conditions of the policy. On motions for judgment on the pleadings, the District Court found for the insurers on the basis of public policy: There is no duty to defend or indemnify against actions arising out of an insured's criminal conduct related to the sex trafficking of minors. The Court appreciates that it may make public policy the basis of a judicial decision only in “the clearest of cases.” See Minnesota Fire & Cas. Co. v. Greenfield, 589 A.2d 854, 868 (Pa. 2004) (quoting Hall v. Amica Mut. Ins. Co., 648 A.2d 755, 760 (Pa. 1994)). Yet, the Court strains to imagine a clearer case than the one presented here in which the facts alleged indicate that Policyholders engaged in criminal conduct in violation of Pennsylvania's Human Trafficking Law. The hotel owners appealed the matter to the Third Circuit, which petitioned the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania to grant review of two certified questions of law: (1) whether Pennsylvania law had an “overriding public policy” against sex trafficking, such that an insurer’s duty to defend and/or indemnify is abrogated when an insured is alleged to have enabled or profited from such trafficking; and (2) if yes, is that duty abrogated whenever the insured’s alleged conduct would constitute a violation of the Pennsylvania Human Trafficking statute. Importantly, the certified questions did not ask the Supreme Court to determine whether the policies afforded coverage under their terms. Rather, the court was asked only whether Pennsylvania public policy independently barred coverage. As a result, the court assumed for purposes of answering the certified questions that the insurers otherwise owed a duty to defend and addressed only the public policy issue, leaving all policy-based coverage defenses for further proceedings. Because the court concluded that the answer to the first certified question was “no”, it did not reach the second issue. In reaching its determination that Pennsylvania public policy does not prohibit insurance coverage for sex trafficking claims, the court limited the impact of its decision in Minnesota Fire & Cas. Co. v. Greenfield, 855 A. 2d 854, 855 (Pa. 2004), which the RI Settlement opinion emphasized as having been an “Opinion Announcing Judgment of the Court” – or a plurality opinion. In Greenfield, the insured homeowner was sued by the estate of his houseguest who overdosed from heroin that he sold to her. 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It is sufficient for the work of the courts to know that the General Assembly has identified conduct it deems harmful and dangerous to the maintenance of an orderly society and criminalized it.” While the court declined to declare that Pennsylvania public policy prohibits coverage for sex trafficking claims, the opinion in RI Settlement expressly states that insurers are free to include appropriate exclusionary language for such causes of actions in their policies if they desire to do so. It will certainly be interesting to see whether the insurance industry accepts the court’s invitation, or perhaps whether the Pennsylvania legislature steps in to clarify that sex trafficking claims are indeed of the type or magnitude that they should not be covered by insurance. In any event, we will, of course, continue to monitor this and other insurance coverage issues that arise before courts in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and throughout our firm’s geographic footprint and around the country.

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In a significant win for insurers' Special Investigation Units, the New Jersey Supreme Court clarified that statutory insurance fraud and racketeering claims may proceed in court rather than through PIP arbitration. At issue was whether insurance fraud claims brought under New Jersey's Insurance Fraud Prevention Act (IFPA) and the state's Anti-Racketeering Act (NJ RICO) are subject to mandatory arbitration under the Automobile Insurance Cost Reduction Act’s (AICRA) PIP dispute-resolution framework. Allstate had sued a network of medical practices, physicians, and related corporate entities, alleging a scheme to extract more than $1.7 million in PIP benefits through fraudulent and misleading billing. The trial court dismissed Allstate's complaint and compelled arbitration, reading AICRA's arbitration clause — which covers "any dispute regarding the recovery of... benefits" under PIP coverage, N.J.S.A. 39:6A-5.1(a) — as sweeping in fraud and racketeering claims along with routine benefit disputes. The Supreme Court affirmed the Appellate Division's reversal, adopting Judge Gilson's opinion below (480 N.J. Super. 566 (App. Div. 2025)) as its own reasoning. The Court held that IFPA and RICO claims fall outside the scope of AICRA's PIP arbitration mechanism because that "streamlined and specialized" process cannot grant the relief those statutes contemplate — treble damages, injunctive relief, broad discovery, and joinder of third parties — and because arbitrators lack authority to award compensatory or treble damages to an insurer. The Court also rejected the argument that Allstate's own Decision Point Review Plans independently compel arbitration, finding those plan provisions no broader than AICRA's own arbitration clause. Notably, the Court expressly disagreed with the Third Circuit's contrary holding in GEICO v. Mt. Prospect Chiropractic Center, 98 F.4th 463 (3d Cir. 2024), concluding it is not bound by that federal interpretation of New Jersey law. Insurers retain the right to pursue IFPA and RICO claims in the Law Division, with a jury trial. For SIU units and NJ insurance carriers, this decision is a significant win: it forecloses defense clinics' primary procedural tool for shunting fraud investigations into limited-scope PIP arbitration, where treble damages, RICO relief, and meaningful discovery were never realistically available. Carriers building cases against fraudulently structured clinics, straw-owned practices, or coordinated billing networks can now proceed with confidence that a well-pleaded IFPA/RICO complaint stays in the Law Division rather than being diverted to arbitration on a motion to compel. Practically, this strengthens SIU's leverage in settlement negotiations, preserves civil discovery tools (subpoenas, depositions, joinder of related corporate entities) critical to unwinding complex ownership and referral schemes, and resolves the split with the Third Circuit in favor of NJ insurers — at least as a matter of state law. Expect increased reliance on IFPA civil actions, rather than PIP arbitration demands, as SIU's primary enforcement vehicle going forward.

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