A $1.4 Million Florida Judgment With No Bad Faith Finding | ICA

Written by: Yusuf Nurudeen Ayodele (B.Sc., AAT, ACA (ICAN))

Published: July 21, 2026

Last updated: October 23, 2026

Topic: How a $10,000 Florida Policy Limit Produced a $1.4 Million Excess Judgment — And Why the Florida Supreme Court Found No Bad Faith

Source review: Florida Supreme Court opinion in Boston Old Colony Ins. Co. v. Gutierrez, 386 So. 2d 783 (Fla. 1980) (No. 54769, decided April 10, 1980, rehearing denied September 4, 1980, per curiam, on a question certified by the Third District Court of Appeal, 360 So. 2d 464 (Fla. 3d DCA 1978)); Thompson v. Commercial Union Ins. Co. of New York, 250 So. 2d 259 (Fla. 1971); Cunningham v. Standard Guaranty Ins. Co., 630 So. 2d 179 (Fla. 1994); Fridman v. Safeco Ins. Co. of Illinois, 185 So. 3d 1214 (Fla. 2016); Harvey v. GEICO General Ins. Co., 259 So. 3d 1 (Fla. 2018); Vo v. Scottsdale Ins. Co., No. 1D2023-2228 (Fla. 1st DCA 2025); Menendez v. Progressive Express Ins. Co., 35 So. 3d 873 (Fla. 2010); Florida Statutes §§ 624.155 and 624.1551; chapter 2023-15, Laws of Florida (CS/CS/HB 837), including Sections 4, 11, 29 and 30, together with the House staff final bill analysis; Florida Standard Jury Instruction (Civil) 404.4, Insurer's Bad Faith (Failure to Settle); the Florida Department of Financial Services Civil Remedy filing and search portal; and KFF's analysis of 2024 federal claims-denial and appeals transparency data

What Boston Old Colony v. Gutierrez Teaches Florida Drivers About Their Insurer's Duty to Settle

 

A Florida jury once decided an insurance company owed $1.4 million for refusing to settle a claim, and then the Florida Supreme Court threw that verdict out entirely.

 

If you're dealing with an insurer that won't settle your claim, or you're worried about an excess judgment of your own in Florida, this case is worth understanding — not because it proves your insurer is wrong, but because it lays out exactly what your insurer owes you, whichever side of a claim you're on.

 

The case is Boston Old Colony Ins. Co. v. Gutierrez, 386 So. 2d 783 (Fla. 1980), and more than four decades later, Florida courts still use the test it created to decide whether an insurer crossed the line.

 

About this series. This is one entry in an ongoing Florida bad-faith series on this site, in which each post works through a single decided Florida case or statutory mechanism in full — the facts, the procedural history, the holding, and what later law changed. 

The posts intentionally cross-reference one another because the doctrines overlap: the same five settlement duties recur across excess-judgment, multiple-claimant, civil-remedy-notice and claim-denial scenarios. 

Where two posts reach different outcomes on similar facts, that difference is the point of the comparison, not a repetition of it. Cases are selected because the published opinion is available in full and can be checked against the links provided; each post is written and edited individually and updated when the underlying law changes.

A Head-On Collision, A $10,000 Policy, And A $1.4 Million Verdict

 

Two drivers, known in court records as Brown and Raul Gutierrez, collided head-on. Each blamed the other for crossing into their lane. The police officer who responded to the scene leaned toward Gutierrez's version of events, which put Brown at fault.

 

Brown's auto policy carried a $10,000 liability limit — a modest number even by 1970s standards, and nowhere close to what a serious injury claim could ultimately cost. Florida's bodily injury minimums are still just as thin today, which is why that gap between coverage and real exposure hasn't closed much since — and the distance between what a policy will pay and what a jury might award is the entire reason bad-faith law exists in Florida.

 

How The Numbers Played Out In Boston Old Colony v. Gutierrez

Stage	Amount	What It Represents
Brown's Policy Limit	$10,000	What the insurer was contractually obligated to pay.
Gutierrez's Early Settlement Offer	$10,000	What could have resolved the case before trial.
Jury Verdict Against Brown	$1.4 million	140 times the policy limit.
Bad-Faith Judgment Against the Insurer	$1.4 million	Later reversed by the Florida Supreme Court.

 

The 140-times gap here isn't a one-off, which is part of what makes this case a useful teaching example for anyone trying to understand how Florida handles excess judgments — a strikingly similar gap between a small policy and a seven-figure verdict shows up again in another Florida case, that one built on a $20,000 policy.

 

An excess judgment happens whenever a court awards more than a policy will cover, though what legally counts as one has been litigated repeatedly. In Cunningham v. Standard Guaranty Insurance Company, 630 So. 2d 179 (Fla. 1994) — Case No. 81056, decided January 6, 1994, opinion by Justice Grimes — the Florida Supreme Court addressed whether a bad-faith claim could proceed where the parties had stipulated to try the bad-faith issue first, without an actual excess judgment ever being entered. The Court treated the absence of an excess judgment as something other than an incurable jurisdictional defect on those facts, reasoning that the stipulation served the same function. Full opinion: https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/1124186/cunningham-v-standard-guar-ins-co/

 

Boston Old Colony involved a single claimant and a single policy, but the same excess-judgment math gets far more complicated once several injured people are competing for one policy, since a single settlement decision by the insurer can then affect multiple people at once.

 

Two decades later, in Fridman v. Safeco Insurance Company of Illinois, 185 So. 3d 1214 (Fla. 2016) — Case No. SC13-1607, decided February 25, 2016, majority opinion by Justice Pariente, with Justice Canady dissenting — the Court held that an insured in an uninsured/underinsured motorist case is entitled to have a jury determine liability and the full extent of damages before litigating a first-party bad-faith action under section 624.155, and that the resulting verdict binds the insurer in the later bad-faith proceeding. Full opinion: https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/3180311/adrian-fridman-v-safeco-insurance-company-of-illinois/

 

Florida law gives injured parties a specific, narrow path to go after the insurer directly when an excess judgment happens, but only under certain conditions, as this case shows.

 

Why The Insurer Didn't Just Pay The Policy Limits

 

If a $10,000 policy is facing a claim that could realistically exceed it, the obvious move looks like settling fast. Boston Old Colony's own investigation, however, complicated that picture.

 

The insurer hired an accident-reconstruction expert, and that expert's findings actually favored Brown — concluding Gutierrez had been the one who crossed the centerline. On paper, Brown had a real defense. Here the insurer's expert findings actually helped its own insured, which is the mirror image of the situation in cases where an insurer's own medical evidence undercuts its investigation and ignoring that favorable evidence becomes the basis for a bad-faith claim.

 

Still, the insurer's adjuster wasn't willing to bet the case on that alone. Liability was genuinely contested, Gutierrez's injuries were significant, and an excess judgment was a real possibility if a jury sided with Gutierrez instead. The adjuster flagged that risk to Brown directly and recommended settling at the policy limits to close off the exposure.

 

It is easy to overlook, when people assume "the insurance company" makes every decision, that an insured's own instructions can override an insurer's better judgment.

In third-party liability claims, the policyholder retains real influence over whether a case settles, even when a settlement might objectively be the safer move.

 

This matters because it explains why Brown, not the insurer, is the reason this case didn't settle early. Brown had filed his own counterclaim against Gutierrez and didn't want a settlement offer to look like an admission of fault. At the insurer's request, he signed a hold-harmless agreement, personally taking on responsibility for anything a judgment might add beyond the policy limits.

 

Brown's hold-harmless agreement shows how much weight paperwork signed mid-claim can carry. Florida claimants have found the same thing out the hard way after signing a settlement release too quickly, only to discover that the language waived far more than they realized — which is worth understanding before signing anything similar.

 

Before trial, with both the original claim and Brown's counterclaim still open, Gutierrez offered to settle for the $10,000 policy limits. Boston Old Colony denied liability instead of accepting — honoring what Brown wanted, not what the adjuster had recommended. Later, once Brown's counterclaim was resolved separately, the insurer came back and offered Gutierrez the policy limits after all. By then, though, Gutierrez preferred to take his chances at trial.

 

What Happened When Gutierrez Sued The Insurer Directly

 

The case went to trial, and the jury sided decisively with Gutierrez: a $1.4 million verdict against Brown, more than a hundred times what his policy would pay.

 

Gutierrez then filed a second lawsuit — this one against Boston Old Colony directly, not against Brown. His argument: the insurer had acted in bad faith by not settling for policy limits when it had a real chance to. A jury agreed, awarding Gutierrez a $1.4 million bad-faith judgment against the insurance company. Florida's Third District Court of Appeal affirmed that verdict.

 

At this point, if you stopped reading, you'd assume this is a story about an insurer paying dearly for refusing a fair offer. That's the popular version of this case, and it's also incomplete — the Florida Supreme Court hadn't weighed in yet, and when it did, the outcome flipped.

 

The Florida Supreme Court's Five-Part Test For Insurer Good Faith

 

The Florida Supreme Court took the case on a certified question of great public interest. The Third District certified the question as: "Does the law as enunciated in Thompson v. Commercial Union Ins. Co. of New York, 250 So. 2d 259 (Fla. 1971), authorize a bad faith action against an insurance company when that company has refused to settle a claim at the express direction of its own insured who obtains a settlement of his claim and the insurance company thereafter offers to settle for its policy limits before trial?" That question squarely implicated the Court's earlier decision in Thompson v. Commercial Union Insurance Company of New York, 250 So. 2d 259 (Fla. 1971) Source

Thompson was the decision that first extended a bad-faith cause of action in Florida to an injured third party proceeding against the tortfeasor's insurer, and it involved an insurer that had refused to settle at every stage while disregarding its own counsel's advice. The precise question in Boston Old Colony was whether that same right survives when the obstacle to settlement was the insurer's own policyholder rather than the insurer. Full text of Thompson: https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/1126510/thompson-v-commercial-union-ins-co-of-new-york/

 

The Boston Old Colony opinion itself — Case No. 54769, decided April 10, 1980, rehearing denied September 4, 1980, issued per curiam — is available in full at https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/1114866/boston-old-colony-ins-co-v-gutierrez/

 

Florida's academic law libraries also maintain a non-commercial digitized archive of Florida Supreme Court records and briefs spanning 1886 to the present, compiled by the Florida State University College of Law Research Center: https://library.law.fsu.edu/Digital-Collections/flsupct/index.html

 

The Court's answer was: sometimes, yes, but the facts here didn't support it. In reaching that conclusion, the Court laid out the test Florida courts still apply today. An insurer handling a third-party claim owes its insured a duty to:

The Insurer's Duty To Settle In Good Faith

Duty	What It Means In Practice
Advise Of Settlement Opportunities	Tell the insured when a real settlement offer exists.
Advise Of Probable Litigation Outcome	Give an honest assessment of how a trial is likely to go.
Warn Of Excess Judgment Possibility	Flag when a verdict could exceed the policy limit.
Advise On Steps To Avoid Excess Judgment	Explain what actions could reduce that exposure.
Settle When A Reasonably Prudent Person Would	Act as if the insurer itself were paying the full judgment.

 

The table above paraphrases the duties for readability. The opinion's own language, at 386 So. 2d 785, is this: the good-faith duty "obligates the insurer to advise the insured of settlement opportunities, to advise as to the probable outcome of the litigation, to warn of the possibility of an excess judgment, and to advise the insured of any steps he might take to avoid same," and the insurer "must investigate the facts, give fair consideration to a settlement offer that is not unreasonable under the facts, and settle, if possible, where a reasonably prudent person, faced with the prospect of paying the total recovery, would do so." Florida courts have carried that language forward for four decades. Source

The Florida Supreme Court's Committee on Standard Jury Instructions in Civil Cases has since codified the same language into the pattern instruction that trial judges read to juries in bad-faith cases, Instruction 404.4 (Insurer's Bad Faith), which cites Boston Old Colony as its source authority for the duty "to warn of the possibility of an excess judgment, and to advise the insured of any steps he might take to avoid same." You can read the full set of Florida civil jury instructions, including the 400-series on insurer bad faith, on The Florida Bar's official rules page: https://www.floridabar.org/rules/florida-standard-jury-instructions/civil-jury-instructions/civil-instructions/

 

The statutory side of the framework sits in section 624.155, Florida Statutes, titled "Civil remedy." Subsection (1)(b)1 is the operative language for a failure-to-settle claim: it creates liability where an insurer does not attempt "in good faith to settle claims when, under all the circumstances, it could and should have done so, had it acted fairly and honestly toward its insured and with due regard for her or his interests." Subsection (11) confirms that damages under the section "may include an award or judgment in an amount that exceeds the policy limits." Current text is published by the Florida Legislature at: https://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&URL=0600-0699/0624/Sections/0624.155.html

 

Why The Insurer Passed The Test

 

Applying its own five-part checklist, the Court found Boston Old Colony had done what the law required: it investigated the facts thoroughly, it recognized the excess-judgment risk and warned Brown about it directly, and it recommended settlement. The only reason settlement didn't happen the first time was Brown's explicit refusal — not any failure or foot-dragging by the insurer.

 

Once Brown's counterclaim was out of the way and that obstacle disappeared, the insurer offered the policy limits again. At that point, it was Gutierrez, not the insurer, who chose to go to trial instead of settling.

 

The Court also distinguished this case from Thompson, where the insurer had refused to settle at every stage, ignoring even its own attorney's advice. Boston Old Colony had been willing to settle throughout — it was blocked, at least initially, by its own insured's instructions, which the Court treated as a materially different situation.

 

The Hold-Harmless Loophole The Court Closed

 

The hold-harmless agreement Brown signed didn't actually save the insurer, and the Court went out of its way to say so. It warned that an insurer can't use a hold-harmless agreement to escape its good-faith duty — the duty applies regardless of what paperwork the insured signs.

This caveat matters more than it might seem. Without it, an insurer could get an insured to sign away protections and then handle a claim however it wanted, with the agreement as legal cover.

The Court closed that door before it could become a pattern, which is why the insurer still won this case on the merits of its actual conduct rather than because of the hold-harmless paperwork.

 

Why The Insurer Won And What That Actually Means For You

 

The Florida Supreme Court quashed the Third District's decision affirming the $1.4 million bad-faith judgment, and held that Boston Old Colony's motion for a directed verdict should have been granted in the first place.

 

Justice Alderman went further in a special concurrence, arguing that an injured third party shouldn't be able to sue a tortfeasor's insurer for bad faith at all, since the insurer's duty runs to its own insured, not to the opposing claimant. He warned this creates a strange incentive structure: a claimant can end up better off if the insurer breaches its duty, potentially collecting both the policy limits and an excess judgment, and worse off only if the insurer behaves properly. Two justices, Adkins and Boyd, dissented, so the decision wasn't unanimous.

 

A common assumption is that if a verdict exceeds the policy limit, the insurer is automatically on the hook for bad faith. This case is direct proof that the assumption is false. In a third-party failure-to-settle case, an excess judgment is normally the event that gives rise to the claim — but it is not, by itself, evidence that the insurer acted in bad faith.

 

That reframes what this case actually offers a policyholder, because it doesn't hand anyone a legal win. What it hands readers is the rulebook — the specific duties an insurer has to satisfy — plus a caution about how an insured's own choices during a claim can affect a later bad-faith claim. If you told your insurer not to settle, to protect a counterclaim, your pride, or any other reason, that instruction can work against you if you later argue the insurer should have settled anyway.

 

It is also worth knowing that Boston Old Colony is not the last word on how appellate courts review these verdicts. In Harvey v. GEICO General Insurance Company, 259 So. 3d 1 (Fla. 2018) — Case No. SC17-85, decided September 20, 2018, opinion by Justice Quince, with Chief Justice Canady and Justice Polston each dissenting — the Court quashed the Fourth District Court of Appeal's decision at 208 So. 3d 810 and held that the Fourth District had failed to properly apply directed-verdict standards when it wiped out a $9.2 million bad-faith verdict against the insurer. The Court reaffirmed that the Boston Old Colony duties impose a fiduciary obligation on the insurer to protect its insured from a judgment exceeding policy limits, and that whether the insurer discharged that obligation is normally a question for the jury. Boston Old Colony set the test, and Harvey shows that the same test turns on the specific facts whichever party is asking a court to take the question away from a jury. Full opinion: https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/4538790/suzanne-harvey-etc-v-geico-general-insurance-company/

 

There is also a procedural step most readers never hear about. Before a statutory bad-faith action can be filed under section 624.155(3), the Florida Department of Financial Services and the insurer must receive sixty days' written notice of the alleged violation on a departmental form — the Civil Remedy Notice. Getting that notice right matters more than most policyholders expect: the specific-violation requirement is exacting enough that a notice written too vaguely can fail to support a bad-faith claim at all. Those filings are public and searchable, which means you can look up whether an insurer has a history of CRNs filed against it. The Department's official filing and search portal is at https://apps.fldfs.com/civilremedy/SearchFiling.aspx, and the Florida Chief Financial Officer's consumer explanation of the process is at https://www.myfloridacfo.com/division/consumers/civilremedy

 

How Florida Law Has Shifted Since 1980

 

The five-part test from Boston Old Colony is still good law, but the surrounding landscape changed significantly with Florida's House Bill 837, signed by Governor Ron DeSantis on March 24, 2023. It's one of the most consequential tort-reform packages the state has passed, and it directly touches how bad-faith claims work.

 

How Florida Insurance Bad-Faith Rules Changed After HB 837

Rule	Before HB 837	After HB 837
Negligence Standard	Negligence was expressly relevant to the good-faith question. Boston Old Colony held that "because the duty of good faith involves diligence and care in the investigation and evaluation of the claim against the insured, negligence is relevant to the question of good faith.	Mere negligence alone is explicitly insufficient to establish insurer bad faith.
Claimant Conduct	Claimant behavior was not formally weighed against the insurer.	Claimants and insureds also owe a duty of good faith, and improper conduct may reduce recoverable damages.
Safe Harbor	No formal 90-day period existed for insurers to avoid bad-faith exposure.	An insurer may avoid bad-faith liability by tendering the policy limits or the demanded amount within 90 days.
Attorney Fees	One-way attorney-fee shifting allowed successful policyholders to recover legal fees.	Section 627.428 was repealed, and one-way fee shifting is largely unavailable for new policies.

The shift in that first row is the sharpest of the four. Before HB 837, the controlling Florida authority treated an insurer's negligence in investigating and evaluating a claim as relevant evidence on the good-faith question. Section 624.155(5)(a) now provides that "mere negligence alone is insufficient to constitute bad faith." Negligence is not thereby made irrelevant — it is made insufficient on its own. Source

Every one of these changes can be read in the enacted law rather than in secondhand summaries. HB 837 passed the House 80–31 on March 17, 2023, passed the Senate 23–15 on March 23, was approved by the Governor on March 24, and was assigned Chapter No. 2023-15. The complete bill history, vote counts, committee referrals, and amendment record are published by the Florida Senate at https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2023/837

 

That 90-day safe harbor is a separate mechanism from — and shouldn't be confused with — the 60-day cure period that predates it, which governs the Civil Remedy Notice process rather than a direct policy-limits tender.

 

The enacted chapter law is the controlling text. Section 4 of Chapter 2023-15 rewrites section 624.155 to add the 90-day safe harbor at new subsection (4)(a), the "mere negligence alone is insufficient to constitute bad faith" language at (5)(a), the claimant's own good-faith duty at (5)(b), and the multiple-claimant interpleader and arbitration options at (6). Section 11 repeals section 627.428 outright. Full chapter law, as published by the Florida Department of State: http://laws.flrules.org/2023/15

 

For the Legislature's own account of what the bill was meant to accomplish, the House staff's final bill analysis walks through the bad-faith changes point by point, including the statement that the bill will "[a]llow an insurer to avoid third-party bad faith liability if the insurer tenders the policy limits or the amount demanded by the claimant within 90 days after receiving actual notice of the claim." That analysis is at https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2023/837/Analyses/h0837z.CJS.PDF

 

Property insurance claims carry a separate and stricter gate that predates HB 837. Section 624.1551, Florida Statutes, effective December 16, 2022, bars an extracontractual action under section 624.155(1)(b) against a property insurer until the insured has obtained "an adverse adjudication by a court of law that the property insurer breached the insurance contract and a final judgment or decree has been rendered against the insurer" — and it expressly provides that accepting an offer of judgment or being paid an appraisal award does not count as that adverse adjudication. Statutory text: https://www.leg.state.fl.us/Statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&URL=0600-0699/0624/Sections/0624.1551.html

 

How that timing rule applies to older claims has already been tested. In Vo v. Scottsdale Insurance Company, No. 1D2023-2228, the First District Court of Appeal, in an opinion by Judge B.L. Thomas issued February 26, 2025, reversed an Escambia County Court order dismissing an insured's extracontractual suit. The court agreed the statute has a remedial purpose but held it "cannot be applied retroactively" because it eliminates a previously valid, legislatively created cause of action, applying the two-part retroactivity test from Menendez v. Progressive Express Insurance Co., 35 So. 3d 873 (Fla. 2010). The opinion is hosted by the court itself at https://1dca.flcourts.gov/content/download/2447877/opinion/Opinion_2023-2228.pdf

This is why the pre- and post-reform distinction in the table above matters so concretely: which version of the law governs a particular claim can turn on when the action was filed, on when the policy was issued or renewed, or on both, and courts have not applied these provisions uniformly. That is a question to put to a licensed attorney with the actual policy and dates in front of them.

That's a meaningful shift from 1980, when Boston Old Colony only examined the insurer's conduct — today, a claimant's own behavior during negotiations can factor into the outcome too.

One important limit follows from that, and it is not a single clean rule. Chapter 2023-15 contains two applicability provisions that have to be read together: Section 30 provides that, except as otherwise expressly provided, the act "shall apply to causes of action filed after the effective date of this act," while Section 29 provides that the act "shall not be construed to impair any right under an insurance contract in effect on or before the effective date." The separate "causes of action accruing after" language in the act governs only the shortened negligence statute of limitations, not the bad-faith amendments. Which trigger controls a given bad-faith claim — the filing date, or the date the policy was issued or renewed — has been actively litigated since 2023 and is not uniformly resolved. Source

 

If You Think Your Insurer Is Repeating This Pattern

 

None of this is a substitute for reviewing your own policy or talking with a professional about your specific situation, but a few habits can put you in a stronger position if a dispute like this arises.

• Get settlement communication in writing, and think carefully before accepting whatever number an insurer offers first — the offer on the table isn't always the last one available.
• Excess-judgment risk is a reasonable thing to ask about. Florida courts have described the good-faith duty as including an obligation "to warn of the possibility of an excess judgment, and to advise the insured of any steps he might take to avoid same" — language drawn from this case, and language that is not always raised unprompted in a claim file. Source
• Keep your own conduct in good faith. Since HB 837, a claimant's or insured's uncooperative behavior can now reduce a later damages award, so responding to reasonable requests and deadlines protects your position on both sides of a dispute.
• Understand that an excess verdict by itself isn't proof of bad faith. Boston Old Colony is the clearest illustration: the insurer faced a judgment 140 times its policy limit and still won, because the Court measured its conduct against the five duties rather than against the size of the verdict. Section 624.155(5)(a), Florida Statutes, now states the point in statutory terms — "[m]ere negligence alone is insufficient to constitute bad faith." Read it at https://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&URL=0600-0699/0624/Sections/0624.155.html
• Talk to a qualified attorney before assuming you have a claim. In the meantime, Florida law gives you a defined set of rights and next steps that kick in the moment a claim denial letter arrives.

If your situation resembles what Brown went through — an insurer defending you in someone else's lawsuit, contested liability, and a real settlement offer on the table — it may help to look at a Florida case where the insurer's conduct fell short instead of meeting the standard: the same five duties, applied to a very different outcome.

Appeals are rare, and the odds are not as one-sided as either optimists or pessimists assume. In its analysis of 2024 federal transparency data, KFF found that consumers appealed fewer than 1% of denied in-network claims on HealthCare.gov plans, and that insurers upheld 66% of the appeals that were filed. 

A separate review of external-review decisions in four states found that almost half of those decisions overturned the initial denial. The practical point is narrower than "appeals win": the overwhelming majority of denials are never challenged at all, and the external-review stage, which almost no one reaches, has a materially better record than the internal stage. Source

 

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What Is An Excess Judgment In Florida Insurance Law?

An excess judgment occurs when a court awards a claimant more money than the at-fault party's insurance policy covers, leaving the policyholder personally exposed for the difference unless a bad-faith claim against the insurer succeeds.

2. Can I Sue My Insurance Company For Refusing To Settle?

In certain circumstances, yes — Florida allows third-party bad-faith claims when an insurer unreasonably refuses to settle within policy limits and an excess judgment results, but the insurer's conduct must fail the five-part good-faith test, not merely produce a large verdict.

3. Does Losing At Trial For More Than My Policy Limit Automatically Prove Bad Faith?

No. Boston Old Colony v. Gutierrez is a direct example of an excess judgment that did not amount to bad faith, because the insurer had investigated the claim, warned of the risk, and attempted to settle.

4. What Is A Hold-Harmless Agreement And Can It Protect My Insurer?

A hold-harmless agreement is a document where an insured personally accepts responsibility for any judgment beyond the policy limits; Florida courts have ruled that this type of agreement cannot be used to excuse an insurer from its underlying duty of good faith.

5. How Did HB 837 Change Florida Bad-Faith Insurance Law?

Signed in March 2023, HB 837 codified that mere negligence isn't enough to prove bad faith, added a 90-day safe harbor for insurers who tender policy limits promptly, imposed a good-faith duty on claimants too, and repealed section 627.428, Florida's one-way attorney fee statute. The act's own applicability provisions — Section 29 on insurance contracts in effect on or before March 24, 2023, and Section 30 on causes of action filed after that date — determine which claims the changes reach, and their interaction has been contested in the courts.

Editorial Disclaimer

 

Boston Old Colony v. Gutierrez turned on its own specific facts under Florida's five-part good-faith test — a similar-looking dispute can produce a different outcome, and this case doesn't predict how any individual claim will be decided.

 

Law discussed here, including HB 837's changes to §624.155, reflects the statutory and case law as of publication.

Which version of the law governs depends on when the cause of action arose and on the policy in effect at the time, and later rulings affect how these provisions are applied — see Vo v. Scottsdale Insurance Co., No. 1D2023-2228 (Fla. 1st DCA Feb. 26, 2025), holding that section 624.1551 cannot be applied retroactively to a cause of action that accrued before the statute took effect. Source

Confirm current law directly or with a licensed attorney before relying on it. Case citations and quoted language are sourced to the linked opinions and statutes; verify anything specific to your situation against the primary source.

 

Mentions of specific insurers, verdicts, or dollar figures describe historical, adjudicated matters only and aren't a characterization of how any insurer handles claims today.

 

Your situation likely differs from the one described here. If you're facing a refused settlement, a possible excess judgment, or a denied claim, review your policy and speak with a licensed attorney in your state.

Related posts linked here are companion analyses of different Florida cases and statutes. They are not condensed or rewritten versions of this one, and each should be read against its own primary sources.

The case is Boston Old Colony Ins. Co. v. Gutierrez, 386 So. 2d 783 (Fla. 1980) - Case Overview: Key Facts, Court And Ruling

Case Identification At A Glance

Category	Details
Full case name and citation	Boston Old Colony Insurance Company, Petitioner, v. Raul Gutierrez, Respondent, 386 So. 2d 783 (Fla. 1980). Parallel citation: 1980 Fla. LEXIS 4198.
Docket number	No. 54769, on review of a question certified by the Third District Court of Appeal as one of great public interest. Decision below: Boston Old Colony Ins. Co. v. Gutierrez, 360 So. 2d 464 (Fla. 3d DCA 1978).
Court and jurisdiction	Supreme Court of Florida — the state's court of last resort, sitting in Tallahassee.	Its holdings bind every Florida trial court and all six of Florida's district courts of appeal — five at the time this case was decided, with the Sixth District Court of Appeal added in 2023 — which is why this 1980 decision still governs failure-to-settle disputes statewide more than four decades later. Source
Date decided	April 10, 1980.
Disposition	Decision of the district court of appeal quashed. The Supreme Court held the insurer was entitled to a directed verdict, wiping out the jury's $1.4 million bad-faith award against the carrier. The controlling point: an excess judgment 140 times the policy limit is not itself evidence of bad faith, and the insurer's conduct is measured against its five settlement duties, not against the size of the verdict.
Parties involved	Boston Old Colony Insurance Company, the liability carrier on a $10,000 policy (petitioner), against Raul Gutierrez, the motorist injured in the head-on collision who held a $1.4 million judgment against the carrier's insured (recorded in the opinion as $1,400,000) and then pursued the carrier directly (respondent).
Panel	Decided per curiam — issued in the name of the court as a whole rather than under a single authoring justice.
The statutes in play	None. The case was decided purely under Florida's common-law duty of good faith, building on Thompson v. Commercial Union Insurance Company of New York, 250 So. 2d 259 (Fla. 1971). Florida did not codify a statutory bad-faith remedy until § 624.155, Fla. Stat. two years later, and property claims now face the additional gate in § 624.1551, Fla. Stat. Both remedies still incorporate the duties this case defined.
Court records	Full opinion text is published by the Free Law Project at CourtListener. Florida's academic law libraries maintain a non-commercial digitized archive of Supreme Court records and briefs from 1886 forward through the FSU College of Law Research Center, and current dockets and filings are searchable through the Appellate Court Information System.