Written by: Yusuf Nurudeen Ayodele (B.Sc., AAT, ACA (ICAN))
Published: July 17, 2026
Last updated: October 21, 2026
Topic: Bodily Injury Policy Limits In Florida — Individual Versus Aggregate Coverage, And What Happens When A Judgment Exceeds Both
Source review: Eleventh Circuit opinion in Martinez v. GEICO Casualty Insurance Co. (11th Cir. No. 24-10641, decided September 23, 2025), and the underlying district court record, No. 1:23-cv-20219 (S.D. Fla.); Florida Statutes §§ 324.021(7), 624.155, 627.736, 627.727 and 627.4137; Lasky v. State Farm Ins. Co., 296 So. 2d 9 (Fla. 1974); Boston Old Colony Ins. Co. v. Gutierrez, 386 So. 2d 783 (Fla. 1980); Berges v. Infinity Ins. Co., 896 So. 2d 665 (Fla. 2004); Farinas v. Fla. Farm Bureau Gen. Ins. Co., 850 So. 2d 555 (Fla. 4th DCA 2003); Harvey v. GEICO General Ins. Co., 259 So. 3d 1 (Fla. 2018); Eres v. Progressive American Ins. Co., 998 F.3d 1273 (11th Cir. 2021); Kinsale Ins. Co. v. Pride of St. Lucie Lodge 1189, Inc., 135 F.4th 961 (11th Cir. 2025); Florida HB 1181 (2025) and the House Insurance and Banking Subcommittee staff analysis; Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles insurance requirements; Florida Department of Financial Services personal automobile insurance overview and consumer guides; National Association of Insurance Commissioners guidance on personal umbrella policies; ISO auto claim-severity data published by the Insurance Information Institute; CDC Vital Signs data on crash-injury medical costs; and U.S. Government Accountability Office report GAO-19-292 on air ambulance prices
What Happens When A Car Accident Judgment Exceeds Your Insurance Policy Limits?
A
car accident can turn into a financial crisis long after the tow truck leaves,
and for many people the turning point comes weeks later, when they discover
that the at-fault driver's insurance doesn't come close to covering what
happened to them. That's what a bodily injury claim really tests: not just who
caused the wreck, but how much coverage stands behind them when the bills start
arriving.
Understanding
your policy limits, how aggregate coverage works, and what happens when a judgment
exceeds those limits can change the decisions you make before a crash rather
than after one.
This
piece walks through what those terms mean, uses a real federal appeals court
case to show how they play out, and covers what both drivers and injured passengers
can do to protect themselves.
The
outcome only makes sense once you know exactly what happened and who decided
it, so it's worth starting with the case overview: the key facts, the court, and the ruling.
What Are Bodily Injury Policy Limits, And Why Should You Care Before You're In A Crash?
Every
auto liability policy has two numbers attached to bodily injury coverage. The
first is the individual-coverage limit — the most the insurer will pay for one
injured person — and the second is the aggregate-coverage limit, the total cap
for everyone hurt in that single accident, no matter how many people that is.
Say
a policy carries $10,000 per person and $20,000 per accident. If four people
are hurt in one crash, that $20,000 gets divided among all four claims
combined. One severely injured passenger could easily need more medical care
than the entire aggregate limit provides.
This
math matters because a bodily injury claim isn't valued in a vacuum. It's
valued against a hard ceiling set months or years before the crash, by whatever
coverage the at-fault driver happened to carry. Reading a declarations page
before an accident tells you what that ceiling actually is.
Filing
a civil remedy notice also triggers a strict clock, and what happens if the insurer doesn't
respond within Florida's cure
window can affect whether a bad-faith case can proceed at all.
| Common Auto Insurance Terms | What It Means | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Individual-Coverage Limit | The maximum amount an insurance company will pay for bodily injury suffered by one person in a single accident. | $10,000 per injured person |
| Aggregate-Coverage Limit | The maximum total amount the insurer will pay for all bodily injury claims arising from one accident, regardless of the number of injured people. | $20,000 per accident |
| Property Damage Limit | The maximum amount available to pay for damage to another person's vehicle or other property. | $10,000 per accident |
| Policy Period | The specific dates during which the insurance policy remains active and provides coverage. | 6-month or 12-month policy term |
| Named Insured | The individual or individuals specifically listed on the insurance policy who receive the policy's protections and responsibilities. | Driver listed on the insurance policy |
Auto
liability payouts vary widely by case, but the numbers on paper often surprise
people. Data from the Insurance Information Institute's Facts + Statistics:
Auto Insurance report puts the average paid bodily injury liability claim at
$24,681 in 2022, $26,178 in 2023 and $28,278 in 2024 — a severity trend that
now sits at nearly three times Florida's $10,000 individual-coverage floor.
Florida's Minimum Coverage Is Lower Than You Might Think
Florida
drivers are sometimes surprised to learn the state doesn't require most of them
to carry bodily injury liability coverage at all. Florida's
financial-responsibility statute, Fla. Stat. §324.021(7), defines proof
of ability to respond in damages as $10,000 per person and $20,000 per crash
for bodily injury, plus $10,000 for property damage — but that showing is
triggered only in defined circumstances rather than at ordinary registration.
What
every owner of a four-wheel vehicle must actually carry, per the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, is $10,000 in personal injury
protection and $10,000 in property damage liability. PIP itself is governed by
Fla. Stat. §627.736,
which pays 80 percent of reasonable and necessary medical expenses regardless
of fault.
Florida's
no-fault framework has survived constitutional challenge since its inception.
In Lasky v. State Farm Insurance Co., 296 So. 2d 9 (Fla. 1974) (No. 42856,
decided April 17, 1974, revised on denial of rehearing May 28, 1974), the
Florida Supreme Court upheld the No-Fault Law against access-to-courts and
equal-protection attacks, and the statutory structure it approved is the same
one still in force today.
Claims
that this changed in 2026 are wrong, and the legislative record says so
plainly. HB 1181 (2025) would have repealed the PIP requirement and raised bodily injury minimums with
an effective date of July 1, 2026.
The House Insurance and Banking Subcommittee staff analysis confirms both the repeal and the increased limits it contemplated. HB 1181
passed multiple House committee votes, but the bill's official history shows a
last recorded action of June 16, 2025 with no floor vote taken, and its Senate
companion, SB 1256, died in committee before the session ended. Florida's
no-fault PIP system remains fully intact.
Bodily
injury coverage becomes mandatory only in specific situations, such as after a
DUI conviction or certain license reinstatement requirements. Outside of those
triggers, a Florida driver can legally be on the road with zero coverage for
the injuries they cause someone else.
That
distinction matters for anyone budgeting their own coverage or evaluating a
claim against someone else's policy — the rules didn't change, even though
plenty of secondhand sources suggested they had.
Why Low Minimums Create Risk for Everyone on the Road
Low
state minimums shape more than the at-fault driver's exposure. They also
determine what an injured victim can recover through a liability claim, since
the claim is capped by whatever limits the other driver happened to carry
rather than by the severity of the injury.
- A driver carrying only the state-required PIP and property damage coverage may have no bodily injury coverage at all to pay an injured third party.
- A driver who does carry bodily injury coverage may still have limits set decades ago and never revisited.
- Passengers and pedestrians have no say in what coverage the at-fault driver purchased, yet their recovery depends entirely on it.
Why
This Matters to You: If you're shopping for coverage, the state minimum is a
floor, not a target. If you're the one filing a bodily injury claim, the other
driver's declarations page — not your medical bills — often sets the outer
limit of what's available before other options come into play.
What Happens When A Crash Costs More Than The Policy Covers?
When damages exceed what a policy will pay, the difference is called an excess judgment. It's the gap between what the insurer tenders and what a court, jury, or settlement actually determines the injured party is owed.
Medical
costs for serious injuries climb quickly enough to blow past low policy limits
in a single hospital stay. The CDC's Vital Signs analysis of 2012 crash injuries put the average lifetime medical cost of a crash-related emergency
department visit at about $3,300 and a crash-related hospitalization at about
$57,000, with more than 75 percent of those costs incurred within the first 18
months.
Air
transport adds its own layer. The U.S. Government Accountability Office found
that the median price air ambulance providers charged privately insured
patients in 2017 was about $36,400 for a helicopter transport and $40,600 for a
fixed-wing transport, and that 69 percent of the transports it analysed were
out of network. Either figure on its own is several times a $10,000
individual-coverage limit — before a single surgery is billed.
One
federal appellate decision makes the aggregate-limit problem concrete. In
Martinez v. GEICO Casualty Insurance Co., No. 24-10641 (11th Cir. Sept. 23,
2025), a single 10/20 policy was the entire fund available to a vehicle
carrying six occupants, two of whom were hurt badly enough to be airlifted. The
relevant number for this discussion is not the injuries but the arithmetic:
$20,000 divided among everyone hurt, set years before the crash.
You
can read the full published opinion on the Eleventh Circuit's own opinion server,
and the underlying district court record is indexed at govinfo as Martinez v. GEICO Casualty Insurance Company, No. 1:23-cv-20219 (S.D. Fla.).
| Stage | Amount / Detail |
|---|---|
| Individual-Coverage Limit | $10,000 per person |
| Aggregate-Coverage Limit | $20,000 per accident |
| Occupants Of The Struck SUV | 6 — driver plus five passengers |
| Claimants The Limit Was Allocated To | 2 — $10,000 each to Martinez and Mejia |
| GEICO's Tender at Global Settlement | $20,000 (full limit) |
| Outcome After Litigation | $2,000,000 judgment |
This page uses Martinez only to illustrate how the aggregate limit behaves when several people are hurt at once. The full case narrative — the nine-year state-court action, the global settlement conference, the assignment, and the dated timeline from notice through the Eleventh Circuit's 2025 affirmance — is set out in our companion report on how that $20,000 limit became a $2,000,000 judgment, which covers the same case rather than a different one.
Martinez rejected GEICO's tender on September 23, 2009 and sued Guevara, driver Roxanne Morina, and Morina's mother in Florida state court instead.
That action stayed pending roughly eight years. GEICO granted Guevara permission to enter a stipulated final judgment of $2,000,000 on April 2, 2018, and the court confirmed the award on October 5, 2018.
Guevara
then assigned her claims against GEICO to Martinez, who filed a single-count bad-faith action in the
Southern District of Florida on January 19, 2023. The $1,980,000 spread between
the $20,000 of available aggregate coverage and the $2,000,000 judgment is the
excess judgment.
Does A Big Judgment Automatically Mean The Insurer Acted In Bad Faith?
It's
a natural assumption: if the judgment is a hundred times the policy limit,
someone must have mishandled the claim. Florida law doesn't work that way,
though, and the Martinez case is a clear illustration of why.
The governing standard comes from the Florida Supreme Court rather than from any single insurer's or claimant's characterization of it. In Boston Old Colony Insurance Co. v. Gutierrez, 386 So. 2d 783 (Fla. 1980) (No. 54769, decided April 10, 1980, rehearing denied September 4, 1980), the Court held that because an insured surrenders all control over the handling of a claim, the insurer assumes a duty to exercise that control in good faith and with due regard for the insured's interests.
Those
obligations are enumerated and worked through case by case in our separate
treatment of the insurer's good-faith duty and the $1.4 million verdict that
defined it, so they are not repeated here. What matters for a policy-limits
decision is narrower: the duty runs to the insured, not to the injured
claimant, and no amount of diligent claims handling creates coverage that was
never purchased.
The
Court has also confirmed that each of these cases turns on its own record. Berges
v. Infinity Insurance Co., 896 So. 2d 665 (Fla. 2004) (No. SC01-2846, decided
November 18, 2004, rehearing denied February 28, 2005), reversed a Second
District decision that had set aside a jury's bad-faith finding, restoring
verdicts of $911,400 on a wrongful death claim and $500,000 on a minor's
personal injury claim against a policy carrying far lower limits.
Outcomes
like these recur across Florida dockets, and another case where an insurer's refusal to
settle turned a modest claim into a far larger bad-faith
payout shows the same pattern playing out with different numbers.
In
the Martinez case, GEICO investigated a coverage question (the truck involved
wasn't listed on the driver's policy), gathered police reports and medical
information, and tendered its full policy limits at a global settlement
conference intended to resolve multiple claims from the same crash at once. The
injured passenger argued the insurer delayed too long and mishandled her later
settlement offers.
The
Eleventh Circuit disagreed. The magistrate judge had found that "GEICO did
not, as a matter of law, act in bad faith," the district court adopted
that report and recommendation in full, and the Eleventh Circuit affirmed,
holding that no reasonable jury could infer bad faith from this record under
the totality of the circumstances.
On
the two weeks that passed before GEICO reviewed the police report, the panel
wrote that "[t]he bare fact of this gap in time may 'show some negligence'
on GEICO's part—but that is not enough to establish that GEICO delayed its
investigation in bad faith."
The
court treated the insurer's investigation as reasonable while a genuine
coverage question was open, and treated the decision to convene a global
settlement conference for several claimants at once as consistent with, rather than
contrary to, the duty owed to its insured.
Florida
also has a statutory bad-faith remedy that runs alongside the common-law claim.
Fla. Stat. §624.155 permits a person to obtain judgment under either the common-law remedy or the
statutory one, but not both, and sets out the notice conditions that apply.
Those
notice conditions are specific and easy to get wrong, and the step-by-step process for filing that notice correctly covers the exact violation language the form requires.
Two further Eleventh Circuit decisions frame the outer edges of the standard, one in the insurer's favor and one against.
In Eres v. Progressive American Insurance Co., 998 F.3d 1273 (11th Cir. 2021) (No. 20-11006, decided June 1, 2021), the court affirmed summary judgment for the insurer, holding that evidence showing "some negligence" is not enough to create the inference of bad faith required to survive Rule 56; the docket and opinion are on govinfo.
But in Kinsale Insurance Co. v. Pride of St. Lucie Lodge 1189, Inc., 135 F.4th 961 (11th Cir. 2025) (No. 22-12675, decided April 18, 2025), the court reversed and remanded a summary judgment in the insurer's favor, explaining that where liability is obvious and injuries are severe, an insured's financial exposure operates as a "ticking financial time bomb" and any delay in offering the limits may itself be evidence of bad faith.
That
opinion is on the Eleventh Circuit's
server and
its docket is indexed at govinfo. Read together, Eres and Kinsale protect
insurers that investigate diligently and act reasonably while leaving
policyholders a remedy against insurers that cut corners, and neither result
turns on the size of the judgment alone.
Why This Matters to You: Whether you're an injured claimant or a policyholder facing an excess judgment, the size of the gap between the policy limit and the final award doesn't by itself prove fault on the insurer's part.
Courts
look at what the insurer actually did — how fast it investigated, whether it
communicated clearly, and whether its settlement decisions were reasonable
given the facts it had.
Why Multiple Claimants Change The Analysis
Martinez
turned in part on GEICO's decision to convene a global settlement conference
rather than pay the first claimant to present.
Florida law has wrestled with that exact choice, most notably in Farinas v. Florida Farm Bureau General Insurance Co., 850 So. 2d 555 (Fla. 4th DCA 2003) (Nos. 4D02-11 and 4D02-96, decided April 23, 2003), where a February 23, 1996 crash in which Nicholas Copertino lost control and crossed a median killed five teenagers and injured seven more, including a 14-year-old rendered quadriplegic. Liability was not seriously disputed and the $100,000-per-claim, $300,000-per-accident limits were plainly inadequate.
Farm
Bureau settled with some claimants for the limits, and the Fourth District reversed summary
judgment in the insurer's favor and remanded, holding that an insurer facing
multiple claims and inadequate limits must act reasonably toward all of them.
On rehearing the court observed that such accidents "are likely to lead to
recurrent lawsuits raising similar issues."
A
single accident that produces more injured claimants than one policy can cover
is a recurring problem in Florida rather than a one-off, and Farinas is only
its best-known illustration.
The Eleventh Circuit in Martinez reached a different result on different facts. GEICO had an unresolved coverage question — Guevara's truck was not listed on her policy, and she had purchased it the day of the crash — and it set aside the full aggregate limit for a global conference on March 19, 2009, thirty days after notice, before the coverage question was answered.
Together,
Farinas and Martinez mark the boundary: a global conference is not itself bad faith, but it
does not immunize an insurer that uses the process to stall.
How To Check And Strengthen Your Own Policy Limits
All
of this applies just as much to drivers who haven't caused a crash: anyone
carrying auto insurance is one accident away from being the "Guevara"
in their own version of this story — the insured driver whose limits determine
how exposed they are to a judgment beyond their policy.
A
few concrete steps make that risk visible before it becomes a problem:
- Pull your declarations page and locate the bodily injury limits — both the per-person and per-accident numbers.
- Compare those numbers to your assets and income, not just to the state minimum, since a judgment beyond your policy can reach personal assets.
- Ask your agent about umbrella coverage, which sits above your auto and homeowners liability limits.
- Review your limits after major life changes — buying a home, having a child, or a meaningful raise all change how much you have to protect.
When An Umbrella Policy Makes Sense
A personal umbrella policy adds liability coverage above what an auto or homeowners policy provides, and it generally responds once those underlying limits are exhausted.
The National Association of Insurance Commissioners describes a personal umbrella policy as providing coverage for liability and defense costs that primary auto, homeowners, or renters insurance does not cover.
Florida's own consumer regulator, the Department of Financial Services, sets out how liability coverage functions in a personal automobile insurance overview and publishes downloadable auto insurance consumer guides.
That
layer is precisely what was missing in Martinez, where $20,000 of
aggregate coverage stood behind a $2,000,000 judgment.
State Minimum
(varies by state)
Drivers seeking to meet only the minimum legal insurance requirements.
Recommended Baseline
$300,000 per accident
Drivers with savings, home equity, or other assets they want to help protect.
Umbrella-Backed
liability coverage
Homeowners, higher-income households, business owners, and people with greater financial exposure.
The
trade-off is usually smaller than people expect, since premiums for meaningful
added coverage are often modest compared to the exposure they address.
What To Do If You're The One Injured And Facing Low Policy Limits
The
other side of this story is the injured passenger, pedestrian, or driver who
discovers the at-fault party's coverage won't come close to their medical bills.
That situation calls for a different set of steps.
Two Florida statutes do real work here. Fla. Stat. §627.4137 requires a liability insurer, within 30 days of a written request, to disclose the name of the insurer, the name of each insured, and the limits of coverage, along with a certified copy of the policy.
Scope
note: This report is about choosing and reading bodily injury limits in
Florida. Our companion report covers the same Martinez v. GEICO litigation as a
case study, and a third covers the insurer's good-faith duty. Where those pages
go deeper, this one links rather than repeats.
Separately, Fla. Stat. §627.727 governs uninsured
and underinsured motorist coverage and requires that UM limits be offered at
not less than the bodily injury liability limits the named insured purchased,
unless the insured makes an informed written rejection.
- Document injuries and treatment thoroughly, since the strength of the medical record affects both the initial settlement offer and any later dispute. That documentation matters even more when an insurer disputes or downplays the medical evidence itself, which is a separate fight from the policy-limits question.
- Understand that rejecting a tendered policy-limit offer to pursue the at-fault driver directly, as happened in the Martinez case, can lead to a judgment far above the original policy — but collecting that excess judgment is its own separate legal process, distinct from the underlying injury claim. And if a settlement offer does come with a release to sign, what that release actually waives matters just as much as the dollar amount attached to it.
A
licensed insurance agent or personal injury attorney can walk through what
UM/UIM coverage you may already have and how it interacts with a low-limit
claim against someone else's policy.
The
first number offered is rarely the only one available, and what to weigh before accepting a low settlement offer is worth reviewing before agreeing to anything.
What Every Driver Should Take From This
Policy
limits are the number that decides how a bodily injury claim actually resolves,
long before anyone gets to argue about fault or bad faith.
- Individual and aggregate limits work together, and a single serious injury can consume an entire aggregate limit on its own.
- State minimums, especially in states like Florida, may leave bodily injury coverage optional or set well below what a serious injury actually costs.
- A large excess judgment doesn't automatically mean an insurer acted in bad faith — Florida courts weigh the insurer's actual conduct under a totality-of-the-circumstances standard.
- Umbrella coverage is one of the more direct ways to close the gap between a policy limit and a worst-case judgment.
- Injured claimants have their own tools, particularly UM/UIM coverage, when the at-fault party's limits fall short. And if a claim gets denied outright rather than merely underpaid, a separate set of rights and next steps applies the moment that denial letter arrives.
Editorial Disclaimer
This
report is for educational purposes only and is not legal, financial, insurance,
or tax advice. The author, Yusuf Nurudeen Ayodele, is a Chartered Accountant,
not a licensed attorney, and nothing here creates a professional relationship.
Martinez
v. GEICO and the other cases discussed (Boston Old Colony, Harvey, Berges,
Farinas, Kinsale, Eres, Lasky) each turned on their own facts. A reversal or
remand is not a final finding of bad faith, and no case here predicts the
outcome of another. Read the full opinions before relying on any summary.
Statutes
cited (§§324.021(7), 627.736, 627.727, 627.4137, 624.155) are summarized and
may omit exceptions or have been amended since publication. HB 1181's status
reflects the record as of writing — verify current bill status and statutory
text on the Florida Senate or Online Sunshine sites. Florida's rules don't apply
in other states.
The coverage examples, tables, and`(Insurance Information Institute, CDC, GAO)` are simplified illustrations, not a personalized coverage recommendation or a prediction of any claim's value. Nothing here guarantees any outcome.
Sources, Links, And Corrections
Court
opinions, statutes, and agency pages are linked so you can verify claims
yourself. Quotations are brief and attributed, and everything else is
paraphrased. Links to third-party sites and to other Insurance Claim Advocacy
articles are provided for convenience and are not endorsements. If you find an
error or an outdated statement, please use the Contact Us page. See also the site's
Editorial Policy and
Disclaimer pages.
Who To Consult For Your Situation
| If you are... | Consider speaking with... |
|---|---|
| Reviewing or raising your own bodily injury limits, or considering an umbrella policy | A licensed insurance agent or broker; the Florida Department of Financial Services also publishes consumer guides |
| Injured and facing low limits on the at-fault driver's policy, or weighing UM/UIM coverage | A Florida-licensed personal injury attorney |
| Reviewing a settlement offer or release before signing | A Florida-licensed attorney |
| Facing a possible judgment above your policy limits | A Florida-licensed attorney |
| Weighing how liability exposure affects your assets or finances | A financial or tax professional |
From Claim To Courtroom: Key Facts, Court And Ruling
| Category | Details |
|---|---|
| Full Case Name | Katherine Martinez, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. GEICO Casualty Insurance Company, Defendant-Appellee, No. 24-10641 (11th Cir. Sept. 23, 2025) (published opinion). |
| Docket Number | Appellate No. 24-10641. Below: D.C. Docket No. 1:23-cv-20219-KMW, United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida. |
| Court & Jurisdiction | United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, sitting in diversity and applying Florida substantive law. Its published opinions bind federal district courts in Florida, Georgia and Alabama; on unsettled questions of Florida law it predicts how the Florida Supreme Court would rule rather than making state law. (Eleventh Circuit Opinions) |
| Date Decided | September 23, 2025 (opinion filed and marked "For Publication"). |
| Disposition | Affirmed. The Eleventh Circuit upheld summary judgment for GEICO, holding that under the totality of the circumstances no reasonable jury could find the insurer acted in bad faith, notwithstanding the $2,000,000 excess judgment. |
| Parties Involved | Katherine Martinez, an injured passenger who took an assignment of the insured's bad-faith claim (plaintiff-appellant), against GEICO Casualty Insurance Company, liability carrier for at-fault driver Diana Guevara (defendant-appellee). Guevara was the assignor and is not a party on appeal. |
| Panel | Lagoa, J., writing, with Luck and Abudu, Circuit Judges, on the panel. |
| Coverage At Issue | Bodily-injury liability of $10,000 per person and $20,000 per accident in the aggregate — the statutory-floor tier described in § 324.021(7), Fla. Stat. — against a stipulated final judgment of $2,000,000, leaving $1,980,000 uninsured. |
| The Statutes In Play | Florida common-law third-party bad faith, together with § 627.4137, Fla. Stat. (30-day duty to disclose insurer name, insureds and coverage limits, invoked by claimant's counsel on April 16, 2009) and § 624.155, Fla. Stat. (statutory civil remedy, elected in the alternative to the common-law claim). |
| Court Records | The published opinion is posted on the court's own server at media.ca11.uscourts.gov, and the underlying district court record is indexed by the U.S. Government Publishing Office at govinfo.gov. |
Supporting Authorities: The Cases That Set The Standard
| Case And Citation | Docket | Court And Jurisdiction | Date Decided | Disposition | Court Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Boston Old Colony Ins. Co. v. Gutierrez, 386 So. 2d 783 (Fla. 1980) — petitioner insurer against insured Raul Gutierrez | No. 54769 | Supreme Court of Florida; binding statewide | April 10, 1980; rehearing denied September 4, 1980 | Per curiam. Third District decision quashed; $1,400,000 bad-faith judgment against the insurer wiped out (directed verdict for insurer). Source of the six good-faith obligations. | Full opinion |
| Harvey v. GEICO Gen. Ins. Co., 259 So. 3d 1 (Fla. 2018) — Suzanne Harvey, as personal representative, against GEICO | No. SC17-85 | Supreme Court of Florida; binding statewide | September 20, 2018 | Quince, J. Fourth District decision quashed and remanded. Held the Boston Old Colony duties "are not a mere checklist"; Canady, C.J., and Polston, J., dissented on jurisdiction. | Full opinion (with dissents) · PDF copy |
| Berges v. Infinity Ins. Co., 896 So. 2d 665 (Fla. 2004) — insured Barry Berges against his carrier | No. SC01-2846 | Supreme Court of Florida, on review of the Second District; from Hillsborough County Circuit Court | November 18, 2004; rehearing denied February 28, 2005 | Second District decision quashed; jury's bad-faith finding restored, reinstating $911,400 wrongful-death and $500,000 personal-injury verdicts. Two dissents. | Full opinion |
| Farinas v. Fla. Farm Bureau Gen. Ins. Co., 850 So. 2d 555 (Fla. 4th DCA) — Maribel Farinas and co-claimants against the carrier | Nos. 4D02-11 and 4D02-96 (consolidated) | Florida Fourth District Court of Appeal, West Palm Beach; binds Florida trial courts, persuasive elsewhere | April 23, 2003; rehearing and rehearing en banc denied and question certified July 9, 2003 | Summary judgment for the insurer reversed and remanded. Multiple claimants, five deaths and inadequate $100,000/$300,000 limits; insurer must act reasonably toward all claimants. | Full opinion |
| Kinsale Ins. Co. v. Pride of St. Lucie Lodge 1189, Inc., 135 F.4th 961 (11th Cir. 2025) — insurer against insured lodge and claimant Teaira Nicole Reed | No. 22-12675 | U.S. Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit, applying Florida law | Argued December 7, 2023; decided April 18, 2025 | Reversed and remanded. Where liability is clear and injuries severe, exposure is a "ticking financial time bomb" and delay in tendering limits may itself evidence bad faith. | Court PDF · Docket |
| Eres v. Progressive Am. Ins. Co., 998 F.3d 1273 (11th Cir. 2021) — assignee against the liability carrier | No. 20-11006 | U.S. Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit, applying Florida law | June 1, 2021 | Affirmed summary judgment for the insurer. Evidence of "some negligence" does not raise the inference of bad faith needed to survive Rule 56. | Docket and opinion |
| Lasky v. State Farm Ins. Co., 296 So. 2d 9 (Fla. 1974) — motorist challenging the No-Fault Law | No. 42856 | Supreme Court of Florida; binding statewide | April 17, 1974; revised on denial of rehearing May 28, 1974 | Dekle, J. Florida Motor Vehicle No-Fault Law upheld against access-to-courts and equal-protection challenges. The structure approved remains in force. | Full opinion |
Statutes And Legislative Record: Primary Sources
| Authority | What It Establishes | Official Source |
|---|---|---|
| § 324.021(7) | Defines proof of ability to respond in damages as $10,000 per person and $20,000 per crash for bodily injury, plus $10,000 property damage — triggered in defined circumstances, not at ordinary registration. | The Florida Senate |
| § 627.736 | Personal injury protection benefits, paying 80 percent of reasonable and necessary medical expenses regardless of fault. | Online Sunshine |
| § 627.727 | Uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage; UM limits must be offered at no less than the bodily injury liability limits purchased absent an informed written rejection. | The Florida Senate |
| § 627.4137 | Requires a liability insurer, within 30 days of written request, to disclose insurer name, each insured, coverage limits, and a certified copy of the policy. | Online Sunshine |
| § 624.155 | Statutory civil remedy for bad faith, available in the alternative to the common-law remedy but not in addition to it, with its own notice conditions. | Online Sunshine |
| HB 1181 (2025) | Would have repealed the PIP requirement and raised bodily injury minimums effective July 1, 2026. Last action June 16, 2025 with no floor vote; the bill did not become law and PIP remains in force. | Bill history · Staff analysis |
| Mandatory Coverage, FLHSMV | The state licensing agency's statement of what owners of four-wheel vehicles must actually carry: $10,000 PIP and $10,000 property damage liability. | Florida DHSMV |
| Liability & Umbrella Coverage | Regulator explanations of how liability limits function and what a personal umbrella policy adds above underlying auto and homeowners limits. | Florida DFS · NAIC |
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