Reporting Highlights
- A Special Deal: In a moment of peril, Florida lawmakers allowed its insurer of last resort to take disputes before judges whose salaries it funds.
- Winning Record: Citizens has taken more than 1,500 insurance disputes to mandatory arbitration, where it wins more than 90% of final hearings. In court it wins just over half the time.
- Systemic Issues: Citizens says the process is fast, cheap and fair. Homeowners say the forum violates their rights.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
Last October, Peter and Linda Kilfoil returned from an overnight trip and found water pooling in the kitchen of their Fort Lauderdale, Florida, home. The pair couldn’t pinpoint the source of the leak and had a hard time getting a plumber. So Linda Kilfoil called their insurer, Citizens Property Insurance Corp.
The call was the beginning of the Kilfoils’ journey through an alternate legal universe set up by Citizens, a quasi-governmental insurer in Florida, to reduce its staggering legal costs. In this state-sanctioned world, the judges’ salaries are funded by Citizens, the rules followed in Florida’s circuit courts don’t all apply and the insurance company almost always triumphs…