What the one-way attorney fee was
For decades, Florida's one-way fee statutes (s. 627.428 for admitted insurers and s. 626.9373 for surplus lines) entitled a policyholder who obtained a judgment against an insurer to recover reasonable attorney fees from that insurer. It was "one-way" because it ran in only one direction: the policyholder could collect fees from the carrier, but the carrier could not collect fees from the policyholder. In practice, a lawyer could take a disputed claim knowing the carrier would pay the fees if the policyholder recovered even slightly more than the carrier had offered.
How Florida ended it
Two laws dismantled it in sequence:
- SB 2-A (December 2022) carved property insurance suits out of the one-way fee, so fees in a property suit could be awarded only as provided in s. 57.105 or the pre-suit-notice statute s. 627.70152.
- HB 837 (2023), Chapter 2023-15, effective March 24, 2023, repealed s. 627.428 and s. 626.9373 outright, across all lines of insurance.
Today there is no automatic one-way fee in a Florida first-party property suit.
What it means for your claim now
Before the repeal, a carrier faced real pressure to settle because losing meant paying your lawyer too. That pressure is largely gone. A policyholder now generally bears the cost of litigation unless a narrower fee tool applies, such as a proposal for settlement or the sanction statute s. 57.105. The practical consequence is that documenting and valuing the loss correctly on the front end, before litigation, matters far more than it used to, because the old assumption that "the lawyer costs the carrier nothing" no longer holds.