The Clark Opinion | Property Insurance Coverage Law Blog

Sometimes, decisions come along that make me wonder if judges are reading the same insurance policies and insurance laws the rest of us are. The recent Florida Clark opinion ¹ is one of them. According to this sparkling gem of judicial thought, it turns out that it’s not enough to tell your insurance company, “Hey, my house was ripped apart by a hurricane.” No, no — you must now apparently provide individual notices for each coverage you might later claim — immediately. Lost your roof? Notify that. Lost your sofa? Separate notice. Lost the ability to rent your now-soggy house? Another notice. Better get your checklist ready the next time a Category 4 levels your property.

Let’s take a simple example. Your beautiful beachfront hotel burns to the ground. You call your agent and breathlessly report: “My hotel just burned to ashes!” Apparently, under Clark, unless you also scream into the phone, “And all my beds and coffee makers burned too! And I won’t be renting any rooms for a year!”, the insurance company can later deny your contents and rental loss claims for lack of “prompt notice.” Because clearly, in the aftermath of a total loss, what people should focus on is making sure they itemize every category of destruction right away. Who cares about smoke inhalation or finding a place to sleep? We must satisfy the hyper-technical gods of “notice.”

Feeling skeptical? Let’s kick it, old school. Picture a ship setting sail in 1783. It sinks in a ferocious storm. The shipowner sends a dispatch to London: “The ship has sunk.” Lloyd’s of London, famous for its bells, dutifully rings the ship loss bell. But under Clark’s new logic, someone should have scurried over and said, “Wait! Wait! That’s only notice of the ship! Where’s the separate bell for the cargo?!” Maybe they should have had different bells: one for the ship, one for the bales of cotton, another for the spices, and a separate, dainty chime for the silks. After all, it’s not enough to say the ship is on the bottom of the ocean — we must notify separately that the cargo got wet, too.

Or let’s stay modern. A hurricane blows the entire roof off of your house, the walls are bent inward, the interior is flooded, the furniture is floating, and the neighbor’s canoe is resting where your dining table used to be. You promptly call your insurance agent and say, “My house is destroyed.” But silly you — unless you simultaneously list “roof gone,” “walls ruined,” “furniture destroyed,” “loss of rental income,” and “emotional devastation,” you have breached your sacred duty to provide notice. Naturally, your insurer will graciously pay you for maybe the roof — but forget the contents, forget the rentals, and please don’t even ask about mold. You didn’t give “prompt notice” of those. Shame on you for thinking common sense applied to property insurance.

What this decision does is inject a new level of hyper-technical nonsense into a simple concept that insurance was a product designed to protect policyholders by paying coverage benefits — not trap them. This decision now allows certain insurance companies — especially those already steeped in a culture of delay, deny, and defend — to invent a new way to argue: “Gotcha!” when people honestly, quickly, and understandably notify them of losses.

Insurance is rightfully marketed as providing protection, not creating obscure procedural hurdles that no reasonable person could ever foresee. Instead, Clark invites more denials, delays, brawls, lawsuits, and appeals because the law has never been required to give notice in this manner, and customers suffering the loss do not purchase a policy that says that they have to provide notice of each coverage impacted by the loss when providing the notice of loss.

Public adjusters, risk managers, and especially insurance agents who are usually the first line of communication — pay attention. When you get that frantic phone call, email, or text from a customer reporting their house on fire, their building underwater, or their roof sailing off into the horizon, realize that simply forwarding “the house blew apart” may not be enough anymore. Some companies, emboldened by this decision, will now argue that you had to relay separate notice for the kitchen cabinets, the crown molding, and the lost 10-year tenant lease.

Be warned: Clark might become the new favorite tool of those insurance companies that think claims handling is a zero-sum game. And yes, I will be writing more on this case once I have the briefs and can dive deeper into the rest of the decision.

Stay tuned. This was just the opening bell — and don’t forget to ring one for the furniture, another for the carpets, and another for the lost rental income while you’re at it.

Thought of The Day

“There’s nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it.”
— William James

¹ Homeowners Choice Prop. & Cas. Ins. Co. v. Clark, No. 1D2023-1622, (Fla.1^st DCA Mar. 19, 2025).