By Hal Lewis, Partner

In Florida, the law of “sovereign immunity” keeps injured people from filing personal injury lawsuits against the State or against any county, city or governmental agency. Fortunately, there are statutory exceptions to this law that allow for some lawsuits in limited situations, but those same statutes also cap the damages that a plaintiff in any such lawsuit would be able to recover. The public policy behind this law was well intended, but the time has come for this terribly outdated law to be made current.

The initial reasoning behind “sovereign immunity” was to keep cities, school boards and other such governmental units from “going out of business” in the wake of a large verdict against them. The argument always was that one tragic school bus accident as the result of negligence on the part of the bus driver could subject a school board to tens of millions of dollars in damages. If the school board was not insured sufficiently, then the school board would not be able to operate any longer and public harm would arise. Thus, while the legislature saw a need to allow lawsuits against the school board in such cases, they also saw the need to cap damages in order to make sure that the schools would stay open.

The problem, however, arises from the fact that the legislature has not raised the caps on damages for almost three decades! What may have seemed like a fair and reasonable amount in the early 1970’s is certainly not a fair and reasonable amount in today’s dollars – especially when you consider that the average car cost $3,100 in those days and the average house cost $46,000. Anyone can see the cost of living has gone up at least three or four hundred percent in the past thirty years, but the Florida Legislature refuses to address this concern.

Instead, the legislature continues to keep the cap on individual damages in any personal injury lawsuit against the State or other governmental agency at the ridiculously low level of $100,000. No matter how catastrophic the injuries are and no matter how substantial the medical bills are, the damages are still capped at $100,000 per person – just as they were in 1975! One wonders why the legislators vote to pay themselves many times more than their counterparts were paid in the 1970’s, but yet the legislators refuse to raise the sovereign immunity limits to $400,000 or $500,000 so that severely injured individuals in 2002 can receive the same amount (proportionately) that their injured counterparts received many years ago.

When a parent loses a child as the result of negligence on the part of a city worker who runs a stop light while driving a garbage truck, $100,000 is nowhere near being a fair and reasonable amount of compensation to that grieving parent. After all, the city has the ability to buy insurance to protect itself against these potential damages, so the “threat” of going bankrupt nowadays is an idle threat at best. There is simply no logical explanation for why the Florida Legislature continues to force severely injured victims into accepting much less than “fair value” for their losses. Therefore, Fonvielle Lewis Foote & Messer supports the Academy of Florida Trial Lawyers in its effort to fix this problem.