The Appraisers Agreed. Fighting the Award Form Still Needs a Presuit Notice.

Each side hired an appraiser, the appraisers agreed on the amount of loss, and the money still did not move. Hamid Nekouee would not sign Citizens' Appraisal Award form, accusing the carrier of "refusing to complete the appraisal process unless a release, masquerading as an appraisal form, is used."¹ So he sued for a declaration about the form and asked for no damages at all. On August 14 the Second District held that a lawsuit seeking nothing is still a lawsuit, and that his was over before it started.¹

The statute is section 627.70152. Subsection (3)(a) makes a written notice of intent to initiate litigation, filed with the Department of Financial Services, a condition precedent to filing suit under a property insurance policy, and subsection (5) says a court "must dismiss without prejudice" a suit brought without one.² The circuit judge in Pasco County read the notice provisions, could not see how they fit a complaint that demanded no money, and denied Citizens' motion from the bench: "we don't even know if there is a dispute yet."¹

The Second District disagreed, and reached Humpty Dumpty before it reached the statute.¹

"All suits" at full strength

Judge LaRose quoted the exchange from Through the Looking-Glass in which Humpty Dumpty makes a word mean just what he chooses, then answered it: "Professor Dumpty's pedantic exposition on linguistic subjectivity ignores the fact that words have shared, common meanings."¹ Then: "[A]ll suits" means "all suits"–neither more nor less.¹

Nine words, and the reasoning under them is the general-terms canon, which presumes that general words were chosen to produce general coverage rather than to leave courts room for exceptions. The court worked the term through Merriam-Webster, through Black's on "suit," and through three of its own recent opinions that had called a declaratory action a suit without anybody objecting, and concluded that the trial court's "cramped reading of the statute ignores the plain, ordinary, and expansive scope of the word 'all.'"¹

Nekouee's authority was Bristol West Insurance v. MD Readers, Inc., 52 So. 3d 48 (Fla. 4th DCA 2010), where a declaratory suit seeking no damages escaped a presuit notice requirement. The Second District's answer is narrow and textual, and it tells you exactly where the argument lives: the statute in Bristol West reached "any action for [personal injury protection] benefits," while section 627.70152(1) "is not so limited."¹ Subsection (1) limits itself by the kind of policy, not by the kind of relief. Anyone looking to argue around this opinion has to find a limit in the words, and the sentence has only the one.

The Third District had this question in front of it in 2024 and stepped around it, holding that the complaint in Citizens Property Insurance v. Walden, 395 So. 3d 216, "plainly alleges a thinly veiled breach of contract claim" and so declining to decide whether the notice reaches declaratory actions generally.¹ Nekouee's footnote claims the ground carefully: "Seemingly, we are the first to squarely address the issue that the Third District skirted."¹ Seemingly is the court's word, not a hedge added here, and the opinion still carries the line "Opinion subject to revision prior to official publication."¹

Issuance date first, then subject matter

Ten weeks later the Florida Supreme Court read the same subsection and cut the other way, holding in Hughes that section 627.70152 does not apply to a policy issued before the statute took effect on July 1, 2021.⁸ That opinion got its own breakdown on this site, down to which date on the declarations page controls.

The two readings do not collide, because they are answers to different questions. Hughes decides whether the statute reaches a given policy at all. Nekouee decides which suits it swallows once it does. Run them in that order on a file and the second question only matters if the first one clears.

Neither opinion is settled law yet. Hughes carries the stamp "NOT FINAL UNTIL TIME EXPIRES TO FILE REHEARING MOTION AND, IF FILED, DETERMINED."⁸ And the Nekouee opinion never states when Nekouee's policy was issued. It applies the 2022 version of the statute and the loss was hurricane damage, which points toward a post-2021 policy, but the opinion does not say so, does not name the storm, and nothing here should be read as though it did.¹

What goes in the notice when you are asking for no money

Look at what subsection (3)(a) demands and the trial judge's problem becomes obvious. After a denial of coverage the notice carries "an estimate of damages, if known." After acts or omissions other than a denial it carries a presuit settlement demand itemizing damages, attorney fees and costs, plus "[t]he disputed amount."² A complaint that asks for no money appears to have neither.

The Second District filled the blank in two sentences, and this is the most useful thing in the opinion for anyone who handles Florida files: "Mr. Nekouee seeks no damages. Yet, the loss involved is the agreed upon but unpaid appraisal amount."¹ It cited subsection (3)(a)4 for that figure and subsection (3)(a)5.a for the fees and costs already run up.¹

The number is the award. A file sitting on an award the appraisers signed and the insured did not already contains the figure the form wants, and the objection to the form is what goes on the "alleged acts or omissions" line.² The same reading travels well past appraisal-form fights: if the loss has a number attached to it, the fact that a complaint declines to ask for that number will not excuse the notice. Filing it also starts the carrier's clock, and the menu of permitted answers is short enough to plan around. Where the notice follows a denial, the insurer has ten business days to accept coverage, continue to deny, or assert a right to reinspect, and asserting that right buys it fourteen more business days to reinspect and then accept or keep denying. Where the notice follows anything other than a denial, the insurer must either make a settlement offer or require appraisal or another form of alternative dispute resolution, and if that process has not concluded within ninety days after the notice period runs out, suit may be filed with no further notice.² Ohio's courts came at award finality from the opposite direction this week, and the two opinions sit well together, because an award is very hard to reopen once it closes.

That last line on the caption is not pedantry. The sixty-day number practitioners reach for in this area belongs to the civil remedy notice under section 624.155, and the other sixty is the pay-or-deny deadline in section 627.70131(7)(a).⁶ Neither one is in section 627.70152, and a notice served on the wrong clock draws the same mandatory dismissal as no notice at all.²

The notice goes to the Department, not to the carrier, and the Department forwards it.² Two operational details of that portal repay knowing. Everything filed there is a public record and the search works without an account, and a signed-in user can subscribe to nightly email alerts for every notice filed against companies they name.⁷ Nothing filed can be edited afterward, and only the account that created a notice can withdraw it, so a notice aimed at the wrong carrier has to be filed again from scratch.⁷

The Department's own public FAQ for that system still describes the statute as applying to "all suits not brought by an assignee."⁷ The Legislature struck those five words in 2022.³ They are the precise words whose absence Nekouee turns on.

Section 86.121(2), and the fee that was never there

One standing reason to file a bare declaratory action in Florida is section 86.121, which HB 837 created in 2023 and which directs that a court "shall award reasonable attorney fees" to an insured who obtains a declaratory judgment after the insurer has made a total coverage denial.⁴ Commentary on the 2023 fee repeal routinely describes that carve-out and stops there.

Read to the end of the section. Subsection (2): "This section does not apply to any action arising under a residential or commercial property insurance policy."⁴

On a homeowners or commercial property file, then, the declaratory action carried no fee entitlement under that section before Nekouee and carries none after it. What Nekouee adds on top is the notice, the ten business days, the carrier's response window, and subsection (5)'s mandatory dismissal if the notice is missing.¹² If the question on your desk is whether to route an award-form dispute into a declaratory action, price it with both of those sitting in the same column.

Four years, no names

There is a reporting channel aimed squarely at the conduct Nekouee complained about. Section 627.7154(3)(f)11. requires the Office of Insurance Regulation to name, in its semiannual report, any insurer that a market conduct examination found to have a pattern or practice of willful unfair trade practice violations in its use of appraisal, "including, but not limited to, compelling insureds to participate in appraisal under a property insurance policy in order to secure full payment or settlement of claims."⁵ A companion paragraph requires the Office to publish the list on its website.⁵ SB 2-A added that language effective December 16, 2022.⁶

The July 1, 2026 report answers in a single sentence: "As of the date of this report, no insurers have been the subject of a market conduct examination that resulted in a finding as described above."⁶

In 2024 Florida accounted for 12.33% of the homeowners claims opened nationwide and 73.15% of the homeowners lawsuits.⁶ The 2025 share drops hard on both lines, and it is preliminary data that OIR itself flags as not yet final, so the honest read is that the direction is down and the magnitude is unsettled. Litigation volume is also only one side of this market, and the other side turns up in the early Isaias closure data.

What nobody can tell you is how many of these presuit notices actually get filed. OIR charts its own count in the July report as an image with no numbers printed on it, sourced to the Department's portal, and the portal publishes no total of its own.⁶⁷ The filings are individually public and collectively uncounted, which is a strange place for a condition precedent to live four years in.