By Clint Moore, Esq.
It was about three in the morning when the first tree fell loud enough to wake me.
I was texting from the front porch when the second one came down out back, shoving the gutters into the yard with a splash. Close call. But stepping outside turned out to be a good thing, because I saw how fast the water had risen—and how high.
After rescuing what I could from the floor and barricading doorways with towels and blankets, the question of whether the water would breach my home and place of business hung in the air.
That's when I smelled the smoke.
Me and my wallet, phone, keys, and dog Banksy escaped the house into knee-high water and saw the garage on fire. We jumped in my truck, plunged it into the flooded street, and called 911.
Most of the house made it.
Four days later, after a lot of cleaning and the realization that I'd need to move out for a while, I thought it might be the right time to try something I'd been building toward. For the previous eighteen months, I'd been studying claims adjusting at the National Claims Institute to become a better insurance attorney. The people I met there helped me grow. So, with the help of a firm I'd come to respect, I became a licensed public adjuster apprentice.
Four thousand dollars in additional living expense benefits bought me three months in a Sarasota rental. Fortunately, my virtual law firm made changing operating locations simple. I figured my skills as an insurance claims attorney would transfer just as smoothly. After all, I was essentially adjusting claims whenever I handled them pre-suit, right?
How different could this be?
Catastrophic Claims and Their Cadence
I wake up at 5:15 and complete my morning routine: workout, sauna, tennis balls with Banksy, breakfast, shower. Then I start packing for the field.
It's hot out there. Plenty of ice, water, and hydration packets. Beef jerky, protein bars, and tree nuts for fuel.
I grab my Bullybag—a tape measurer, laser measurer, moisture meter, thermal imaging camera, shingle gauge, pitch gauge, flashlight, pen, railroad chalk, soapstone, and a battery charger. Inside my backpack is a Matterport camera and an iPad that does everything my phone already does.
I load my Tacoma and bid the dog goodbye. Rabbits dart across neighborhood streets that are being noise-polluted overhead by parrots and egrets. A ten-minute drive to I-75 South. Big box stores and retirement communities. Speedy geriatrics sharing the road. One hour later, I exit the highway into Punta Gorda.
From here, the ride hits different. Visually, audibly, olfactorily. No traffic lights. Endless piles of debris lining the roadways like bowling alley bumpers. Pickups and power trucks. Pieces of precious memories with no time for their owners to remember or reflect. Grifters. Yard signs everywhere offering services, but nobody seems available to help. An electric hum hangs in the air with varying intensity. Everything smells damp.
This was weeks after it hit.
There's a pin on my iPhone telling me where to drive. I pull into a grassy area next to a neighborhood lift gate stuck in the open position. A semicircle of pickup trucks provides the backdrop. I hop out in heavy leather boots, plain t-shirt tucked into work pants, Leatherman visible on my belt, and wrestle my loaded Bullybag out of the truck bed and onto my hip.
It becomes immediately apparent to everyone present: I have shown up looking like an idiot.
My compatriots wore comfortable walking shoes, shorts, and other common-sense wardrobe choices for Florida in October. No one else had a visible Leatherman. They didn't bring tools because they already knew that real inspections would happen another day. That's just the natural course when hundreds of thousands of insurance claims are filed at the same time. So the new guy could put his shiny new tools away.
Good thing Woody Allen taught us that eighty percent of success in life is just showing up.
Claims Adjusting Is Demanding Work
Comedic relief can be necessary when working for people who are suffering. But there is a time for reverence.
A public adjusting lead came through to my inbox. The property address was familiar—less than five minutes from the home I grew up in, which I assumed was why it was assigned to me. The owners were kind people. They decided not to retain our services until after hearing from their carrier. Totally understandable.
A few weeks later, my mom texted me a link to a GoFundMe campaign for a man who had developed spinal meningitis after attempting temporary repairs on moldy wood flooring. She knew him from church. His prognosis was as grave as it gets.
I recognized the name. It was the lead.
At a conference in Orlando, I once heard a veteran adjuster speak about the dangers of mold and microbial growth. I remember thinking how rare something like that must be. This was the reminder that it isn't. On a truly miraculous note, the man recovered—he is cognizant, has his memory, and continues to improve.
Beyond the empathetic weight of representing an insured after a loss, public adjusting demands technical competence across insurance policies, weather data, loss valuation, and construction means, methods, and materials. It requires organizational skills sharp enough to manage dozens of people, entities, and moving parts simultaneously on a high-volume claim load. Multiply that by the expectations of thousands of claimants who all experienced a loss at the same time, and the bottlenecks aren't hard to imagine.
Things Will Change
Hurricane Ian changed my professional trajectory. Then Tallahassee tried to crash it.
In December 2022, during a special legislative session, historic changes were made to Florida insurance law. Senate Bill 2-A eliminated the century-old one-way attorney's fee statute, Section 627.428, which had allowed a homeowner who successfully sued their insurance company to recover attorney's fees from the carrier. Assignment-of-benefit contracts, already stripped of fee recovery months earlier, were prohibited entirely. The stated goal was to reduce litigation and stabilize premiums.
A few years in, the results are a mixed bag. Litigation has dropped somewhat. Premiums have stabilized and even come down slightly—but they remain far higher than they were before the reforms. The binding arbitration provisions that were supposed to offer policyholders an alternative to court are largely dead on arrival. Courts still order non-binding arbitration from time to time, but very few claim disputes are being resolved that way.
The exception is Citizens Property Insurance Corporation. Citizens leans heavily on its Division of Administrative Hearings endorsement, and those proceedings have been rough for policyholders. Many are getting hit with orders to pay Citizens' attorney's fees—even when they voluntarily withdraw or dismiss their claims. Constitutional challenges are now working their way through the court system.
Perhaps the most revealing development has come from testimony by the former insurance commissioner: that managing general agents were funneling enormous sums of money during the reform periods, which allegedly allowed carriers to appear far less profitable than they actually were. Carrier-owned MGAs and other third-party administrators were collecting huge fees while the carriers cried poor to manufacture an insurance crisis—and to justify killing the fee statute.
Florida was spared any hurricanes in 2025, so claim volumes have naturally dropped. But carriers continue to run the old playbook. The new normal looks like this: a homeowner suffers a covered loss, receives a denial, gets pushed into litigation to dispute it, and then the carrier pays a reasonable amount during the lawsuit—but the policyholder is still left short because they now have to pay their own attorney and absorb the costs of litigation out of whatever they recover. The promise of the reforms was lower premiums and fair claim handling. Policyholders got a slight discount and kept the same fight.
Widen Your Lane
"Stay in your lane" is becoming a trite phrase in our industry. It's ironic when insurance lawyers say it, since those two professions—insurance and law—are asked to analyze virtually all trades. Granted, the phrase makes sense because so many states separate licensure for contracting, adjusting, and the practice of law, and there are civil and sometimes criminal penalties for running afoul. So it's not terrible advice.
But it doesn't mean you have to stop learning. Or trying new things. You'd be better off doing both, even if only for study.
It's like that Seinfeld episode where Kramer adopts a highway: I'm staying in my lane because I'm widening it myself. A lawyerly approach to broadening one's horizons—lawyers control the traffic lanes but not yet nature.
If we all try to see it from another perspective, clients benefit from the trust and understanding cultivated between the different roles in an insurance claim. There is so much to know out here.
Insurance makes our dreams possible. What we love requires taking risk. C.S. Lewis said that courage is the form of every virtue at its testing point. Without insurance, would you have the courage to personally guarantee your shelter, your body, your abilities, or the value of your life to someone else?
Too many of us make the mistake of perceiving insurance as a zero-sum game.
Chip Merlin always signs off from his blog with an apt quote. Since imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I'll close with one that's often misunderstood. Its truncated form was something said to me almost every day growing up, working odd jobs in my dad's flooring warehouse. The full version changes everything:
"A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one."
— William Shakespeare
Clint Moore is the founder of Clint & Company, P.A., an Orlando-based law firm representing policyholders in first-party property insurance claims and general coverage disputes. He is licensed in Florida and Texas. A former public adjuster apprentice and graduate of the National Claims Institute, he writes about insurance law, claims handling, and the intersection of the two at clintco.legal.
Need help with your claim?
If you or someone you know is dealing with a property insurance dispute, we're here to help.
Get in Touch