Remember the good old days, when insurance companies were here to help you and the experts they hired were hired to help both sides? Those days are long gone. Now the story is quite the opposite. Citizens has recently been spending an astronomical amount of money preparing cases for trial. This includes setting up mock trials using trial consultants, high priced lawyers and even higher priced experts. Citizens has taken the stance that it wants and expects to take every case to trial. When a homeowner has concerns over damage to his property should the first stage not be to ensure there is no hazard and then the second step should be to evaluate whether a covered loss has occurred. Citizens instead has chosen experts not based upon their fairness, experience, or concern for the safety of the public but instead has opted to hire experts that can win a trial for them. They hire these experts from day one with full expectation of a war against the homeowner. If an insurance company is hiring a trial consultant to investigate your house and already anticipates that it will take your case to trial before you even know it, is that insurance company acting it the best interests of its insureds? Absolutely not. Has Citizens reached a new low. Absolutely yes. If you are a homeowner and file a claim, know that there is a good chance a bunch of Citizens executives, lawyers and experts are spending a ton of time and money getting ready to take you on. They are probably spending more money to fight you than they would to fix your house.

But, this is the path Citizens has chosen. It has chosen to treat all of its insureds as enemies from the first day they file a claim. Citizens has chosen to only hire experts that will its bidding. Citizens has chosen to spend more money fighting homeowners than paying for their claims. Citizens has chosen to create unnecessary litigation and clog up the court systems and trial dockets. Citizens has chosen to throw all ethics out the window. The ones that should really be ashamed (because we fully understand Citizens has no shame) are the engineers and geologists that Citizens is paying off to do their bidding. When an engineer in Florida receives his/her license they take an oath to place the welfare of the public above all other considerations. But money, ah money, it will always win.