On July 15, 2026, Florida's Third District Court of Appeal released two attorney-fee decisions arising out of first-party property insurance suits against the same carrier. In one, a $12,025 fee award was reversed. In the other, a fee award was affirmed without the court ever reaching the merits of the challenge. Neither outcome had anything to do with who was right about the underlying insurance claim.
Both turned on paper: what the fee order said, and what the losing party did, or did not do, to keep its objection alive. For anyone litigating first-party property cases in Florida, where fee motions travel in both directions, the two cases read together as a single lesson.
Section 57.105, Florida Statutes, lets a court award attorney's fees against a party, or the party's counsel, who pressed a claim or defense they knew or should have known was baseless. The statute's own text supplies the required determination: that the losing party or its attorney knew or should have known that the claim or defense, when initially presented to the court or at any time before trial, either was not supported by the material facts necessary to establish it, or would not be supported by the application of then-existing law to those material facts. The statute also contains a safe harbor: a party seeking sanctions must serve the motion first and give the other side 21 days to withdraw or correct the challenged claim or defense before filing it with the court.
One thing this statute is not: insurer bad faith. Section 57.105 sanctions litigation conduct, by either side, in any civil case. A first-party bad-faith claim against a carrier for how it handled a claim lives in a different statute, section 624.155, with its own elements, its own notice procedure, and its own body of law. Courts sometimes use the phrase "bad faith" in the 57.105 context to describe frivolous litigation conduct. The overlap ends at the vocabulary.
In Citizens Property Insurance Corp. v. Quality Mold Finders Corp., No. 3D25-0697 (Fla. 3d DCA July 15, 2026), the trial court had awarded fees and costs under section 57.105(1) against the carrier, in a stipulated amount of $12,025, after the carrier pressed an affirmative defense the other side contended was baseless. The Third District reversed. Not because the defense turned out to be well founded, and not because the amount was wrong; the amount was stipulated. The court reversed because the fee order never made the findings the statute requires: that the defense, when presented, was unsupported by the material facts or by then-existing law.
The standard the court applied is settled in the Third District: an award of fees under section 57.105 requires a determination that the party or its counsel knew or should have known the claim or defense was unsupported, and the court must make specific findings of bad faith and should recite in the order the facts on which those conclusions rest. An order that announces a winner without walking through why is missing the thing the statute makes essential.
The same panel members were not so receptive in Father & Son Carpet Cleaning & Restoration v. Citizens Property Insurance Corp., No. 3D24-1779 (Fla. 3d DCA July 15, 2026), decided the same day. There, an assignee of the policyholder appealed a fee-and-cost judgment entered in the carrier's favor, disputing only the amount awarded, and arguing the trial court's factual findings were deficient. The Third District affirmed without reaching the argument, because it was never preserved: the appellant neither made a timely, specific objection below nor moved for rehearing on the ground that the findings were deficient.
The rehearing piece is not judge-made gloss anymore. It is written into the rule itself. Rule 1.530(a) of the Florida Rules of Civil Procedure now provides that to preserve for appeal a challenge to the failure of the trial court to make required findings of fact in the final judgment, a party must raise that issue in a motion for rehearing under the rule. And the window is short: a motion for rehearing must be served no later than 15 days after the filing of the judgment in a non-jury action. The court also reiterated the older half of the doctrine: apart from fundamental error, appellate review requires a contemporaneous objection that is timely and specific enough to tell the trial judge what the claimed error is.
Read together with Quality Mold Finders, the sequence is stark. A missing-findings argument won an appeal in one courtroom and was refused a hearing in the other, on the same day, from the same district. The difference was not the strength of the argument. It was whether the argument had been put in front of the trial judge first.
The habit worth building from these two cases is simple. Every adverse fee judgment gets read for its findings the day it arrives, and the rehearing deadline gets calendared the same day. And every favorable fee order gets read the same way, because an order without findings is not a result. It is an appeal waiting to happen.
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