A Florida appellate opinion held that records from an investigation into insurers’ claim-handling practices cannot be shown to the people seeking them until a judge decides whether the records are exempt from disclosure. The insurers won that procedural point in Heritage Property & Casualty Insurance Company v. Rapkin. 1 They did not win a ruling that their records are trade secrets. The appellate court expressly left that question open to the trial judge.
The records at issue total 878 sealed pages connected to a Florida Department of Financial Services investigation. The trial court planned to let two public records requestors review them under a confidentiality order so they could fully participate in a hearing on the insurers’ secrecy claims. The appellate court said the sequence was backward. It ruled that the trial judge must first decide whether the material is protected. Then, the judge must decide what may be disclosed. A confidentiality order could not undo disclosure if the records turned out to be genuine trade secrets.
The appellate court’s concern is that an insurer cannot get a secret back once it has been revealed, and nobody should casually expose another policyholder’s private financial or medical information. Our firm represents one of the requestors in this case. So we return to the trial court, where the insurers must prove that the particular material they want withheld actually qualifies for protection. Calling 878 pages “trade secrets” is not the same as proving that 878 pages are trade secrets.
This public records request dispute matters because Florida statutory law gives an insurer that marks and certifies material as a trade secret a way to stop its release while a court case proceeds. The statutory pause protects a potentially legitimate interest. The appellate court confirmed that the burden of proving trade-secret status ultimately remains with the insurer.
In “Secrets Behind the Curtain: How Insurers Are Using ‘Trade Secrets’ to Hide from Regulation,” and “Are ‘Trade Secrets’ Becoming the Insurance Industry’s Shield Against Accountability?” I argued that secrecy claims have grown well beyond protecting a genuine competitive advantage. The Rapkin decision makes the need to revisit those arguments more urgent. The courts must apply the law as written, including its safeguards against premature disclosure. The Legislature must ask whether the law draws the right boundary around information concerning how insurers investigate, evaluate, pay, and deny claims.
The insurance industry receives conditional protection from federal antitrust laws to the extent it is regulated by state law. It is not blanket antitrust immunity. It does not make every insurer’s document public. But the policy bargain is hard to miss. State regulation of insurance matters enormously precisely because ordinary federal antitrust scrutiny does not always apply. If state law also allows evidence of claims practices to disappear behind broad, prolonged secrecy claims, who is checking whether that bargain works for policyholders?
A real proprietary formula, a genuinely valuable confidential method, and an insured’s private information deserve protection. A claims manual does not become a trade secret merely because it is called one. Nor should an internal claims bulletin or discussion escape scrutiny if it reveals whether a company trained adjusters to perform its promises fairly. State trade secret laws regarding insurance claims handling should be very limited for obvious reasons. We don’t want to protect wrongdoers, and good faith claims handling, which promotes full and prompt payment, should be shared rather than hidden among industry competitors.
Florida should require prompt, document-specific rulings when insurers seek to withhold investigative records. Judges can protect truly sensitive portions, redact policyholders’ personal information, and permit meaningful disclosure of the rest. Regulators need full access to examine insurer conduct, while the public needs enough information about material findings and claims practices to judge whether oversight is working. Neither a blanket demand for publication nor a blanket claim of secrecy serves policyholders.
The Rapkin court did not decide what is behind this curtain. It decided who gets to look, and in what order. The next question is whether Florida will insist that someone actually examine what the insurers say must remain hidden.
Thought For The Day
“There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.”
— George Bernard Shaw
1 Heritage Prop. & Cas. Ins. Co. v. Rapkin, No. 1D2026-1153, 2026 WL 3327054 (Fla. 1st DCA Nov. 4, 2026).
