Thirty years ago, I was chasing McKinsey & Company for testimony and documents about the claims systems it helped insurance companies create. Allstate’s Claim Core Process Redesign became the most famous example, but State Farm also paid McKinsey millions to study claims costs and processes.
Those discovery battles taught me an important lesson: that consultants may never sign a denial letter, inspect a damaged roof, or speak with a policyholder, but they can help design the systems, metrics, approval requirements, and financial goals that influence thousands of claim decisions.
It is obvious to me that the consultants have changed, but the discovery objections do not. In the earlier Allstate litigation, requests for the McKinsey materials drew objections that the documents were confidential, proprietary, burdensome, expensive, overly broad, and irrelevant. A New Mexico appellate decision recounting that fight shows how long and hard Allstate battled over those materials. Eventually, much of the McKinsey record became public, allowing judges, regulators, lawyers, and policyholders to examine how Allstate had redesigned its claims organization.
I previously wrote about a later discovery dispute revealing that State Farm paid McKinsey approximately $84 million over two years for work that included a Content Material Spend Review. The workstreams included contents, water mitigation, roofs, electronics, and State Farm’s Premier Service Program. Roof claims were identified as the largest area of spending, yet State Farm’s designated witness reportedly knew remarkably little about McKinsey’s involvement, the supporting documents, or the financial analysis.
Now we have a new claims consultant providing advice to State Farm, and it is Accenture. On September 25, 2026, Accenture filed an opposition to a motion seeking to compel documents in Hursh v. State Farm Fire and Casualty Company, pending before Judge Amy Palumbo in Oklahoma County. 1 The Hursh policyholders are seeking documents concerning Accenture’s involvement in State Farm’s Fire Model Enhancement and its wind and hail claims operation.
Accenture’s filing is advocacy, not a judicial finding. Accenture disputes any suggestion that it participated in a conspiracy to reduce payments to policyholders, and no court has found that Accenture engaged in improper claims conduct. Still, the filing contains several admissions and positions that make the discovery dispute important.
Accenture acknowledges that State Farm retained it to analyze and improve claims handling processes for several types of insurance claims as part of the Fire Model Enhancement. It says its wind and hail work lasted only a few months, from April through July 2020. Accenture further acknowledges that it performed much of its work inside State Farm’s computer systems and that Accenture personnel were given State Farm email addresses.
Accenture argues that “the vast majority” of the relevant documents are in State Farm’s possession rather than Accenture’s. This would be a useful answer if State Farm simply produced all those documents. But Accenture’s filing says the Hursh plaintiffs have complained that State Farm objected that it was “not at liberty” to produce documents “authored and/or copyrighted by entities that are not parties.” Accenture disputes the characterization and says State Farm has already produced some Accenture-related materials.
You can see the problem. State Farm points toward the consultant’s authorship. Accenture points back toward State Farm’s servers. The policyholder stands in the middle, watching a very expensive corporate ping-pong match with no disclosure.
Accenture also says it has no responsive documents concerning much of the requested material. It denies collecting the industry data, studies, methodology, or supporting information behind the alleged “Industry Best” benchmark for full roof replacements. It says it did not measure State Farm’s wind and hail performance against an industry standard and did not receive the benchmark materials described by the plaintiffs.
Yet Accenture’s counsel also acknowledged that Accenture “provided information” incorporated into PowerPoint presentations concerning the frequency of full roof replacements following hail damage. State Farm materials have reportedly attributed an “Industry Best” full-roof-replacement frequency of approximately 5% to 10% to Accenture Consulting Services. That supposed benchmark was compared with much higher State Farm replacement rates and described as presenting an enormous “quality improvement opportunity.” I discussed the serious unanswered questions surrounding that benchmark in an earlier post.
So, where did the number come from?
If Accenture did not collect industry data, did not receive benchmark data from State Farm, did not develop a methodology, and possesses no supporting studies, what information did it provide for those presentations? Who calculated the 5% to 10% figure? What population of claims was studied? Were policy language, building codes, roof age, matching requirements, repairability, geography, and storm severity considered? Was the number based on payments, recommendations, inspections, denials, or something else?
Those questions cannot be answered by repeatedly saying that the documents are somewhere else. Accenture’s procedural objections deserve fair consideration. It contends the Oklahoma subpoena was served in the wrong jurisdiction and must be domesticated in Illinois. It also argues that an eight-year request is grossly disproportionate to a project lasting approximately four months and estimates that collecting and reviewing the material would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Nonparties should not be forced to endure unlimited discovery merely because lawyers know how to operate a copy machine.
But the appropriate solution is targeted discovery, not a corporate invisibility cloak. The subpoena can be limited to the relevant period, identified custodians, specific project names, contracts, statements of work, final presentations, earlier drafts, communications with State Farm, and the source and methodology for any claimed industry benchmark. State Farm can be required to produce the records in its systems while Accenture identifies what remains uniquely in its possession. A knowledgeable Accenture witness can explain what Accenture was hired to do, what information it supplied, where that information came from, and what happened to the project records.
Accenture relies heavily on a federal judge’s ruling that required the plaintiffs to pursue the materials from State Farm before subpoenaing Accenture. That ruling, however, did not declare the underlying institutional discovery irrelevant. The court found proportional discovery into the Wind and Hail Fire Model Enhancement appropriate, permitted discovery concerning cost-benefit analyses, roof-replacement approval requirements and indemnity tracking, and allowed the deposition of Nicole Manduca, the leader of the Wind and Hail Fire Model Enhancement Team. The court simply required the plaintiffs to seek the overlapping documents from State Farm first.
That distinction matters. “Ask State Farm first” should not become “never ask Accenture.” Frankly, in my experience, what State Farm turns over and what third parties with allegedly the same documents turn over are two different things. Thank God we pursued both avenues in the bad faith litigation versus McKinsey, or we would never get to the full confidential truth.
The fundamental issue is larger than the Hursh roof claim. Insurance companies have every right to study claims, improve training, prevent fraud, correct overpayments, and make claims operations more efficient. But there is a vast difference between measuring whether claims are being adjusted accurately under the policy and measuring whether adjusters are producing fewer full roof replacements and lower indemnity payments.
When a consultant helps design or analyze a systemic claims process, its work may be central to determining whether individual claim decisions were driven by the facts and policy language or influenced by a desired aggregate financial outcome. That is why the contracts, assumptions, data, communications, and methodologies matter.
Thirty years after the McKinsey battles, we should have learned that claims consultants cannot be treated as invisible architects. If their work influences the machinery that makes claim decisions, courts, regulators, and policyholders are entitled to understand what they built.
The consultants may change. The cat-and-mouse game should not be allowed to last another thirty years.
If you want to see how absurd consultants and insurers can be about hiding claim process documents, please read a blog from 14 years ago: States Seek McKinsey Reports. Insurance law professor Jeff Stempel even wrote a classic hornbook on State Farm hiding documents, which law students study, and I suggest others read his work and “The Insurance Policy as a “Thing” – Why Jeffrey Stempel Still Has the Insurance World Thinking.”
Thought for the Day
“Business ethics build trust and transparency, which in turn create the right environment for our people, our clients and our stakeholders.”
—Julie Sweet, then Accenture General Counsel, Secretary and Chief Compliance Officer, Accenture Corporate Citizenship Report 2010–2011.
1 Non-Party Accenture LLP’s Response in Opposition to Plaintiffs’ Motion to Compel Third-Party Subpoena, Hursh v. State Farm Fire & Cas. Co., No. CJ-2025-2626 (Okla. Dist. Ct. – Okla. County).
