I occasionally get unexpected gifts from insurance companies and their lawyers. Usually, they come disguised as motions to compel, motions for protective orders, or several hundred pages of objections explaining why the one document everybody wants supposedly has nothing to do with anything.

This week, State Farm lawyers gave policyholder attorneys something much more useful.

Thank you. I mean that sincerely, although perhaps not in precisely the way State Farm’s lawyers intended.

In Moore v. State Farm, pending in the Northern District of Oklahoma, State Farm filed a motion asking the court to deem confessed an earlier motion seeking to exclude the policyholder’s experts. 1 State Farm’s argument was essentially that the plaintiff could not plausibly claim she only recently learned about an alleged company-wide pattern involving wind and hail claims because information about the alleged scheme had already been sitting in public court filings for months. State Farm specifically pointed to a November 2025 filing in Hursh v. State Farm, 2 and then, helpfully, attached the document as an exhibit.

Nothing says, “This information has been publicly available, and you should have known about it,” quite like attaching the information so everybody can conveniently read it. Policyholder attorneys and public adjusters handling State Farm hail cases should take State Farm up on the invitation. Read the exhibit.

To be very clear, the Hursh filing contains allegations and descriptions of testimony and documents developed in other litigation. Those allegations have not all been established as judicial findings, and State Farm vigorously disputes that it has engaged in an improper scheme. But discovery starts with informed questions. This filing tells lawyers some very good questions to ask.

The Hursh plaintiffs allege that State Farm’s Property and Casualty Claims Department identified roof indemnity as a major source of loss and began investigating ways to reduce roof payments. The filing describes the creation of a Wind/Hail Fire Model Enhancement Program and a Wind & Hail Fire Model Enhancement Team, commonly called WHMET, which allegedly developed, implemented, monitored, and evaluated changes in wind and hail claims handling.

According to the filing, WHMET developed a “Wind/Hail Playbook.” The alleged tactics included taking away an individual adjuster’s ability to approve a total roof replacement without managerial approval, mandatory HAAG wind and hail training, enhanced claims-handling procedures, and training concerning the “art of the conversation.”

The filing recounts prior testimony from State Farm claims consultant Tom Moss concerning management review when weather reports reflected hail of one inch or less, management approval for certain wind claims involving reported wind speeds of 50 miles per hour or less, AccuWeather reports being placed into wind and hail claim files, HAAG training, reviews of claim files and reinspections, and work between WHMET and State Farm’s Enterprise Technology operation involving Xactware software.

According to the Hursh filing, those enterprise-wide software rules could act as triggers when claims personnel took certain actions, including attempting to pay for a total roof replacement. The filing alleges that claims consultants worked with Enterprise Technology concerning changes and settings within State Farm’s claims software.

When handling a State Farm hail case today, do not simply ask for “the claim file” and congratulate myself for serving discovery. I would ask for the machinery behind the claim.

Start with the Wind/Hail Fire Model Enhancement Program, WHMET, the Hail Focus Initiative, the Hail Initiative, any hail quality focus initiative, the Wind/Hail Playbook, Fire Model Enhancement Guidelines, annual Fire Quality Plans, presentations, memoranda, meeting minutes, implementation instructions, training materials, intranet publications, revisions, and communications concerning those programs.

This is not speculation about where to look. Another Oklahoma filing, in Barlow v. State Farm, 3 essentially hands lawyers the discovery vocabulary. Its interrogatories ask State Farm to identify purported industry standards for wind and hail claims and full-roof replacements, Accenture’s role in identifying or developing those standards, State Farm’s performance against those standards before and after implementation of the FME tactics, and the models, data, and analyses supposedly used to validate those standards.

Then follow the numbers. Request the documents reflecting indemnity savings, the ratio of full roof replacements to partial replacements, percentages of full-roof approvals, total roof payment volume, internal benchmarks, “industry standards,” quality-improvement targets, and comparisons between actual results and expected results. Barlow Request for Production No. 45 specifically identifies those subjects.

Why is that important? Claims executives are allowed to manage a claims department. Insurers are allowed to train adjusters. They are allowed to measure performance. There is nothing sinister about quality control.

But there is an enormous difference between measuring whether claims are adjusted correctly under the insurance contract and measuring whether adjusters are producing fewer full-roof replacements. If the latter becomes the operational definition of “quality,” a policyholder lawyer has every reason to ask who created that metric, why it was created, how it was communicated, whether adjusters were judged against it, and whether it influenced the particular claim being litigated.

The Hursh filing describes a Fire Accuracy Dashboard through which State Farm allegedly monitored the number of full-roof replacements authorized by managers. It recounts an email in which concern was supposedly expressed that the dashboard might give the appearance of having a “target number” for full-roof replacements. The filing also alleges that full-roof replacement approvals declined from 70.4% to 34.7% during part of 2021. Those are allegations that need proof, but they are certainly enough to tell a competent lawyer where discovery should go.

Next, follow the consultants. Barlow seeks reports, analytics, correspondence, agreements, and scopes of work involving Accenture and other third parties concerning purported wind and hail industry standards. It also asks for the underlying data supplied by State Farm, the models and outputs used by Accenture, documents concerning how the benchmarks were derived, and the contracts and scopes of work between State Farm and Accenture.

Do not merely ask, “Did Accenture consult with State Farm?” Ask what assignment Accenture received. Ask what State Farm data went in. Ask what assumptions were used. Ask which insurers supplied the comparison data. Ask how the supposed industry benchmark was calculated. Ask whether State Farm tested the data for reliability. Ask what came out of the model. Then ask what State Farm did differently after receiving the result.

The same logic applies to HAAG, AccuWeather, and Xactware. Who selected them? What did they provide? What instructions did State Farm give? What business problem was each supposed to solve? Most importantly, how did those tools change what happened to an actual policyholder standing underneath an actual hail-damaged roof?

The last question is where good institutional discovery becomes a good bad faith case. A lawyer can discover every PowerPoint created in Bloomington and still lose if there is no bridge between the corporate program and the insured’s claim.

So, after discovering the institutional program, work backward through your particular claim. Obtain the complete electronic claim file, not merely the printable version somebody decided was the “claim file.” Barlow defines the claim file to include electronic claims-management information, communications among claims personnel, supervisor materials, consultant reviews, reports, notes, authority requests, procedures and manuals relied upon in adjusting the claim.

Ask whether a management trigger occurred. Ask who reviewed it. Ask whether the hail-size rule applied. Ask whether a weather report was required. Ask whether the adjuster initially believed the roof should be replaced. Ask whether somebody higher up changed that decision. Ask what Xactware or Xactimate prompts appeared. Ask whether a reinspection was ordered. Ask what “quality” review was performed. Ask whether anybody compared that adjuster, manager, team, or market against roof-replacement metrics.

Then depose the people with actual knowledge. The Hursh filing identifies Thomas Moss, Nicole Manduca, Wensley Herbert, Scott Welsh, Kathy Ress, Wendy Mazza, and Tyrone Smith in connection with various aspects of development, approval, implementation, supervision, and measurement of the alleged initiative. It does not follow that every one of those people should be deposed in every hail case. Proportionality still matters. But their roles tell lawyers which organizational chart to start drawing.

Prior testimony is equally valuable. Barlow requests Nicole Manduca’s deposition and exhibits from Nida v. State Farm 4 and Thomas Moss’s deposition and exhibits from Barnett v. State Farm. 5 Lawyers should locate the prior transcripts, prior corporate representative testimony, exhibits, privilege logs, and orders compelling discovery in Nida, Barnett, Lyle, Hursh, and the other Oklahoma hail cases. Litigants should not have to rediscover the corporate wheel every time another State Farm homeowner walks through a lawyer’s door.

Pay attention to electronic discovery. The Barlow requests contain a detailed ESI protocol and specifically reserve the right to seek native-format production rather than accepting a document dump in whatever imaged format makes electronic evidence least useful. Metadata, custodians, database fields and native files can matter enormously where the issue involves dashboards, software rules, electronic approvals and management review.

This should also explain why the fight over discovery in Oklahoma has attracted so much press attention. The Oklahoman reported earlier this year that Attorney General Gentner Drummond’s participation in Hursh would broaden discovery substantially, and later reported that a trial-court ruling allowing his intervention would enable the Attorney General to pursue internal communications, training materials, and claims data. Oklahoma Watch, in reporting republished by Free Press Oklahoma City, similarly focused on the Attorney General gaining discovery powers and the possibility that internal documents might finally become public.

A complaint tells you what somebody alleges. Discovery tells you whether they can prove it. State Farm was trying to exclude experts. In the process, State Farm told the federal court that policyholders’ lawyers should have known about this alleged State Farm hail scheme because the roadmap was already sitting there in public records. Those lawyers then attached one of the better roadmaps as proof.

Policyholder lawyers, public adjusters, and State Farm policyholders with hail claims should read the document. State Farm is free to explain publicly why it is factually inaccurate.

I have been doing and teaching about this line of insurance litigation for a long time and suggest that policyholder lawyers do not lazily copy every request and send fifty pages of nationwide discovery in a $35,000 roof case. That is how a roadmap becomes a fishing expedition. Tailor the discovery to the loss date, the jurisdiction, the claims operation, the people involved, and what the insured’s file already tells you. Start narrow enough to defend the requests but informed enough that State Farm knows you understand what you are looking for.

State Farm may ultimately have an innocent explanation for every document, metric, training program, software trigger, and management approval process discussed in these cases. Fine. Discovery is where we find out.

Thought For The Day

“For more than a century, being a good neighbor has meant keeping our promises and helping people.”

—Jon Farney, President and CEO, State Farm

1 Moore v. State Farm Fire & Cas. Co., No. 4:25-cv-00417 (N.D. Okla.). See Defendant’s Motion to Deem Confessed Defendant’s Motion to Strike/Exclude All Expert Witnesses [Doc. 58].

2 Hursh v. State Farm Fire & Cas. Co., No. CJ-2025-2626 (Okla. Dist. Ct. – Okla. County). See Plaintiffs’ Consolidated Response in Opposition to State Farm’s Motions to Quash Deposition Notices [Doc. 58-1].

3 Barlow v. State Farm Fire & Cas. Co., No. 5:25-cv-00044 (W.D. Okla.). See Plaintiffs’ Second Set of Discovery Requests [Doc. 69-1].

4 Nida v. State Farm Fire & Cas. Co., No. CJ-2020-4453, CJ-2026-1029 (Okla. Dist. Ct – Okla. County).

5 Barnett v. State Farm Fire & Cas. Co., No. CJ-2020-00141(Okla. Dist. Ct. – Grady County).