First, there were the Epstein Files. Then came the State Farm Documents. On March 25, Oklahoma Supreme Court referee Cassandra Holden heard oral arguments in State Farm’s latest effort to prevent access to documents in the matter known as Hursh v. State Farm, a case of a denied roof claim th at has come to represent hundreds of similar cases of Oklahoma homeowners suing State Farm over an alleged scheme to cheat policyholders on valid claims of wind and hail damage. News of the Hursh matter first broke in December. This month, the story went national, compelling State Farm to issue a response claiming that what was really driving the narrative was an amorphous, ill-defined “political environment.” State Farm’s fundamental argument over the documents in the Hursh matter has been that Oklahoma County District Court Judge Amy Palumbo’s November order to produce materials related to the alleged scheme was overly burdensome compared to the $22,000 at stake — the replacement cost of the roof of the Hursh family’s Broken Arrow home. In other words, it would cost State Farm a lot more than $22,000 to defend itself against the claim that it owed the Hurshes $22,000. On Wednesday, former Oklahoma Solicitor General Mithun Mansinghani, representing State Farm, complained that Hursh’s lawyers had been granted access to far more than was needed to settle the matter. “Plaintiffs have sought everything under the sun,” Mansinghani said. “They are wanting the volume of discovery you would see in a class action.” Many, Many Cases An oft-repeated argument that the Hursh matter is, or ought to be, about a single roof claim is belied by numerous courtroom statements from both plaintiff’s attorneys and State Farm’s own counsel, who in hearings across the state have made frequent reference to hundreds of similar cases that are more or less identical. Even Palumbo, who in January approved Attorney General Gentner Drummond’s application to intervene in the Hursh case, likened the Hursh matter to many cases that preceded it. “Y’all appear to have many, many, many cases with State Farm,” Palumbo said, in November. That point was emphasized in a petition submitted by the AG’s office, which complained that State Farm’s petition had failed to acknowledge that the AG was now part of the case. That’s telling. The AG represents not an individual client but the entire state, and the fact that intervention had been granted meant that, by definition, the fates of many Oklahomans beyond the Hursh family were at stake. The AG’s intervention means that RICO laws can be applied to State Farm, charges of the sort that are generally reserved for the prosecution of organized crime. The office of the AG comes with a heightened level of subpoena power. Oral arguments in a separate State Farm effort to vacate Palumbo’s decision to grant the AG’s intervention will be heard before the full Supreme Court in late April. Simple Math Intervention aside, Blake Sonne of Oklahoma City law firm Whitten Burrage, which represents Hursh, offered a stark characterization of the gulf that divides descriptions of State Farm’s alleged scheme. “They claim it’s quality improvement; we claim it’s bad faith affecting thousands of policyholders in Oklahoma,” Sonne told the referee Wednesday. Of more than 900 total roof claim cases against State Farm as of last count — likely more by now — 125 have already settled. The remainder have either been filed and are working their way through the courts or are signed on with multiple law firms. What’s truly at stake in the Hursh matter is a question of simple math. In an August hearing, it was revealed that State Farm had wrongly disclosed the settlement amounts of some or all of the first 125 cases. In open court, it was revealed that just one of the cases, involving a roof claim of around $30,000, settled for $3 million. “State Farm does NOT want the Oklahoma or national public to see these documents,” reads a plaintiff’s petition from an earlier action. The first 125 cases were represented by a matter known as Nida v. State Farm. As in the Hursh case, a battle over discovery in Nida — that is, a fight to see documents — raged for more than a year before attorneys won the right to see the State Farm documents and depose executives. Not long after the documents were produced, State Farm settled all 125 cases. It’s not publicly known whether the remainder settled for more or less than $3 million each. Regardless, it was a lot of money. Far in excess of the $22,000 at stake in the Hursh matter, and far in excess of the $5 million that State Farm has said it would cost to comply with discovery orders. After the Nida cases settled, the State Farm documents were returned to the company. But that wasn’t the end of it, because State Farm allegedly continued to deny roof claims. Now, the number of cases is far greater than 125. As the Supreme Court sets out to untangle State Farm’s latest legal contortions, the cases will continue to pile up. Hundreds of new lawsuits, led by Hursh, will follow the circuitous path left by Nida. Attorneys are not arguing for State Farm documents they haven’t seen, Sonne said on Wednesday. Rather, they are fighting for the proof of the hail scheme that State Farm has already paid millions to keep hidden. “This is no fishing expedition where there is no direct tie-in with the documents being discovered in this case,” Sonne told the referee. “We’ve seen the documents. We’ve seen all of them. We had to return and destroy them.” $170 Billion Since issuing her first discovery order in November, Palumbo has expressed, with growing frustration, distaste with State Farm’s strategy of responding to discovery orders not with compliance but with increasingly detailed explanations of why they should not be compelled to comply. That strategy culminated in Wednesday’s arguments before the referee. State Farm’s filings to the Supreme Court cited a daunting array of statistics. Hursh’s attorneys, State Farm complained, were seeking materials on 30 topics, with 101 subparts, covering 15 years of State Farm history. State Farm had already provided 874 pages of material in the Hursh claim, they said. Furthermore, plaintiffs sought information on 155,000 documents related to 120,000 claims, which would consume 4,428 hours of State Farm time. Just identifying the files would take another 40,000 hours, State Farm attorneys said in briefings. Hursh’s attorneys dismissed that on Wednesday. What was at issue was not the Hursh’s roof, they repeated, but the entirety of a company-wide wind-hail scheme. Everything related to the scheme was needed in order to prove that a scheme existed. Kicking back against State Farm’s claim that the discovery order was burdensome, the AG’s petition noted that State Farm, which announced a recent valuation of $170 billion with $25 billion in growth over the last year, was a big enough company to handle any discovery order. “[State Farm] is therefore not a party for whom large-scale discovery production is operationally novel or structurally burdensome,” the AG’s petition read. No Telling How Far it Might Go State Farm’s petitions said that the sheer scope of the discovery order was a cudgel being used to compel settlement. Hannah Whitten, appearing Wednesday alongside Sonne on behalf of Hursh, did not grant that much but made it clear that the Hursh matter was not the beginning of the story, nor would it be the end of it. “Plaintiffs will be seeking substantially similar discovery in hundreds of cases in Oklahoma,” Whitten said. There’s no telling how far it might go: in a filing last year, State Farm revealed that beyond the 900 cases already complete or underway, there are tens of thousands of additional cases in which State Farm denied claims outright or which they did not pay off in full, as with the Hursh case. That’s Oklahoma alone. State Farm does business in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and parts of Canada. In response to an interview request, State Farm issued a statement denying that the legal actions in Oklahoma have anything to do with the company’s recent decision to return approximately $100 to all of its auto policyholders or close its headquarters in Bloomington, Illinois, the company’s home base since it was first founded in 1922. What No One Knows Lurking behind the complex legal pyrotechnics, Billy Hursh and his family wait for news. Hursh said his position hadn’t changed: he simply wanted State Farm to hold up its end of the bargain it made when it sold him a policy. That said, becoming the named party who represented hundreds — or thousands — of others had revealed to Hursh the true scope of the insurance giant’s alleged scheme. “When we first filed our suit, I would have guessed it was in the dozens,” Hursh said, reflecting on how many others there might have been. “Now, I don’t even know the numbers, and that’s what’s so upsetting about the situation because no one really does.” At the end of Wednesday’s oral arguments, Holden said that the next step would be a non-binding report that she would draft and submit to the Court. J.C. Hallman covers a variety of topics for Oklahoma Watch. Contact him at [email protected]. The post Battle Over Cryptic State Farm Documents Reaches OK Supreme Court appeared first on Oklahoma Watch. ...read more read less