The Discovery Objections Series · Part 5 · Case Study · July 2026
Pattern-and-practice evidence is the slowest, most-fought dig in bad-faith discovery. The Cecenas had the law on their side — and lost it to delay, while the trial they were told they’d jeopardize slipped sixteen months.
Of everything a bad-faith claimant tries to pry loose in discovery, one category is fought harder and takes longer to get than any other: proof that the insurer, or a particular adjuster or reviewing expert, did to other insureds what it did to this one. Pattern-and-practice evidence — the other-insureds’ claim files, the adjuster’s history, the expert’s outcome record — is the difference between a one-off dispute the insurer can wave away and a general business practice that supports both bad faith and punitive damages. Insurers know this, which is why they resist it more stubbornly than any other request, and why the machinery for getting it is deliberately slow. Cecena v. Allstate Ins. Co., No. C05-03178 JF (HRL), 2006 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 86291 (N.D. Cal. Nov. 9, 2006), is a two-page order that shows what happens when a claimant has the law for this evidence and forfeits it anyway — not on the merits, but on the calendar.
Eduardo and Maria Cecena’s San Jose home was damaged in a fire on December 14, 2003. Their homeowners policy was with Allstate. They sued for bad faith, alleging Allstate had failed to make full or timely payment; Allstate removed the case to federal court on August 5, 2005. Discovery ground through 2006. This was not a quiet file: by October 2, 2006 — days before the fact-discovery cutoff — the Cecenas had five separate motions to compel pending at once, covering interrogatory answers, two sets of document requests, a person-most-knowledgeable deposition, and a percipient-witness deposition. Each one drew Allstate opposition; each was resolved granted-in-part, denied-in-part; and the fight did not end there — Allstate followed with a motion to reconsider the discovery orders, and the Cecenas answered with three separate motions for sanctions, all of which the court denied. That is what a serious pattern-and-practice dig looks like from the docket: not one clean request, but a months-long campaign across every discovery vehicle at once, contested at every step. The effort is the point. This evidence is not sitting in a folder waiting to be handed over.
The request at the center of it was the classic one. Interrogatory No. 22 asked Allstate to identify, by name, address, and phone number, every other insured whose claim the Cecenas’ adjuster had handled since 2002. The theory was the standard pattern-and-practice one: if this adjuster mishandled the Cecenas’ claim, evidence that he mishandled others too supports the bad-faith claim and punitive damages.
The court agreed with the theory. It cited Colonial Life & Accident Ins. Co. v. Superior Court, 31 Cal.3d 785, 790–92 (1982), directly, for the proposition that other insureds’ claim files “may be relevant to show whether there have been other instances of misconduct in the past by a particular claims representative and the insurer’s knowledge of it,” and that a plaintiff may prove bad faith “by showing either that the acts that harmed him were knowingly committed or were engaged in with such frequency as to indicate a general business practice.” That is Colonial Life’s core holding, applied without hesitation.
Then the order names the machinery gate and stops. “Nevertheless, before any personal information can be disclosed, California law requires that non-party insureds must first give their consent to disclosure in writing in response to a letter approved by the court,” citing Insurance Code § 791.13. No mention of the statute’s judicial-order exception, no discussion of redaction — the same truncated reading of § 791.13 that Part 4’s anchor case, Dobro v. Allstate (S.D. Cal. 2016), would commit nine years later in the same district. But the consent gate is not what killed the request. What killed it was time.
A legally sound request for the single most valuable kind of evidence, denied because it arrived too late to run the slow machinery it required — and because no one put a reason for the delay on the record.
Getting the names, then obtaining court-approved written consent from each non-party insured, then subpoenaing their individual claims files, was a multi-step process — the Cecenas’ own counsel described it at the hearing as serving those subpoenas “at the start of trial” — and the court found it “cannot be reasonably accomplished — at least not without jeopardizing the January 7, 2007 trial.” The case-management deadlines had been set in March. The Cecenas had known of Allstate’s objection to this interrogatory since January 2006. Nine months passed. “There is no indication that unusual circumstances beyond plaintiffs’ or their counsel’s control prohibited them from moving to compel this discovery sooner, and plaintiffs’ counsel has no explanation as to why he waited until now to move for relief.”
Here is the part the two-page order cannot show, and the docket does. The court denied the interrogatory to protect a January 7, 2007 trial date. That trial did not happen in January 2007. It was continued, and continued again — reset to April 2008, then to May 2008. The pretrial conference was not held until May 2, 2008. Trial did not begin until late May 2008 — roughly sixteen months after the date the court had invoked as the reason the Cecenas could not have their pattern evidence. In hindsight, the runway the court said did not exist existed in abundance. And the docket reflects no renewed motion to compel Interrogatory No. 22 in any of it.
Two lessons sit inside that irony, and they point in opposite directions on purpose. The first is that you cannot bank on continuances: the court ruled on the calendar in front of it in November 2006, reasonably, and a claimant who waits until the eve of a set trial date is gambling that the date will move — a bet that loses as often as it wins. File early enough that the slow machinery has room to run before the trial date, not after it. The second is the flip side: when the calendar does open up — and here it opened by more than a year — the request that was denied as premature-plus-late becomes ripe again, and the claimant who does not renew it forfeits a second time. The “no runway” rationale evaporates the moment the trial slips; someone has to notice and re-file.
Treat pattern-and-practice discovery as the long pole in the tent, because it is. It is the evidence the insurer will fight hardest, through the slowest procedural channel, and it is therefore the first request you serve, not the last. If the factual basis genuinely matures late, put the reason on the record before the court has to ask — the way claimants in Foremost Ins. Co. v. Allstate Ins. Co., No. 5:23-cv-02557-SSS-SHK, 2024 WL 5413150 (C.D. Cal. Sept. 23, 2024), and Fashion Nova LLC v. Citizens Ins. Co. of Am., No. CV 23-1317 GW (PVCx), 2023 WL 8872092 (C.D. Cal. Nov. 8, 2023), did by documenting the insurer’s own contribution to the compressed schedule. If the trial date moves, renew. And design around the consent-letter machinery rather than into it: the Cecenas never asked for the disposition data — how many claims this adjuster handled, how they were resolved — as distinct from the identity data the interrogatory actually sought. A request built the way Part 4’s rewrite of Dobro was built, dispositions first and identities held in reserve, would not have needed the consent machinery at all, and would not have needed a year of runway to execute.
Free edition · The story
The full narrative: the pattern-and-practice theory the court accepted under Colonial Life, the interrogatory denied for nine months’ unexplained delay, the trial date that slipped sixteen months, and the request never renewed.
Paid edition · Ground by ground
The practitioner’s dissection: the order request by request, the run-the-clock docket chronology, the § 791.13 gap against the fuller statute, and the rewrite built around dispositions rather than identities.
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The residual objections this case sits inside are mapped in Death by a Thousand Objections; the truncated-statute problem it shares with Part 4 is dissected in The Motion That Asked for Ten Thousand Names; and the discipline for the identities the Cecenas should not have led with is in The One Discovery You Should Almost Never Ask For.
Distilled from the project’s own reading of Cecena v. Allstate Ins. Co., No. C05-03178 JF (HRL), 2006 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 86291 (N.D. Cal. Nov. 9, 2006), its docket, and California Insurance Code section 791.13 and its exceptions. Source text in sources_md_conversions/cases/; case-wiki entry in wiki/cases/. The ground-by-ground rewrite is reserved for the subscriber edition. Educational and informational only; not legal advice.