Practical Tips · Checklist · June 2026

The Discovery to Avoid Asking For

Other claimants’ names are the one thing courts won’t give you — and the one thing you don’t need. Ask anyway, and you can taint the discovery you’d otherwise win. Six moves that keep you out of the trap.

The pattern that proves a biased claims practice lives in the files, not in the people who filed them. So a request that touches other insureds’ personally identifiable information — names, addresses, contact details — is the request to avoid, not the request to lead with. The companion piece, The One Discovery You Should Almost Never Ask For, explains why; the case study of Shirley v. Allstate shows what leading with the names actually costs.

This page is the short version of the framework — the six moves that keep a PII request from sinking the discovery around it. The full working version, with the authorities, model language, and objection answers, is the Implementing Kit on the companion Substack.

What the checklist covers

  1. Don’t ask for PII — you almost never need it. The identities of other claimants prove nothing about whether the insurer handled claims in bad faith. The handling does. Frame the discovery around claims handling and outcomes; reach for identities only if you need a live witness you cannot otherwise find.
  2. Get the files first; the names later, if ever. Seek the other insureds’ claim files in redacted form first. Once you have read them, you will usually find you never needed a single identity to use what they teach.
  3. Meet the privacy statute head-on — it has two doors. California’s insurance-privacy act is not a flat bar; it excepts disclosure under a judicial order and disclosure otherwise permitted by law. Name the exceptions before the insurer buries them.
  4. Redaction kills the constitutional objection. You are after the claims handling, not anyone’s identity. Concede redaction of names, addresses, and identifiers up front, and the constitutional privacy interest in contact information largely dissolves.
  5. Target litigated claims — they are already public. Claims that went to litigation, or where the insured retained counsel, are both the better evidence and already in the public sphere, so they do not implicate the same privacy concerns as a stranger’s quiet file.
  6. If you truly need PII, run it through certification — and never opt-in. Personal information is granted as a matter of course to identify class members. In an individual action, if a court orders notice at all, insist on opt-out; never volunteer opt-in, which yields token responses and prolongs discovery.
Get the full checklist. The six moves above are the framework. The working version — the authorities that prove each move, the model request and stipulation language, the statutory-exception argument insurers hope you never make, and the full roster of grants and denials behind each step — is the Implementing Kit, published on the companion Substack.

Get the Implementing Kit →   See the case study →   The bias-evaluation service →

Related

See the issue this checklist serves in The One Discovery You Should Almost Never Ask For, the cost of getting it wrong in How Asking for the Names Lost the Whole Case, and the affirmative file discovery in Framing an OICF Request That Survives.

Distilled from the project’s own survey of California and federal orders on other insureds’ personally identifiable information. The seminal authority is Colonial Life & Accident Ins. Co. v. Superior Court, 31 Cal.3d 785 (1982); the cautionary case is Shirley v. Allstate Ins. Co. The statutory-exception authority, the class-certification cases, and the grant/denial roster behind each move are reserved for the subscriber Implementing Kit. Educational and informational only; not legal advice.