Practical Tips · Other Insureds’ PII · June 2026
To prove a biased claims practice you need the other insureds’ files. You rarely need the other insureds. Confuse the two — ask for the people instead of the paper — and you can lose the discovery that really matters.
There is a reflex, the moment a claimant suspects the insurer is running a practice rather than deciding a claim, to want the names. Who else did this happen to? Find them, the thinking goes, and the pattern proves itself. The reflex is almost always wrong. The names and addresses of other claimants — their personally identifiable information, or PII — are at once the hardest discovery to obtain in this area and the discovery you least need. The proof of a biased claims practice does not live in the people who filed the claims. It lives in their files.
The pattern is in the paper, not the people. Confuse the two, and the discovery that proves your case can walk out the door.
What turns a convenient denial into a practice is repetition — the same reviewer, retained by the same carrier, reaching the same insurer-favorable answer the same flawed way across a run of claims. All of that is recorded in the files: the reports, the testing protocols, the denial rationales, the outcomes. None of it is recorded in a claimant’s identity. The name is, at most, a way to reach a live witness — and you rarely need one, because a redacted file speaks for itself once you have it. So the target is the files, sought with the identifying information stripped out: you are after the claims handling, not anyone’s contact details.
Courts treat a bare request for other claimants’ identities as suspect on its face — a step toward soliciting new plaintiffs — and apply a heightened relevance-and-need standard to it. The result is lopsided: outside the class-action setting, these PII requests are denied far more often than they are granted; in a survey of the California and federal orders, in better than three-quarters of them. And the cost is not limited to the names. Leading with a PII request — as the plaintiffs did in Shirley v. Allstate — puts the privacy fight at the front of the case and the claims handling at the back, and the suspicion that attaches to the request for names bleeds onto the file discovery that should have been routine.
The objection comes dressed as privacy. Insurers invoke California’s insurance-privacy statute as if it sealed the files shut without the insured’s signed consent. It does not: the statute carries its own express exceptions — disclosure in response to a judicial order, and disclosure otherwise permitted by law — and a discovery order is a judicial order while civil discovery is permitted by law. The recurring pattern in the orders is that insurers present the statute as a flat bar and courts analyze the privacy interest without ever reaching the exceptions. The constitutional privacy claim is answered the same quiet way: under the three-part test of Hill v. National Collegiate Athletic Assn., redaction of the names and identifiers leaves no serious intrusion to weigh — Shirley itself found the threatened invasion “not serious.” (Medical and financial information carries heightened protection and should be redacted as a matter of course.)
There is a single setting in which courts hand over PII as a matter of course — class or representative certification. Where contact information is sought to identify class members and establish numerosity, commonality, and typicality, disclosure benefits the absent insureds, and the courts grant it routinely. That is the exception that proves the rule: PII flows when its purpose is to serve the other insureds, not to recruit them. In an individual action it almost never flows, and where a court orders any notice at all, opt-out is the recognized mechanism; opt-in produces token, unrepresentative responses and merely prolongs discovery. Colonial Life & Accident Insurance Co. v. Superior Court (1982) — the seminal authority that opened other insureds’ files in California more than forty years ago — settled that the files are reachable. It did not prescribe opt-in, though it is constantly overread to say it did.
Read the deep-dive → See the case study → The bias-evaluation service →
Turn the principle into practice with The Discovery to Avoid Asking For (the six-move checklist), see the cost of getting it wrong in How Asking for the Names Lost the Whole Case, and the affirmative file discovery in The Files the Insurer Hopes You Won’t Ask For.
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 privacy framework is Hill v. National Collegiate Athletic Assn., 7 Cal.4th 1 (1994); the cautionary case is Shirley v. Allstate Ins. Co. The statutory-exception authority and the class-certification cases are reserved for the subscriber deep-dive. Educational and informational only; not legal advice.