State Farm asked Alabama's highest court to strip the sharing provisions from a discovery order. On August 14, those provisions survived.
The case began with a roof in Union Springs. A couple insured under a State Farm homeowners' policy filed a storm claim after wind and hail damage in the first week of January 2024. Their roofer quoted $9,112.02 for repairs. State Farm, the opinion says, "adjusted the claim in a cursory fashion and offered to settle the claim" for $4,059.10.
In January 2025 the couple sued for breach of contract and bad faith, alleging State Farm had a "pattern and practice of lowballing roofing claims." The court did not decide whether that was true. It ruled only on a narrower question that matters more to insurers.
The couple's lawyers wanted a protective order that let them reuse State Farm's confidential materials in other bad-faith roof cases they are running against the same carrier. State Farm resisted, calling the documents - its Operations Guides, Standard Claim Processes and Jurisdictional References - trade-secret claims-handling methods. "No Alabama court has ever permitted a sharing provision in any bad faith insurance litigation, much less one as sweeping as this," it argued.
The court rejected that position. Nothing in Alabama's discovery rules bars sharing, it held, and limited sharing spares everyone the cost of repeating the same discovery. It did tighten the order in State Farm's favor: sharing is capped at the eight cases the couple's counsel already had going, recipients must sign on and answer to the trial court, and return-or-destroy timing was clarified. A clause allowing disclosure to government agencies stayed.
Because State Farm got some of those changes but not the removal it sought, the court granted its petition in part and denied it in part.
For claims teams, the point is plain: a carrier's confidential claims materials produced in one bad-faith suit can travel into counsel's related suits, inside firm limits. The justices split several ways, and one, joined by another, would have found the trial court went too far.
