A Pennsylvania appeals court has forced an insurer to hand over more than 2,000 pages it tried to keep out of a bad faith case. 

The Superior Court of Pennsylvania affirmed the discovery order on September 16, finding AmGuard did not meet its burden of showing attorney-client privilege or work product protection applied to any of the 379 withheld documents. 

The dispute grew out of a 2018 three-car collision in California. The policyholder, who carried a commercial auto policy with a $1 million underinsured motorist (UIM) benefit through AmGuard, suffered neck, back, and shoulder injuries and lost earnings. The other driver's coverage topped out at $15,000. 

The policyholder demanded the full $1 million benefit in August 2019. AmGuard's response came roughly 14 months later: a $100,000 offer, paired with the position that the injuries were "not causally connected" to the crash and that losses had been "exaggerated." 

That did not hold up. An arbitrator awarded $985,000 and assessed total recoverable damages at more than $5.2 million. A California court confirmed the award, and AmGuard paid. 

The policyholder then filed breach of contract and bad faith claims in Luzerne County, seeking records showing how AmGuard evaluated the claim, who set the $100,000 figure, and why. 

AmGuard produced a four-page privilege log that squeezed 379 documents into five broad rows. The largest row covered 250 documents across 1,538 pages, described only as "email correspondence" with outside counsel. No individual authors, recipients, or dates appeared anywhere on the log. 

Applying its 2021 en banc decision, the court found the log gave no meaningful basis to assess whether the claimed protections actually applied. On appeal, AmGuard argued broadly that all communications with its California counsel during the arbitration were privileged - but it did not point to a single document by content, date, author, or purpose. The court called the approach insufficient. 

AmGuard also sought to block production of internal reserve information, but its privilege log had cited only "confidentiality and relevancy" rather than privilege or work product. The court found the argument fell outside the scope of the appeal. 

For claims handlers and coverage teams, the message is practical: when withholding documents in Pennsylvania discovery, the privilege log needs to do the heavy lifting on a document-by-document basis. Broad categories will not cut it. 

The underlying bad faith and breach of contract claims remain unresolved.