Montana Bans Paying DRP and Non-DRP Shops Differently. Whether You Can Sue Over It Is a Separate Question.

Short answer: Montana forbids an insurer from giving you a reason to pick one body shop over another. Its insurance regulator has already found that paying for a diagnostic scan at a shop in the insurer's own network, while refusing the same scan at an independent, is that kind of reason. What is far less settled is whether a private person can sue over it. Montana's statute creating an independent cause of action against an insurer names six provisions it makes suable. The anti-steering section is not among them.

By Anthony Braswell for Quorum Industries LLC, The Autobody Directory · Updated 2026-08-26 · How this was written, and what the machine may not do

How this page was produced: Researched, drafted and checked with AI assistance under human direction, and signed off by the named author. How this site is written

That gap is the whole story on this page, and you can check it yourself in about two minutes against Montana's own code.

What this page will show you

Two statutes, quoted from Montana's own code host, and the arithmetic between them. A 2016 Montana Supreme Court decision about the same architecture, in a case that has nothing whatever to do with body shops, plus two federal decisions that say it more bluntly and bind nobody. Why declaratory relief in Montana has two answers, which is the part almost everybody gets wrong, and the 2020 certified question that would have settled it if the case had not been dismissed thirty-eight days later. Two advisory memoranda the state insurance commissioner issued in 2024, which nobody appears to have read side by side, and which together do something more useful than either does alone. What that office has already collected from State Farm, and why that is not the point people usually make of it.

Then the docket of the 2026 class action, read from the court's own index, including the cause number, the three defendants, plaintiffs' counsel, a judge who recused before anything happened, and the thing that ties the whole page together: the court has classified it as a declaratory judgment case. Then what the two trade reports add, the longer list of what nobody has established, and the fight the body shops themselves lost in federal court, which is not this fight.

What this page does not claim

We have not read the complaint. We have now read the court's docket, so this page does state the cause number, the judge, the parties, plaintiffs' counsel and what the court calls the case. It does not state the counts, the statutes pleaded or the class definition, because the register of actions lists the complaint without making it downloadable. Where we describe what the suit alleges we are describing trade press reporting on it, and we say which outlet, every time. Where we describe the case record we say we read the docket.

We do not tell you what the complaint pleads. One outlet says it carries counts "including allegations of bad faith and fraud," which is that reporter's summary. No count names are given, and neither outlet names a statute as a cause of action. Neither says the complaint sues on § 33-18-224. One says the complaint refers to the Commissioner's 2024 advisory, and it is the advisory, not the complaint, that cites that section. Those are different things and this page keeps them apart.

This page is about what the law says, not about who wins. Nothing here is a prediction about the reported case, and nothing here is legal advice.

We do not repeat that any insurer "settles short pays quickly." That claim circulates in the industry and may well match shop-floor experience. Short-pay disputes run as small claims and assignment-of-benefits collections, which by design produce no published record, so the claim cannot be checked against one. The absence of a record is the finding we can report. It is not evidence either way.

We do not tell you a court has decided any of this. No Montana decision we could find mentions § 33-18-224 at all. The case law quoted below is about the structure of the statutory scheme, not about body shops, and we say exactly where the analogy stops.

The statute that forbids it

Mont. Code Ann. § 33-18-224, "Designation of specific automobile body repair businesses prohibited," read from Montana's code host on 2026-08-25:

(1) (a) An insurance company, including its producers and adjusters, that issues or renews a policy of insurance in this state covering, in whole or in part, a motor vehicle may not:

(i) require that a claimant under the policy use a particular automobile body repair business or location for an estimate or a repair;

(ii) engage in any act or practice that intimidates, coerces, or threatens a claimant or that provides an incentive or inducement for a claimant to use a particular automobile body repair business or location

Read the second clause slowly, because it is doing work the first one cannot. An insurer that pays for a scan at its own network shop and declines the identical scan somewhere else has not required anybody to go anywhere. It has made one shop cheaper for the customer than the other. That is the plain shape of clause (ii).

The same section, at subsection (4), obliges the insurer to pay "the reasonable and necessary cost of the automobile body repair services for covered damages," measured against the market price defined at § 33-18-222. Subsection (8)(b) defines "claimant" to cover both the insurer's own policyholder and a third party claiming against it, so the duty does not switch off because the driver is on the other side of the crash.

Source: Mont. Code Ann. § 33-18-224, read 2026-08-25.

The statute that decides whether you can sue

Most states leave unfair claim settlement practices to the insurance department, with no private suit attached. Montana is one of the states that wrote a private action into the code, which is the reason a case like this is brought there.

Mont. Code Ann. § 33-18-242(1), read from the same host on 2026-08-25:

An insured or a third-party claimant has an independent cause of action against an insurer for actual damages caused by the insurer's violation of 33-18-201(1), (4), (5), (6), (9), or (13).

Six subsections, all of them inside § 33-18-201, which is the general unfair-claim-practices section. § 33-18-224, the anti-steering statute quoted above, does not appear in § 33-18-242 at all. Not in subsection (1), not anywhere on the page.

We checked that directly, and any reader can repeat the check: open the section and search it for the number.

Source: Mont. Code Ann. § 33-18-242, read 2026-08-25.

What that arithmetic means in practice

Say it precisely, because the precise version is the one that survives contact with a lawyer. Section 33-18-242 does not expressly create for a violation of § 33-18-224 the independent damages action it creates for the enumerated subsections of § 33-18-201. That is a statement about what the statute contains. Everything after it is consequence, and the consequence is where the argument lives.

The consequence is that a plaintiff who wants damages has to route the conduct somewhere the legislature did make actionable. On the materials reviewed for this page, three paths are visible. This is not a complete catalogue of every theory a Montana plaintiff could plead, and a lawyer with the file in front of them may well see a fourth.

1. Through § 33-18-201. Subsection (4) reaches an insurer that refuses to pay claims without a reasonable investigation, and subsection (6) reaches one that fails to attempt in good faith a prompt, fair and equitable settlement where liability is reasonably clear. On that route § 33-18-224 is not the claim. It is evidence of the standard the insurer fell below. This is the route the Commissioner's office has already drawn, twice, in two separate advisory memoranda from 2024. Both are quoted below and both are on the office's own letterhead.
2. Through the contract. Plead breach, and use § 33-18-224 to argue what the policy obliged the insurer to pay for. The statute preserves this route by name.
3. Declaratory relief. Ask the court to say what the law requires without seeking damages under a section that does not authorise them. This one splits in two depending on what you ask the court to declare, and the split is the most useful thing on this page. It has its own section below.

§ 33-18-242 closes off the alternatives fairly firmly. Subsection (3) says an insured may sue for breach of contract, for fraud, or under that section, "but not under any other theory or cause of action," and adds that an insured "may not bring an action for bad faith in connection with the handling of an insurance claim." Subsection (4) says the same of third-party claimants. Subsection (6) gives the insurer a defence where it had a reasonable basis in law or fact for contesting the claim.

The distinction between subsections (3) and (4) is not academic here. In the reported case the two named plaintiffs are said to sit on opposite sides of it, one as a State Farm policyholder and one as a third-party claimant against a State Farm insured, so the two of them are governed by two different subsections of the same statute.

One warning before you go checking any of this against an older case. The section's history line reads "En. Sec. 3, Ch. 278, L. 1987; amd. Sec. 1, Ch. 356, L. 2023; amd. Sec. 2, Ch. 430, L. 2023." It was enacted in 1987 and amended twice in 2023, and the subsection numbers moved. The 1997 decision quoted further down this page cites the independent cause of action at § 33-18-242(2) and the reasonable-basis defence at § 33-18-242(5). Today those are subsections (1) and (6). Read a pre-2023 Montana case against the current text and the numbers will not line up. That is renumbering, not disagreement.

What the Montana Supreme Court has said about that structure

Not about body shops. About the same architecture.

In Mark Ibsen, Inc. v. Caring for Montanans, Inc., 2016 MT 111, decided 11 May 2016, the plaintiff tried to sue privately under two Unfair Trade Practices Act sections, § 33-18-208 and § 33-18-212. Like § 33-18-224, neither is enumerated in § 33-18-242(1). The Court refused, at paragraph 47:

"Section 242 provides the narrow exception to the rule that it is the Commissioner who will enforce the UTPA."

and at paragraph 50:

"We therefore conclude that the UTPA does not imply a private right of action. Rather, it expressly confers enforcement authority upon the Commissioner and narrowly provides a limited private right of action only in Section 242."

Here is exactly where the analogy stops. The number 224 does not appear anywhere in that opinion. Ibsen is on point by structure, because the sections it refused to imply a right under occupy the same position in the scheme that § 33-18-224 occupies. It is not on point by subject, and no Montana court has been asked the body shop version of the question. A court that wanted to distinguish it would have room to try.

Ibsen also leaves a door open that is easy to miss. At paragraph 51 the Court said the plaintiffs were still entitled to pursue common law claims for fraud, deceit and misrepresentation. Closing the statutory route is not closing every route.

One thing about Ibsen that gets repeated wrongly, including in summaries we read while checking this. Ibsen says it applied "the four-part test we applied in Klaudt and Wombold to determine whether a statutory scheme implies a private right of action." Go and read Wombold at paragraph 35 and those four factors are introduced as a summary of Montana's rules of statutory construction, traced back to a 1979 case, not as a purpose-built implied-right test. Ibsen deployed general construction canons for that job. That is a fair thing for a court to do and it does not weaken the holding, but "Montana has a four-part implied-private-right test" overstates what exists.

Two federal courts have said the same thing more bluntly

Ibsen is the Montana Supreme Court, and it is the authority that counts. Two federal decisions in the same family say the quiet part out loud, and both come from litigation against the same defendant Ibsen sued.

In Fossen v. Caring for Montanans, Inc., Ninth Circuit No. 14-35077, filed 30 June 2015, the panel wrote:

"Since the 1987 amendment, however, the Montana Supreme Court has never recognized a private right of action for the violation of a UTPA provision other than those provisions identified in § 33-18-242(1)."

The same disposition explains where the list came from:

"In 1987, the Montana legislature amended the Montana Unfair Trade Practices Act [...] expressly to designate six statutory provisions [...] the violation of which would permit an insured or a third party to pursue a direct claim against an insurer."

That matches the statute's own history line, which records enactment in 1987. The plaintiffs there were trying to sue over premium rate discrimination under § 33-18-206, another unenumerated section.

Below, the District of Montana had put both halves in one breath, on 24 January 2014:

"It is now well-settled that there is both a statutory private right of action for claims-handling disputes under section 242 of the UTPA and common law rights arising therefrom. However, there is no common law or statutory private right of action pertaining to other types of insurance disputes, such as claims of rate discrimination in violation of subsection 206 of the UTPA, as is alleged in this case."

Now the caveat that keeps this honest, and it is not a small one. The Ninth Circuit disposition is an unpublished memorandum disposition carrying the standard notice that it "is not appropriate for publication and is not precedent except as provided by Ninth Circuit Rule 36-3." It is a federal court's reading of state law, not a Montana court's, and it binds nobody. We cite it because it is a careful contemporaneous statement of the same point, not because it settles anything.

Sources: Fossen, 9th Cir. No. 14-35077, read 2026-08-26 on a third-party host. The district court order of 24 January 2014 in the same case, No. CV 09-61-H-CCL, was read from the United States Government Publishing Office's own courts collection at govinfo.gov. Ibsen prints their reporter citations as 617 Fed. Appx. at 739 and 993 F. Supp. 2d at 1263; we have not verified either page number against a reporter, because the slip copies carry no reporter pagination.

Sources: Ibsen, 2016 MT 111, read 2026-08-26. This is the court's own slip opinion, hosted by Justia, because we could not resolve a Montana government URL for it. We print no parallel reporter citation, because the opinion does not contain one.

So the question a Montana court would have to answer is not really whether paying DRP and non-DRP shops differently is against the law. The Commissioner has already said it is. The question is which enumerated provision, if any, the conduct has to be routed through before a private plaintiff can recover for it.

Declaratory relief, which splits in two

We got this wrong in an earlier version of this page, in both directions, and the correction is worth more than the original.

An earlier draft treated declaratory relief as simply available. We then downgraded it to "contested" on the strength of the Montana Supreme Court declining to decide the question. Both were too coarse. Montana does not have one answer here. It has two, and which one you get depends on what you ask the court to declare.

Ask for advance payment of damages that are not reasonably in dispute, and you are on a road Montana built on purpose. Both of the decisions the Commissioner's January memorandum relies on were themselves declaratory judgment actions, and both succeeded. Ridley ends by reversing and remanding "for entry of a declaratory judgment consistent with this opinion." DuBray, at paragraph 16, is plainer still:

"DuBray's claims for declaratory relief in the form of advance medical payments were authorized by Ridley and should have been allowed to proceed."

That is not a grudging tolerance. Declaratory relief is the mechanism the whole Ridley line runs on, and the reason is in Ridley itself: the reasonable-basis defence in § 33-18-242 meant a damages action could be met with the answer that the insurer had a reasonable basis for contesting the claim. Declaratory relief was the way around that. So a Ridley claim is a declaratory claim by design.

Ask for a declaration on some other Unfair Trade Practices Act theory and the picture is far worse. In James Lee Construction, Inc. v. Government Employees Insurance Company, Ninth Circuit No. 22-35102, filed 17 January 2023, the panel held:

"The Montana Unfair Trade Practices Act [...] does not permit the Lee Plaintiffs' claims for declaratory relief."

That case was about subrogation and whether an insured must be made whole first, not about advance payment. Note the same two caveats as before: it is an unpublished memorandum disposition, not precedent except under Ninth Circuit Rule 36-3, and it is a federal court reading state law.

And the Montana Supreme Court has twice had the chance to settle it and passed. In Johnson v. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co., 2025 MT 194, decided 2 September 2025, footnote 2:

"The Johnsons also argue that their prayer for declaratory relief is not preempted. We cannot locate in the record a decision of the District Court holding otherwise. The Johnsons point to a federal district court decision that suggests it may be, but that decision is not in this case, so we decline to address this argument."

Read the grammar of that carefully, because the natural first reading is backwards. "Holding otherwise" means holding that the prayer is preempted, and "suggests it may be" completes to "may be preempted." The federal decision the Johnsons pointed at was one cutting against them. The Court also declined to decide whether § 33-18-242(3) preempted the conversion claim in the same case, because that claim failed on other grounds first.

And here is why the question is still open, which is the part nobody seems to have written down. It is not that nobody asked. Somebody asked, and the answer was thirty-eight days from arriving when the case ended.

On 24 August 2020, in Jesse Reeves v. Safeco Insurance Company of Illinois, No. CV 20-69-M-DLC, the United States District Court for the District of Montana, Missoula Division, decided it could not resolve this on its own and certified the question to the Montana Supreme Court. The question, in the district court's own words:

"Whether Montana law allows a first-party plaintiff to bring a declaratory judgment action under § 33-18-242(3) to establish its insurer's obligations to make advance payments of medical bills and wage loss consistent with Ridley v. Guar. Nat. Ins. Co., 951 P.2d 987, 989 (Mont. 1997) and DuBray v. Farmers Ins. Ex., 36 P.3d 897, 899 (Mont. 2001)."

That is, almost word for word, the question this page has been circling. The same order records that the Montana Supreme Court has never squarely held that even a third-party plaintiff may obtain declaratory relief under § 33-18-242(3), while noting that in practice it "has consistently allowed third-party declaratory judgment claims under the UTPA." Allowed in practice, never held in terms, and for first-party plaintiffs not even that.

Then, on 1 October 2020, the parties stipulated to dismissal with prejudice, each side bearing its own costs and fees, and the district court signed it. Thirty-eight days after certification. A stipulated dismissal on those terms is what a settlement looks like from the outside. The certified question went with it.

So there is no answer. We looked for one, and we are telling you what we could not pin down: we do not know whether the Montana Supreme Court accepted the question, declined it, or simply had it sitting when the case resolved. We found no order either way and no original-proceeding docket number tied to it. Anyone who can open the Montana Supreme Court's docket search in a browser, or pull entries 16 through 23 of the federal docket, can close that gap in a few minutes.

What can be said is the shape of it. The single most important open question in this corner of Montana insurance law was put squarely to the court that could settle it, and it was withdrawn by settlement before anyone got an answer. The law is unsettled because the test case went away.

Sources: the certification order of 24 August 2020 and the dismissal order of 1 October 2020, both read from the United States Government Publishing Office's own courts collection at govinfo.gov, package USCOURTS-mtd-9_20-cv-00069, on 2026-08-26. That package contains exactly two documents. GPO publishes opinions. It does not publish full dockets, so the entries between them are not something we have seen.

Even inside the safe road there is a limit, and it may be the sharpest thing on this page for the reported case. In Teeter v. Mid-Century Insurance Company, 2017 MT 292, decided 28 November 2017, the Court set out the test at paragraph 15:

"Therefore, Ridley is a two-part test: (1) whether liability is reasonably clear and (2) whether it is reasonably clear that a medical expense is causally related to the accident."

and then, at paragraph 18, drew the boundary:

"Thus, we conclude that based on the purpose of the Declaratory Judgments Act and our Ridley cases, a Ridley declaratory claim is an inappropriate method to adjudicate disputed issues of material fact as to causation."

Sit with that against a class action about diagnostic scans. Whether a given scan was necessary, and whether its cost is causally tied to a given collision, is precisely the kind of thing an insurer disputes. If those facts are genuinely in dispute, Teeter says a declaratory claim is the wrong vehicle for resolving them. That is not a prediction about the Montana case. It is the question a defendant would raise first, and a reader can now see it coming.

Sources: Johnson, 2025 MT 194, Teeter, 2017 MT 292 and James Lee Construction, 9th Cir. No. 22-35102, all read 2026-08-26. The James Lee memorandum came from the Ninth Circuit's own server. The two Montana opinions came from a third-party host, because we could not resolve a state URL. Neither Montana opinion carries a parallel reporter citation.

The regulator got there first

On 21 August 2024 the Montana Commissioner of Securities and Insurance, Troy Downing, issued a three-page advisory memorandum addressed to "ALL INTERESTED PERSONS". We read it from the Commissioner's own copy. It carries no text layer, so we read it as page images and transcribed the passages below by eye.

Under the heading ILLEGAL PRACTICES, after saying the office had reviewed automobile repair complaints filed with the CSI, the memorandum makes two findings.

The first is the one the industry has been quoting. Some insurance companies are paying:

"For pre/post sublet scans if the scans are completed at or for auto repair shops participating in the insurer's Direct Repair Program (DRP) but are not paying for pre/post sublet scans under the same or similar coverage circumstances if the scans are performed at or for non-DRP auto repair shops."

and are paying:

"A higher dollar amount for pre/post sublet scans if the scans are completed at or for auto repair shops participating in the insurer's DRP, but are paying a lower dollar amount for pre/post sublet scans under the same or similar coverage circumstances if the scans are performed at or for non-DRP auto repair shops."

Then the conclusion:

"In both instances above, these practices constitute illegal incentives or inducements to use DRP-auto repair shops (also known as steering) and violate §33-18-224(1)(a)(ii). It would also be illegal if an insurer used similar tactics regarding other services, such as calibration."

The second finding gets almost no attention and deserves some. Under the heading "Insurer Representations":

"CSI learned recently that at least one insurer (with an established DRP) may have discouraged a claimant from using a non-DRP auto repair shop by misrepresenting information about the shop, claiming that the shop was difficult to work with and made the claims process difficult. These types of statements are intimidating and can easily discourage a consumer from selecting an auto repair shop of the consumer's choosing, violating §33-18-224(1)(a)(ii)."

So the office read the same subsection to reach both a payment differential and a bad word about a competitor.

And here is the part that matters most for everything above. The memorandum's closing GUIDANCE section does not stop at § 33-18-224. It reaches for an enumerated provision:

"Section 33-18-201(6) requires that insurers attempt in good faith to effectuate 'prompt, fair, and equitable' settlement of claims in which liability has become reasonably clear. The CSI will enforce the rights of claimants to receive the benefits to which they are contractually entitled and the protections they are afforded under the law."

Subsection (6) is one of the six that § 33-18-242(1) makes privately actionable. The regulator has already, in its own document, connected this conduct to a provision on the suable list. That is route 1 above, drawn by the office that wrote the advisory.

The memorandum ends by encouraging interested persons to consult independent legal counsel. We would repeat that.

Source: CSI Advisory Memorandum, 21 August 2024, read as page images on 2026-08-26. SHA-256 of the file we read: 0de02d6e74226fea4b554c7e44075f832431a76bedaa3036a8e0381745481f3e. An earlier version of this page quoted the memorandum at one remove through trade press, because the PDF returns no extractable text.

Why almost nobody has read it, and why we nearly did not. The document is a scanned image. Search engines cannot index it, our fetchers could not extract a word of it, and the office's own advisory memoranda index does not list it. We went and read that index: it carries ten entries and the most recent is dated 5 July 2022. At least five advisory memoranda issued since then are live on the same website and appear on it nowhere, including both of the ones this page relies on. So the document that the Montana collision industry has been quoting for two years sits on a state server, unlisted and unsearchable, and the quotation everyone uses is a trade summary of it. It is a scanner and a stale web page. It is also why reading the file yourself is worth twenty minutes.

That matters for reading any suit built on this conduct. A plaintiff pointing at it is asking a court to enforce a reading the state's own insurance regulator published two years ago.

The other advisory, which is the one that closes the loop

Seven months before the body shop memorandum, on 26 January 2024, the same office issued a second advisory memorandum. It never mentions scans, body shops or steering. It is about § 33-18-201(6) and (13), which are two of the six subsections on the suable list, and it says what they require.

We read this one as page images too, from the Commissioner's own copy.

Its Background section:

"The Montana Supreme Court has repeatedly held that sections 33-18-201(6) and (13), MCA, require an insurer to provide advanced payment (prior to final settlement) to a victim of an automobile accident for any damages for which liability under the policy is reasonably clear."

Its Guidance section, which is where the reach is:

"CSI reads both sections 33-18-201(6) and (13) consistent with Ridley and Dubray to require an insurer to provide advanced payment of damages to a victim of an automobile accident for any damages that are not reasonably in dispute. The scope of Ridley is not limited to medical expenses. Dubray at 15. The duty for advanced payment of damages under Ridley encompasses any expenses incurred by the victim of an automobile accident that have become reasonably clear, including but not limited to medical expenses and lost wages."

And the sentence that matters most:

"an insurer's failure to pay expenses (such as costs of acquiring medical records) violates sections 33-18-201(6) and (13), MCA"

The test the office says it will apply is whether the damages are "reasonably certain and directly related to an insured's negligence or wrongful act," citing Dubray at paragraph 15, and it says it will also consider "Montana's public policy of protecting innocent victims of automobile accidents."

Put the two memoranda side by side and the chain runs entirely through government documents. The August memorandum says paying for a scan at a network shop and refusing it elsewhere violates the anti-steering section, and reaches for § 33-18-201(6) in its guidance. The January memorandum says § 33-18-201(6) and (13) require payment of expenses a claimant has incurred once they are reasonably clear, and that failing to pay such an expense violates those subsections. Both of those subsections are on the § 33-18-242(1) list.

That is route 1, and the regulator built both halves of it.

Now the parts that could break it, because they are real.

Both of the cases behind that memorandum are third-party claimant cases, and we checked. In Ridley the plaintiff was a passenger injured when the car he was riding in was hit, and he sued the other driver's liability insurer. In DuBray the plaintiff was a driver hit by someone Farmers insured, and he sued Farmers. Neither is a policyholder suing their own carrier. Nothing in either opinion extends the holding to first-party coverage, and neither opinion says it does. The January memorandum inherits that shape: it is written about "a victim of an automobile accident" and damages "directly related to an insured's negligence or wrongful act." The two plaintiffs in the Montana suit sit one on each side of that line, so this memorandum speaks squarely to one of them and only glances at the other.

A second thing we found only by opening the cases: DuBray never cites § 33-18-201 at all. The number does not appear in the opinion. DuBray reaches its result through Ridley, through § 33-18-242(6)(b) and through the Uniform Declaratory Judgment Act. Ridley is the only one of the two that construes subsections (6) and (13). So when the memorandum presents both decisions as interpreting § 33-18-201(6) and (13), that is the agency's synthesis of the line, not something DuBray's text says. The synthesis looks fair to us. It is still the agency's, and you should know which part is whose.

It says nothing about diagnostic scans. Whether a scan is an expense that has "become reasonably clear" is the open question, not something either memorandum answers.

And the Ridley line has moved since 1997, in both directions. Watters, in 2000, limited the obligation to the mandatory minimum coverage required by the motor vehicle responsibility law. Shilhanek, in 2003, overruled that limitation in terms. Peterson, in 2010, supplied the definition the whole thing turns on, holding that liability is reasonably clear "when a reasonable person, with knowledge of the relevant facts and law, would conclude, for good reason, that the defendant is liable to the plaintiff." Teeter, in 2017, added the causation prong and the procedural limit quoted earlier. Sandidge, in 2022, restated the constraint from the insurer's side: where there is an objectively reasonable debate about whether an expense is causally related to the accident, there is no advance-payment obligation for it. Anyone building on Ridley needs the whole line, not the 1997 case alone.

And the document disclaims itself, in bold, on its own last page:

"This advisory memorandum is informational only and does not enlarge, delimit, or otherwise modify any requirements of applicable law or in any way limit the authority of CSI under applicable law."

A regulator's reading is a regulator's reading. It is not a holding, and § 33-18-242(6) still gives an insurer a defence where it had a reasonable basis in law or fact for contesting the claim.

Source: CSI Advisory Memorandum, 26 January 2024, read as page images on 2026-08-26. SHA-256: 8d3076b50d83987353fdd4929acbd569c3673a76fbc6bbf13aff84095535231e.

The memorandum cites its two authorities as Ridley v. Guaranty Nat'l Ins. Co., 286 Mont. 325, 951 P.2d 987 (1997) and DuBray v. Farmers Ins. Exch., 2001 MT 251, 307 Mont. 134, 36 P.3d 897. We have since opened both, on a third-party host, and both citations check out as the memorandum prints them. Ridley is No. 96-697, decided 24 December 1997, Trieweiler J., on appeal from the same First Judicial District Court in Lewis and Clark County where the 2026 class action was filed. DuBray is No. 01-068, decided 6 December 2001, also Trieweiler J.

One transcription caution, because we hit it and you might. Ridley's defendant is spelled Guaranty in the Montana Supreme Court's own later citations and in the Commissioner's memorandum, but one third-party host spells it Guarantee throughout its copy. The memorandum is right and that host is the outlier.

The commissioner who signed both memoranda has left office

This matters and almost nobody building on those documents seems to have noticed.

Both 2024 advisory memoranda were signed by Troy Downing as Commissioner of Securities and Insurance and Montana State Auditor. He no longer holds that office. Montana's commissioner is now James Brown, sworn in on 6 January 2025. The Commissioner's own website names Brown throughout, and the National Association of Insurance Commissioners' state directory records the swearing-in date and notes that Brown "pledges to build on the solid record of his predecessor, Commissioner Troy Downing." Downing is now a member of the United States House of Representatives for Montana's second congressional district.

What that does and does not change. It does not unmake the documents. An advisory memorandum is an agency record and it stays one when the signer leaves. Neither memorandum has been withdrawn or superseded as far as we can find. But an advisory is not a rule and not a holding, both of these say so in their own text, and enforcement priorities belong to whoever holds the office today.

So if you are relying on the August 2024 memorandum, you are relying on the published position of an office, taken under a commissioner who left five months later, and not on anything the current commissioner has said about scans, calibration or steering. We looked for something newer and did not find it. One caution on that search: the office's advisory memoranda index is a page that builds itself in the browser, and our fetcher could only ever see a 2021 to 2022 slice of it no matter which page we asked for. Our finding rests on the office's 2025 and 2026 news archives and a site-wide search, not on a complete reading of that index. Someone with a browser could close that gap in a minute.

Sources: csimt.gov and the NAIC state directory entry for Montana, both read 2026-08-26.

The same regulator, the same insurer, twice

This section gets misread constantly, so here is what it is for. Neither enforcement action below is about diagnostic scans. Neither one established the scan-payment allegation. Neither is evidence that it happened. They are here because they answer a different question, which is whether this regulator, in this period, will actually go through this insurer's claim handling and make it pay. It did, twice, for real money. That is the backdrop a 2024 advisory from the same office should be read against, and that is the whole of the connection. Anyone who tells you the fine was for scans is wrong.

Read from the Commissioner's own press releases, which are primary:

On 6 February 2024 the office announced a consent agreement with State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company: a $2 million fine plus $2 million suspended against corrective action, following an examination covering 1 November 2018 to 15 April 2022. The office said State Farm "had underpaid some drivers who were in accidents with State Farm's insureds," and that "certain auto accident claimants were inappropriately denied payment." State Farm reviewed more than 2,436 Montana claims, with $1,182,927.43 already repaid at announcement.

On 17 October 2024 the office announced $5.2 million in further payments to Montana consumers after State Farm reviewed roughly 18,000 more claims covering comparative negligence and loss of use.

Neither release carries an administrative docket number.

Sources: CSI, 6 February 2024 and CSI, 17 October 2024, read 2026-08-25.

We have the docket now, and it changes things

Everything in the next section was written from trade press. This section was not. On 2026-08-26 we reached the Lewis and Clark County District Court's public case index and read the case record and its register of actions ourselves. Here is what the court's own file says.

Cause number: DV-25-2026-0000536-DK. Caption: Lana J, Curry et al. vs. STATE FARM MUTUAL AUTOMOBILE INSURANCE COMPANY et al. Status: open, filed 4 August 2026, which confirms the filing date we had from one outlet. Jurisdiction, District. File location, Repository.

The court's own case subtype is "Declaratory Judgment."

Stop on that for a second, because it is the whole reason the section above this one exists. Not "insurance," not "contract," not "tort." The court has docketed this as a declaratory judgment case. Everything on this page about what Montana does and does not allow a declaratory claim to do is no longer background. It is the road the plaintiffs are actually driving on.

The complaint is docketed as "Class Action Complaint & Jury Demand," document sequence 1.00, entered 4 August 2026. Class treatment and a jury demand are therefore in the court's own record.

There are three State Farm defendants, not one. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company, State Farm Fire and Casualty Company, and State Farm Specialty Insurance Company. Each was issued its own summons on 4 August, at 07:58, 08:04 and 08:09 respectively. Neither trade report mentioned this, and an earlier version of this page wrote about "State Farm" as though it were one company.

Plaintiffs are represented by Raph J.C. Graybill, for both Curry and Cote. He heads the Helena office of the Graybill Law Firm, P.C., whose own site lists class actions and insurance disputes among his practice areas and describes an "active consumer class action and data privacy practice," and which says he served as Chief Legal Counsel to the Governor of Montana before joining the firm. No source we found in four separate sweeps had named plaintiffs' counsel. It was on the docket the whole time.

The case changed judges before anything else happened. It was assigned to Judge Christopher David Abbott. On 10 August 2026 the register records "Judge Assignment Manually Changed Due to (Judge Abbott Recusal)," and on 12 August 2026, "Assumption of Jurisdiction, Judge Menahan Assumes Jurisdiction." The docket gives no reason for the recusal and neither will we. Recusals happen for many ordinary reasons and speculation is worth nothing.

And the most useful negative fact on this page: State Farm has not appeared. The register of actions runs to nine entries. The last is Judge Menahan taking the case on 12 August. There is no answer, no motion, no notice of removal and no appearance of defence counsel. That is the state docket saying so directly, which is a great deal better than the inference from a lagging federal index that this page carried earlier.

One small confirmation that costs nothing and is worth having. The summons entries each carry $120.00, which matches the Lewis and Clark fee schedule line for commencement of a civil action that we quote further down. Our own reading of that schedule checks out against a live case.

What the docket still does not give us. The complaint itself is not downloadable, exactly as the court's access rules say. The register lists it, and lists nothing behind it. So we still have not read it, and we still do not publish the counts. The class definition, the causes of action and the statutes pleaded remain unknown to us. The docket also shows blank fields where a class action flag and a jury flag would go, so we rely on the document title.

Source: Lewis and Clark County District Court public case index, cause DV-25-2026-0000536-DK, civil case record and register of actions, read 2026-08-26. The register is a court record of what has been filed. It is not the filings.

What the trade press reported, and what it left out

Two trade outlets have covered this. Nobody else has. We checked CollisionWeek, Autobody News, Body Shop Business, Claims Journal, Insurance Journal, Law360, Bloomberg Law, ClassAction.org and the Montana general-interest press, and came up empty at all of them.

Repairer Driven News, 17 August 2026, Teresa Moss:

• Two named plaintiffs. Lana Curry, a State Farm policyholder, and Francis Cote, a former Montana chief deputy insurance commissioner whose vehicle was hit by an at-fault driver State Farm insured. One is a first-party claimant and one is a third-party claimant, which as noted above puts them under different subsections of § 33-18-242.
• Filed in Montana's First Judicial District Court in Lewis and Clark County.
• The allegation is a systematic refusal to pay for pre-repair and post-repair scans done at independent shops.
• The relief sought includes a declaratory judgment, complete compensatory damages and interest, and a judgment that State Farm reopen and fully pay all automobile damage claims for necessary scans.
• The complaint refers to the Commissioner's 2024 advisory. That report does not say the complaint sues on § 33-18-224. The section number turns up there inside a quotation of the advisory, not in any description of the pleading.

glassBYTEs, August 2026, which adds four things RDN does not have and appears to be working from the document itself, because it quotes the complaint directly:

• The complaint was filed on 4 August 2026. No other source gives a filing date.
• ADAS calibration is in there too, alongside the scans. The reported allegation is that State Farm denied coverage of pre-repair and post-repair scans "as well as ADAS calibration for all collision repairs, not just auto glass."
• The complaint "lists several counts against State Farm, including allegations of bad faith and fraud."
• Plaintiffs seek class certification, a common fund to share litigation costs, and a jury trial.

One more thing about Cote, from the same outlet nine months earlier. Repairer Driven News interviewed him at the Collision Industry Conference on 4 November 2025, where he said he was personally fighting an insurer over repair coverage on his own 2024 Chevrolet Silverado. That is the same grievance, in his own name, on the public record, three quarters of a year before the complaint. Whether that helps him or gives a defendant something to work with is a question for people with the file.

Hold onto that third item and check it against § 33-18-242(3) the day the document becomes public. That subsection tells an insured they may sue for breach of contract, for fraud, or under § 33-18-242, "but not under any other theory or cause of action," and says in terms that an insured "may not bring an action for bad faith in connection with the handling of an insurance claim." Fraud is expressly on the permitted list. Bad faith, for a first-party insured, is expressly off it.

Do not read that as a defect in the complaint, because we cannot. "Bad faith" is a reporter's characterisation, not a count name we have seen, and it is also loose industry shorthand for the statutory claim under § 33-18-242(1), which is a different thing from the common-law action the subsection bars. Cote is a third-party claimant governed by subsection (4) rather than (3). The point is only that the statute draws a sharp line between fraud and bad faith, the coverage says the complaint pleads something in each direction, and the pleading is where that resolves.

What still is not established, after the docket:

Two rows came off that table when we read the docket. The cause number is DV-25-2026-0000536-DK and plaintiffs' counsel is Raph J.C. Graybill, both from the court's own record.

The relief cuts both ways against the analysis above, which is part of why the pleading matters. A declaratory judgment is the remedy Montana has not decided is available around § 33-18-242. Compensatory damages are what the enumeration governs. On both reports, the plaintiffs want both.

Sources: Repairer Driven News, 17 August 2026 and glassBYTEs, August 2026, both read 2026-08-26.

Nobody official has said anything, and we went looking

Twenty-two days after the complaint was filed, this case exists in public as two trade articles and a register of actions. That is all. We went looking for an official statement from anyone with standing to make one, and found none. Here is the list, so you can see it is a real search.

Do not read that silence as meaning anything in particular. A defendant that has not yet appeared has no reason to comment, plaintiffs' counsel in a putative class action often say nothing before certification, and a regulator does not ordinarily narrate private litigation. Silence at three weeks is the normal shape of a new case, not a signal.

It is worth recording only because the opposite would matter a great deal. If State Farm issues a statement, if the current commissioner says anything about the 2024 advisories, or if a trade body takes a position, that is new information and this page will carry it.

Shops already fought this and mostly lost

The DRP-versus-independent argument is not new to litigation. It went to a federal multidistrict proceeding, MDL No. 2557, In re Auto Body Shop Antitrust Litigation, in the Middle District of Florida before Judge Gregory A. Presnell.

An Eleventh Circuit panel revived the shops' price-fixing, boycott, tortious interference and unjust enrichment claims in September 2017. The full court then reheard the case and reached the opposite result: allegations of parallel conduct, without more, were held insufficient to plead an antitrust conspiracy, and the unjust enrichment and quantum meruit claims failed because the shops could not show the insurers were on notice they expected payment beyond the stated terms. Tortious interference survived.

The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation remanded five remaining actions on 15 December 2020, recording that the federal antitrust claims had been dismissed and affirmed on appeal, that only tortious interference remained, and that no discovery had commenced.

Source: JPML MDL-2557 remand order, 15 December 2020, read 2026-08-25.

A note on citations, because this page carries two kinds and the difference is worth knowing. For the modern Montana decisions we quote, Ibsen, Johnson and Teeter, we print only the public-domain cite the opinion itself carries: 2016 MT 111, 2025 MT 194, 2017 MT 292. None of those slip opinions contains a parallel reporter citation, and we will not attach one we have not seen. The two full citations that do appear, for Ridley and DuBray, come from the Commissioner's own memorandum, and we have since opened both opinions and confirmed the citations check out. For the Ninth Circuit and district court decisions, Ibsen prints reporter cites at 617 Fed. Appx. 737 and 993 F. Supp. 2d 1254, but the slip copies we read carry no reporter pagination, so we cannot vouch for a page number inside either. A wrong citation is worse than none.

Why the architecture is different this time

Set the two side by side, because the differences are the interesting part.

Whether that architecture works is genuinely open, and the private-right-of-action problem above is the most likely place it gets tested. What can be said today is that it is not a rerun of the case the shops lost.

What Montana does not have

Montana appears to have no aftermarket parts disclosure requirement, and a bill that would have created one died in committee.

House Bill 252 of 2019, sponsored by Representative J. Bachmeier, was titled "AN ACT ESTABLISHING A REQUIREMENT FOR INSURERS TO COVER ORIGINAL EQUIPMENT MANUFACTURER PARTS; REQUIRING DISCLOSURE; REQUIRING CONSENT FOR THE USE OF NONORIGINAL EQUIPMENT MANUFACTURER PARTS; AND PROVIDING DEFINITIONS."

An earlier version of this page said it "would have required OEM parts at no additional cost." That overstated it, and the difference matters. The bill did not require anyone to use OEM parts. It set conditions on non-OEM ones: they had to carry permanent manufacturer identification and be "at least equal in quality to the original equipment manufacturer part in terms of fit and performance." It required the insurer to tell the consumer in writing that they need not accept non-OEM parts, and to get written consent before using any. And it removed the price penalty for choosing otherwise:

"An insurer may not directly or indirectly require the consumer to pay any difference in price if the consumer elects to use original equipment manufacturer parts in the repair of the vehicle."

It covered exterior parts including inner and outer panels, and excluded tyres, windshields and windows.

It came closer than "tabled" suggests. In House Business and Labor on 1 February 2019 the committee amended it, then voted down a motion that it do pass as amended by nine to ten, then tabled it eighteen to nothing. A one-vote committee margin is not the same story as a bill nobody wanted.

On the administrative rule, we are now less sure than we were, and we would rather say so. This page previously described ARM 23.19.203 as "the administrative rule governing motor vehicle repair businesses." Third-party indexes render that rule as "REPAIRS AND SERVICES," sitting in the Department of Justice's title alongside a separate rule on motor vehicle sales, which would make it a general consumer-protection rule rather than a body shop rule. We could not check. Montana's own rules gateway at rules.mt.gov answers an automated request with an AWS web application firewall human-verification challenge, and we do not defeat those. So we no longer assert what that rule is, only that we have not found any Montana aftermarket parts disclosure requirement, and that the 2019 bill which would have created one died in committee. If you can open rules.mt.gov in a browser and read 23.19.203 and its neighbours, we would like to know what it actually says.

Sources: Montana HB 252 (2019), as introduced and the House Business and Labor minutes of 1 February 2019, both from the Montana Legislature's own servers, read 2026-08-26.

Sources and how to check us

Every statutory quotation above is from Montana's own code host at mca.legmt.gov and was read on the date stated at the point of use. The regulator material is from the Commissioner's own press releases and, for both advisory memoranda, from the Commissioner's own PDFs read as page images on 2026-08-26, each with its file hash printed. Every Montana Supreme Court opinion quoted here is the court's own slip opinion, hosted by a third party, and labelled as such at the point of use. We could not resolve a Montana government URL for a single one of them, which is its own small finding about how Montana publishes its case law. The one federal document we read on a court's own server is the Ninth Circuit's James Lee memorandum; the Fossen district court order came from the Government Publishing Office. The multidistrict history is from the Judicial Panel's own remand order. The reported case rests on two trade outlets, both named at the point of use, and neither of them is us reading the complaint.

A note on what an absence of case annotations proves, which is nothing. While checking whether any decision construes § 33-18-224 we noticed that Montana's online code shows no case annotations under that section. We nearly treated that as evidence. It is not. We control-tested it against § 33-18-242, a section with a substantial body of case law including Ibsen itself, and that page carries no annotations either. The online Montana Code Annotated simply does not publish case notes. Our statement that we found no decision construing § 33-18-224 rests on searching for the section number across court servers, briefs, federal opinion collections and the open web, and it remains "none found" rather than "none exists."

The one document this page most needs, and does not have, is the complaint. Here is the path, so that this is a task and not a lament, and every figure below was read from the court's or the county's own document.

Montana runs a public district court portal at dcportal.pubcourts.mt.gov. The court's own access rules define what it is, at Section 3.00(a): "'Public Portal' is a web-based searchable case index, which provides the case number, case type, party names, and the name of the court in which the case is filed. The public portal is not the court record." Section 4.20 lists what the portal includes, and it is party indexes, listings of new filings, registers of actions and calendars. No document images. Section 2.00 says every member of the public has that access at no cost. So the portal should give you a cause number, in the form DV-2026 followed by a sequence number, and nothing more.

It did not give us one, and the reason turned out to be partly our own fault. We tried twice on 2026-08-26 and the two attempts say different things, so here is both.

The portal's front page offers a court dropdown and a Log In button with no credential fields, which matches what Section 2.00 promises. On the first attempt we set that dropdown programmatically and pressed the button, and the site answered "The requested URL was rejected. Please consult with your administrator," with support ID 14213377888753705771. We wrote that up as the portal refusing us.

That was wrong, and we are correcting it. On the second attempt we drove the same page the way a person does, clicking the dropdown, typing the court name, pressing Enter and clicking the button. It let us straight in, to the Lewis and Clark County District Court public access dashboard, no credentials, exactly as the access rules describe. The login was never the barrier. Our own tooling was, and the first write-up blamed the court for something we did.

The barrier is one step further in. From the dashboard, Searches then Party Search offers fields for a surname and given name, and we entered nothing but a party's name. That search was refused the same way, with support ID 3566527280530556330. We stopped there. We did not enter anything in the social security, date of birth or driver licence fields on that form, and we did not go looking for a different endpoint the firewall might like better, because hunting for a gap in a refusal is not something we do.

So the honest state of it is this. A member of the public can reach the Lewis and Clark case index for free, exactly as Montana says. An automated session cannot run a search there, and we think that is the point of the firewall. Once past the search, the case pages themselves read fine, which is how the docket section above this one exists.

One correction to a common expectation, which we had wrong ourselves until we looked. The court's access rules do not promise the portal will name the lawyers. Section 4.20 lists four categories and attorneys are not among them, and Section 3.00(a) describes the portal as carrying the case number, case type, party names and court. In this case the litigant record did name counsel anyway. So the portal may give you more than the rules promise, and it would be wrong to tell you either that it will or that it will not.

You no longer need to run the search, because here is what to ask for. Cause DV-25-2026-0000536-DK, Lewis and Clark County District Court, document sequence 1.00, entered 4 August 2026, titled "Class Action Complaint & Jury Demand." That is enough for a clerk to pull it without any searching at all.

The documents themselves come from the Clerk of District Court for Lewis and Clark County. Section 5.00(a) of the same rules says full case records identified through the portal "will be available for public access in each courthouse during hours established by each court," which makes reading it in person at 228 Broadway, Room 104, Helena, free. Copies cost money. Mont. Code Ann. § 25-1-201(1)(d)(i) sets one dollar a page for the first ten pages of each file and fifty cents for each additional page, and § 25-1-201(1)(d)(iii) sets twenty-five cents a page for copies provided "by facsimile, e-mail, or other electronic means." The county's own fee schedule, effective May 2024, prints the same two rates. So ask for it by email and pay about a third. Subsection (1) was amended in 2025, so check it yourself; we read it on 2026-08-26.

If the case is removed to federal court under the Class Action Fairness Act, the complaint would appear on PACER as an attachment to the notice of removal, in the District of Montana, Helena Division, where case numbers carry a 6 prefix. No removal has happened. We can now say that from the state docket: the register of actions for DV-25-2026-0000536-DK runs to nine entries and none of them is a notice of removal, and State Farm has filed nothing at all. Our earlier and much weaker version of this check read the free federal index, found nothing, and had to publish three separate caveats about index lag and the removal clock. The state docket answers it directly. The removal window may still be open, since the clock runs from service, so this remains a thing to keep checking.

Anyone who obtains the complaint can hold the causes of action actually pleaded against the enumeration in § 33-18-242 and see immediately which route the plaintiffs took, which is the question this page cannot answer. If you get it, send it to us and we will update this page.

Corrections

2026-08-26, eighth revision. A correctness fix we should have caught earlier, and a search that came back empty.

32. The commissioner who signed both 2024 memoranda has left office. Troy Downing was Commissioner of Securities and Insurance when he signed them. James Brown has held that office since 6 January 2025, and Downing now sits in the United States House of Representatives. Earlier revisions of this page named Downing without saying that, which risked leaving a reader with the impression he is the sitting commissioner. He is not. The memoranda are unaffected as agency records, and neither has been withdrawn as far as we can find, but anyone relying on them is relying on a previous commissioner's published position rather than the current one's.
33. We searched for an official statement from anyone and found none. State Farm, its regulatory filings, the Commissioner's office, plaintiffs' own firm, five trade bodies, the Montana Attorney General, the NAIC, a consumer group and two insurer trade bodies. Nothing from any of them, twenty-two days after filing. The page now records that, along with the reason not to read anything into it.

2026-08-26, seventh revision. We got the docket, and it moved more than anything else has.

25. The cause number is DV-25-2026-0000536-DK, Judge Mike Menahan, Lewis and Clark County District Court, filed 4 August 2026. This page previously listed the cause number among the things no source establishes.
26. The court's own case subtype is "Declaratory Judgment." That is the court's classification, not a reporter's. It makes the declaratory relief section of this page the operative one rather than background.
27. Plaintiffs' counsel is Raph J.C. Graybill, for both plaintiffs. This page had said counsel was not named anywhere. It was on the docket.
28. There are three State Farm defendants, Mutual Automobile, Fire and Casualty, and Specialty, each served its own summons on 4 August. Earlier revisions wrote about "State Farm" as one company.
29. The complaint is docketed as "Class Action Complaint & Jury Demand," document sequence 1.00, so class treatment and the jury demand are now in the court's own record rather than in a trade summary alone.
30. Judge Abbott recused on 10 August and Judge Menahan assumed jurisdiction on 12 August. Unreported anywhere else. The docket gives no reason and this page offers none.
31. The no-removal finding is now direct rather than inferred. It previously rested on a lagging free federal index with three caveats. The state register of actions shows nine entries, no notice of removal, and no appearance by any defendant.

2026-08-26, sixth revision. We corrected an accusation we had made against a court, and it was our fault.

22. The Montana court portal did not refuse our login. Our tooling did. The fifth revision said the portal's firewall rejected us when we selected Lewis and Clark District Court and pressed Log In, and printed the support ID. Driving the same page by hand instead, clicking the dropdown, typing the court name and clicking the button, got us straight in to the public access dashboard with no credentials, exactly as the court's access rules promise. The first attempt had set the dropdown programmatically, and that is what the firewall objected to. We had blamed a state court for something we did. The passage now carries both attempts and says which was which.
23. The refusal we did hit is one step further in, at the party search, with its own support ID. We stopped there rather than looking for an endpoint the firewall liked better.
24. Added an expectation-setting note that the court's own rules do not promise the portal will name the lawyers, since Section 4.20 lists four things and attorneys are not among them. Anyone going there hoping to find plaintiffs' counsel should know that before they go.

2026-08-26, fifth revision. One addition, and it answers a question this page asked itself four hours earlier.

21. The certified question was never answered, and we can now say why. The fourth revision recorded that the District of Montana certified the first-party declaratory relief question to the Montana Supreme Court in 2020 and that we could not establish what became of it. We can now: Jesse Reeves v. Safeco Insurance Company of Illinois, No. CV 20-69-M-DLC, certified 24 August 2020, dismissed with prejudice on stipulation 1 October 2020, thirty-eight days later. Both orders read first-party from the Government Publishing Office. The certified question is now quoted in full. What we still cannot say is whether the Montana Supreme Court accepted it, declined it, or had it pending when the case settled, and that limit is stated where it belongs.

2026-08-26, fourth revision. We opened the cases we had been citing at one remove, and two of the things we published turned out to be wrong.

12. HB 252 did not require OEM parts. This page said the 2019 bill "would have required OEM parts at no additional cost." It did not. It set identification and fit standards for non-OEM parts, required written consent before using them, and barred the insurer from charging the consumer the price difference if the consumer chose OEM. The bill text is now quoted. We also said only that it was tabled; the committee first voted down do-pass-as-amended nine to ten, which is a materially different picture.
13. We withdrew our description of ARM 23.19.203. We had called it "the administrative rule governing motor vehicle repair businesses," on a third-party mirror. Third-party indexes title it "REPAIRS AND SERVICES" and place it beside a motor vehicle sales rule, which would make it something broader. Montana's rules gateway answers automated requests with a firewall challenge, so we cannot check, and we no longer assert it.
14. Added Ridley and DuBray as read rather than cited. Both are third-party claimant cases, which sharpens the limit already on this page. DuBray never cites § 33-18-201 at all, so the Commissioner's presentation of both cases as construing subsections (6) and (13) is the agency's synthesis. Added the later line: Watters, Shilhanek, Peterson, Teeter and Sandidge.
15. Rewrote the declaratory relief analysis, which was wrong in both earlier versions. Treating it as simply available was too generous. Downgrading it to "contested" was too coarse. Montana has two answers depending on what you ask the court to declare, and Ridley and DuBray were themselves successful declaratory actions.
16. Added Teeter's limit, that a Ridley declaratory claim cannot adjudicate disputed issues of material fact as to causation, which is the sharpest thing on this page for a scan case.
17. Added the two Fossen decisions, with the caveat that the Ninth Circuit disposition is unpublished and not precedent.
18. Added the renumbering warning. § 33-18-242 was amended twice in 2023 and the subsection numbers moved, so pre-2023 cases will not line up with the current text.
19. Corrected an inference we nearly published, that an absence of case annotations on the online code means something. It does not; the online code carries no annotations for any section.
20. Recorded that no removal to federal court had been docketed as of the index's currency date, with its limits.

2026-08-26, third revision. A second outlet turned up, and it moved five things.

7. The filing date is 4 August 2026. This page previously listed the filing date among the things no source establishes. glassBYTEs gives it. That entry is gone from the table.
8. A second outlet exists. This page previously said the story rested on one source and that glassBYTEs was unreadable to us because its robots file disallowed our fetcher. Opened in an ordinary browser, it reads fine, and it quotes the complaint directly. Corrected.
9. The suit covers ADAS calibration as well as scans, and the plaintiffs seek class certification, a common fund and a jury trial. None of that was on the page.
10. Added what glassBYTEs reports about the counts, and the § 33-18-242(3) question that raises, with an explicit warning against reading it as a defect in a pleading nobody outside the case has seen.
11. Recorded that Montana's public court portal refused our request at its firewall, with the support ID, and that we did not try again.

2026-08-26, second revision. Two additions.

5. Added the Commissioner's 26 January 2024 advisory memorandum, read as page images from the office's own copy. It is about § 33-18-201(6) and (13), two subsections that ARE on the suable list, and it says they require an insurer to pay expenses a claimant has incurred once those are reasonably clear. That is the other half of route 1. The limits are stated with it: that memorandum is written about a victim of an automobile accident in the third-party posture, it never mentions scans, and it disclaims itself as informational only.
6. Corrected the copying-fee citation. This page cited Mont. Code Ann. § 25-1-201(1)(d) and attributed the twenty-five cent electronic rate to the county fee schedule alone. The precise subparagraphs are (1)(d)(i) for the dollar-a-page rate and (1)(d)(iii) for the electronic rate, and the electronic rate sits in the statute itself, which is where we should have looked first. The procurement paragraph is now sourced to the court's own access rules section by section.

2026-08-26, first revision. Four changes, all in the direction of claiming less or showing more.

1. This page previously said a plaintiff "cannot simply sue on § 33-18-224." That stated a legal conclusion the page had not established. It now states what the statute contains and treats the consequence as consequence.
2. It previously said "three routes are visible on the face of the code," which read as a complete list. It is not one, and now says so. The declaratory relief route has been downgraded from available to contested, on the strength of Johnson v. State Farm, 2025 MT 194, where the Montana Supreme Court expressly declined to decide the question.
3. The 2024 advisory memorandum was previously quoted at one remove, through trade press, because the PDF carries no text layer. We have since read the Commissioner's own copy as page images. Two things came out of that which the trade summary did not carry: a second finding about an insurer misrepresenting a non-network shop's reputation, and the memorandum's own reliance on § 33-18-201(6), which is on the suable list. The file hash is recorded above.
4. Added Mark Ibsen, Inc. v. Caring for Montanans, Inc., 2016 MT 111, and the express statement that the number 224 appears nowhere in it.

If a filing, a docket entry or a second outlet contradicts anything above, this section will say what changed and when.

General consumer information: not legal, insurance, or financial advice. Requirements, coverage, and practices vary by state, policy, and manufacturer.

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