Who the Adjuster Owes a Duty To

Short answer: In four of the five states whose instruments we read, the duty runs to the carrier that hired the adjuster, or to the state that licensed one, and not to you. Montana is the exception, and it is a real one: in 1993 its Supreme Court held that a third-party claimant injured in a car crash has a common law cause of action against the individual claims adjuster personally. That holding has not been overruled, and the section below sets out what has changed around it since.

By Anthony Braswell for Quorum Industries LLC, The Autobody Directory · Updated 2026-09-03 · 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 is what the instruments we read actually say. It is not a claim about the country. On the question of whether a third-party claimant can sue the insurer at all, we read the operative primary instrument in five states: Texas, Washington, California, Florida and Montana. Three bar or confine the third party. Two allow it.

Three out of five is not "most states". We will not write it as though it were, and nothing below is scaled up to a national rule. A fifty-state map was not built. Everything here is bounded by the five states named, the courts named, and the dates given. We are not claiming that the other forty five states divide three to two the same way, or that they divide at all. Five primary instruments is what this page has.

Three people, one damaged car

Stand at a damaged vehicle and there are three parties with three different legal positions.

There is the insured, the person who bought the policy. There is the third-party claimant, the person claiming against somebody else's policy, which is the ordinary position of a driver who was hit. And there is the adjuster, the individual who looks at the car and writes the number.

Almost everything that follows turns on the fact that the law treats the first two of those people as different in kind, and treats the third as somebody who has a contract with neither of them.

The line, and the count

Texas writes the line into the statute twice, in the operative words of a single section. Tex. Ins. Code 541.060, "Unfair Settlement Practices", opens by defining the whole catalogue of prohibited settlement conduct as applying only "with respect to a claim by an insured or beneficiary:" and then closes with subsection (b): "Subsection (a) does not provide a cause of action to a third party asserting one or more claims against an insured covered under a liability insurance policy." Both were re-fetched from law.justia.com and matched, read on 2026-09-02.

Read the two together. Misrepresenting a policy provision, failing to attempt in good faith a prompt fair settlement, refusing to pay without a reasonable investigation: in Texas that conduct is not made lawful when it is done to a third-party claimant. It is simply not defined as a violation at all.

The Texas legislature said in its own papers why. The Office of House Bill Analysis, in the introduced-version analysis of H.B. 1216, 76th Legislature, dated 4/11/1999, described Allstate Insurance Co. v. Watson: "The court held that a third party claimant lacks standing to sue an insurer for unfair claim settlement practices under Article 21.21." The reason given is that "a third party claimant has no contract with the insurer or the insured or any special relationship of trust with the insurer", and that extending those duties "would undermine and compromise the duties insurers owe to their insureds since insurers would then owe duties of good faith and fair dealing to both the insured and a third party claimant."

That is a legislative staff description of a court opinion, and it is the only form in which we have it. We refuse to present Watson as a holding in its own words, because we have never read the opinion; the only free full-text hosts located for it are robots-disallowed or paywalled. The point does not rest on Watson in any case. Section 541.060(b) is what Texas enacted afterwards and what Texas has now.

Washington draws the line by identity, not by conduct. RCW 48.30.015(1) gives an action to "Any first party claimant to a policy of insurance who is unreasonably denied a claim for coverage or payment of benefits by an insurer", and subsection (4) defines a first party claimant as a person "asserting a right to payment as a covered person under an insurance policy or insurance contract". The unfair claims rules are about behaviour. The doorway is about who you are. Someone who is not a covered person does not get through it, however plainly the rules were broken.

California created no private right on the statute at all. In Moradi-Shalal v. Fireman's Fund Insurance Companies, decided 18 August 1988, the Supreme Court of California reversed the judgment of the Court of Appeal and overruled Royal Globe prospectively only, holding that "Neither section 790.03 nor section 790.09 was intended to create a private civil cause of action against an insurer that commits one of the various acts listed in section 790.03, subdivision (h)." That is the sentence to its final punctuation mark, re-read at law.justia.com on 2026-09-03; an earlier version of this article stopped it eleven words short, and the correction is item 7 in the log below. What survives is the common law, and the court's own parenthetical marks who owns which part of it: the surviving remedies are described as "traditional theories as fraud, infliction of emotional distress, and (as to the insured) either breach of contract or breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing." Fraud and infliction of emotional distress carry no such restriction in that list. It is the contract and covenant claims that are marked as the insured's alone.

Two states go the other way. Fla. Stat. 624.155(1) opens: "Any person may bring a civil action against an insurer when such person is damaged:". That is a real third-party right, and it is a right against the carrier. The word "adjuster" does not appear anywhere in section 624.155, and we checked for it directly.

Montana is the stranger of the two. Mont. Code Ann. 33-18-242, catchlined "Independent cause of action -- burden of proof", gives "An insured or a third-party claimant" an independent action against an insurer, and then builds the fence in the same section. Subsection (1) confines the action to six enumerated subsections of 33-18-201 out of the whole unfair practices catalogue. Subsection (4) provides that a third-party claimant "may bring an action against the insurer for fraud or pursuant to this section, but not under any other theory or cause of action", and that "A third-party claimant may not bring an action for bad faith in connection with the handling of an insurance claim." Subsection (7)(b) forbids filing "until after the underlying claim has been settled or a judgment entered in favor of the claimant on the underlying claim", and subsection (8)(b) then allows "1 year from the date of the settlement of or the entry of judgment on the underlying claim." The state that grants the right builds the fence with the same hand.

Two dates matter on that fence, because they are recent. The section's history note reads "En. Sec. 3, Ch. 278, L. 1987; amd. Sec. 1, Ch. 356, L. 2023; amd. Sec. 2, Ch. 430, L. 2023." We read the 2011 text of the same section on the same day: in 2011 subsection (4) was the damages provision, and the confinement of the third-party claimant and the bar on third-party bad faith were not in it. Both arrived in the 2023 amendments. Everything Montana has decided about adjusters was decided before that text existed.

Five states. Three no, two yes. That is the whole of it on the question of suing the carrier. Whether you can sue the individual adjuster is a different question, and Montana answers it differently from the rest.

Why this gets decided as a question about which courthouse you are in

Texas is the one state among the five whose unfair practices statute names the adjuster in its own text. Tex. Ins. Code 541.002(2) defines "Person" to mean an individual or entity "engaged in the business of insurance, including an agent, broker, or adjuster", and the definition ends there. Tex. Ins. Code 541.151 then lets "A person who sustains actual damages" bring an action "against another person" for an unfair method of competition or an unfair or deceptive act or practice in the business of insurance. Put the two together and the individual adjuster is a defendant by definition.

Which is why the question gets litigated sideways. A carrier sued in Texas state court by a Texas plaintiff cannot remove to federal court while a Texas adjuster is a co-defendant, because the parties are not completely diverse. So the carrier argues the adjuster was improperly joined, and whether the adjuster owes the claimant anything is decided as a question about jurisdiction. Four such decisions, all read from the courts' own PDFs in govinfo.gov's USCOURTS collection, read on 2026-09-02. Every one of the four is a first-party property claim brought by a homeowner, not an automobile claim, and that limit belongs on the whole list:

• Holmes v. Acceptance Casualty Insurance Company, E.D. Tex., 29 April 2013, a homeowner's fire claim. Remand denied and the adjuster dismissed. The court recorded that there was "no dispute in this case that an insurance adjuster, like Wellington, may be held liable", and still held the pleading insufficient, because "Allegations merely asserted against 'Defendants,' without alleging what facts are attributed to the adjuster" do not give a reasonable basis for recovery against that adjuster.
• Esteban v. State Farm Lloyds, N.D. Tex., Judge Jane J. Boyle, 22 May 2014, a homeowner's wind and hail claim. Remand granted: "Because Galvan is properly joined as a defendant in this case, diversity does not exist and this Court lacks subject matter jurisdiction."
• Edwards v. State Farm Lloyds, N.D. Tex., Senior Judge A. Joe Fish, 14 August 2017, a homeowner's storm damage claim. Remand granted and the motion to dismiss denied: "Texas law recognizes claims against adjusters like Hodge in their individual capacities", and "Because Edwards has asserted a potentially valid claim against Hodge, Hodge has been properly joined." The pleaded acts were a substandard investigation, omitted damages, and undervaluing what the adjuster saw.
• Randall v. State Farm Lloyds, W.D. Tex. Austin Division, Magistrate Judge Susan Hightower, 16 October 2024, a homeowner's winter storm claim. A report and recommendation, recommending remand: "Defendants do not show that Perdue and Segura were fraudulently joined."

Three of those four went back to state court. Four decisions are four decisions, and we will not convert them into a rate; no docket-wide count was attempted and none is asserted here. Nor will we carry them across to automobile claims, because none of them is one.

The letter that ends it, and the limit that travels with it

Texas enacted in 2017 a mechanism that settles the individual adjuster's exposure on a first-party real property claim without reference to anything the adjuster did. It is a property provision, and the limit travels with it in every sentence below. It was "Added by Acts 2017, 85th Leg., R.S., Ch. 151 (H.B. 1774), Sec. 3, eff. September 1, 2017."

Chapter 542A applies to a "Claim" that Tex. Ins. Code 542A.001(2) defines as a first-party claim "made by an insured under an insurance policy providing coverage for real property or improvements to real property" that "arises from damage to or loss of covered property caused, wholly or partly, by forces of nature, including an earthquake or earth tremor, a wildfire, a flood, a tornado, lightning, a hurricane, hail, wind, a snowstorm, or a rainstorm." There is no automobile in that list, and we found nothing equivalent for automobile claims.

Inside that real-property chapter, section 542A.006(a) lets an insurer that is a party to the action "elect to accept whatever liability an agent might have to the claimant for the agent's acts or omissions related to the claim by providing written notice to the claimant", and 542A.001(1) defines "Agent" to mean "an employee, agent, representative, or adjuster who performs any act on behalf of an insurer." If the property insurer sends that notice before suit, subsection (b) provides that "no cause of action exists against the agent related to the claimant's claim" and that the court "shall dismiss that action with prejudice." If the property insurer sends it after suit is filed, subsection (c) provides that the court "shall dismiss the action against the agent with prejudice." Subsection (f) of this real-property provision states that "An insurer may not revoke, and a court may not nullify, an insurer's election", and subsection (i) states that in a jury trial the election "may not be made known to the jury." So on a house damaged by a storm, whether the adjuster is answerable is decided by whether the carrier posts a letter, and the jury never hears that it was posted.

The counterweight sits in the same real-property section. Subsection (g) provides that where the agent is not a party, "evidence of the agent's acts or omissions may be offered at trial", the trier of fact "may be asked to resolve fact issues as if the agent were a defendant", and "a judgment against the insurer must include any liability that would have been assessed against the agent." On these property claims the liability is moved to the carrier, not extinguished.

That real-property election also decided forum, and the district courts split on it before the Fifth Circuit closed the split. A magistrate judge in Grigson v. Allstate Vehicle and Property Insurance Company, N.D. Tex. Lubbock Division, recommended on 31 May 2022 that remand be granted in that real-property case because "Allstate's post-suit, pre-removal § 542A.006 election, standing alone, does not render Woolard improperly joined", and the Fifth Circuit rejected that proposition in its published decision in Advanced Indicator and Manufacturing, Incorporated v. Acadia Insurance Company, decided 3 October 2022 before Jolly, Higginson and Engelhardt, holding that "Because Acadia elected to accept liability for Warren before removal, even though suit had already been filed, the statute required that 'the court shall dismiss the action against the agent with prejudice.'", and affirming the denial of remand while reversing the grant of summary judgment and remanding the case. Both are real-property cases and neither reaches an automobile claim.

The stranger the carrier hired

Where the adjuster is not the carrier's employee but an independent, California has given an answer in plain terms, and it was given in a case brought by the person who bought the policy.

In Sanchez v. Lindsey Morden Claims Services, Inc. (1999), the California Court of Appeal affirmed judgment against the plaintiff, Luis Sanchez, who was the insured, holding that "An independent adjuster engaged by an insurer owes no duty of care to the claimant insured, with whom the adjuster has no contract."

The court's reason is the sentence this whole sector turns on: "Imposing a duty also would subject the adjuster to conflicting loyalties. Insurers and insureds often disagree as to coverage or the amount of loss. An adjuster cannot argue both sides of such disputes, any more than a lawyer can represent opposite sides in a lawsuit. An adjuster owes a duty to the insurer who engaged him. A new duty to the insured would conflict with that duty, and interfere with its faithful performance. This is poor policy."

Note who lost. Sanchez was the policyholder, and he still lost, because the adjuster is a stranger to him. If the first-party insured recovers nothing from the independent adjuster in negligence, the third-party claimant standing at a damaged car is further away still.

Sanchez is not the last word in California, and the limit belongs here. Fifteen years later, in Bock v. Hansen, No. A136567, decided 2 April 2014, the same Court of Appeal, First District, Division Two, held that "A cause of action for negligent misrepresentation can lie against an insurance adjuster", reversed the judgment that had been entered for the adjuster and remanded, and distinguished Sanchez on the ground that negligent misrepresentation and negligence are different torts with different elements. The Bock adjuster was a carrier employee, not an independent, and the Bock plaintiffs were first-party insureds on a homeowners claim. So the California position, stated at its full width, is this: no duty of care in negligence, and no immunity from an independent tort such as negligent misrepresentation. We found no California decision applying Bock to a third-party automobile claimant, and we assert nothing about whether it reaches one.

Sanchez says its decision "is consistent with the majority of cases in other states, which hold that an independent adjuster hired by the insurer owes no duty of care to the insured," and it cites five out-of-state authorities for that. We will not reproduce those five citations as findings, because we did not read any of them, and a case cited inside another case is not a case we have checked.

Sanchez also left one door open, in footnote 1: "We do not in this opinion address the duties of so-called 'public adjusters,' who are retained by insureds or claimants." The one class of adjuster whose duty the court declined to decide is the only class the claimant hires.

Two other courts reached the same architecture by different routes. In Gallagher Bassett Services, Inc. v. Jeffcoat, No. 98-CA-00192-SCT, decided 9 September 2004, the Supreme Court of Mississippi reversed and rendered judgment in favour of the adjusting company, applying a standard under which "An insurance adjuster, agent or other similar entity may not be held independently liable for simple negligence in connection" with its work on a claim but may be held liable if its acts amount to "gross negligence, malice, or reckless disregard for the rights of the insured." The door is open in Mississippi. The company that walked away from it was a third-party administrator, not a carrier, and the claim was a first-party one.

And in Dagley v. Haag Engineering Co., No. 14-98-01053-CV, decided in March 2000, the Fourteenth Court of Appeals of Texas affirmed summary judgment for the engineering firm, holding that "Absent privity of contract with the insured, an insurance carrier's agents or contractors owe no such duty to the insured," reasoning that "The duty of good faith and fair dealing emanates from the special relationship between an insurer and its insured" and that "Without such a contract, there is no special relationship." All three quotations were confirmed on a second route during this pass; the two routes disagree about the day in March, and that conflict is recorded below rather than resolved.

Set that against what the firms say about themselves. Sedgwick's auto claims page, in its road traffic accidents section on commercial vehicle and fleet claims, describes its service as designed "to defend the interests of our clients when third party liability demands are made". Crawford's catastrophe FAQ lists "Controls claims costs" among an adjuster's duties, alongside settling claims "by determining insurance carrier's liability, client's instructions and authority levels". Both pages read on 2026-09-02. The courts say it in the language of privity and the companies say it in the language of marketing, and the two records agree. They agree against the picture of a neutral inspector.

The state that says the adjuster answers to you

Montana is the one state among the five where a third-party claimant hurt in a car crash has been told, by that state's highest court, that the individual adjuster is personally answerable. This is the strongest thing in the article against its own thesis, and it is set out at full strength.

In O'Fallon v. Farmers Insurance Exchange, No. 92-024, decided 30 August 1993, 260 Mont. 233, 859 P.2d 1008, two men were injured when a vehicle driven by an intoxicated motorist struck them. They were third-party claimants against the driver's Farmers policy. They sued Farmers and they also sued Terry Falcon, the claims adjuster Farmers employed, by name. The Montana Supreme Court held that "individuals, as well as insurers, are prohibited from engaging in the unfair trade practices set forth in § 33-18-201, MCA, and that when an individual breaches the obligations imposed by that statute, the claimant who is damaged by that breach has a common law cause of action against that individual." On the adjuster specifically, the court sustained the conclusion that Falcon could be held individually liable, measured against the common law standard rather than the statutory standard that governs insurers. The disposition was reversed in part, affirmed in part, and remanded for trial. That quotation came back from one host, law.justia.com, on two separate reads, and it is flagged as single-route for the same reason Dagley is. The substance is not single-route: a federal court in Montana quotes O'Fallon to the same effect in Moe, below, and the Montana Supreme Court in Brewington v. Employers Fire Insurance Company (1999) cites O'Fallon at 260 Mont. 233, 244, 859 P.2d 1008, 1015 for the proposition that the common law applies where it does not conflict with a statute.

Three limits belong in the same breath, and none of them makes the case go away.

The first is that O'Fallon records no recovery from Falcon. The court sent the case back for trial on the facts. A holding that a claim may be brought is not a judgment that it succeeded, and we have not located what happened to Falcon afterwards.

The second is the 2023 amendments. Mont. Code Ann. 33-18-242(4) now confines a third-party claimant to an action "against the insurer for fraud or pursuant to this section, but not under any other theory or cause of action", and bars third-party bad faith outright. Neither sentence was in the section when O'Fallon was decided, and neither was there in 2011. On its face subsection (4) governs actions against the insurer, and O'Fallon's cause of action runs against the individual. We found no decision applying the 2023 text to O'Fallon's holding, and we are not going to tell you how that comes out. We do not claim that a third-party claimant in Montana can sue an individual adjuster today. O'Fallon has not been overruled and the amended statute has not been applied to it, and those two facts are the whole of what we have.

The third is that the most recent federal application we located predates those amendments. In Moe v. GEICO Indemnity Company, D. Mont., a magistrate judge's recommendation dated 26 February 2020 in a third-party automobile claim, the court treated O'Fallon as good law and recorded that courts in that district have consistently read Montana law to allow a common law bad faith claim against an adjuster. No individual adjuster was a named defendant in Moe. That is a federal district court's reading of state law, from before the statute changed, and it is offered as exactly that.

So the honest statement of Montana is that its Supreme Court has said the opposite, in a car crash case, and that the legislature has since narrowed the ground around that holding without anyone yet telling us whether it survives intact.

The duty that does exist, and the person who can enforce it

There is a real duty to the claimant, written down, currently in force, and binding on every class of adjuster. It is owed to the state.

Fla. Admin. Code R. 69B-220.201, "Ethical Requirements", effective 4/21/2025, defines who it binds without any escape hatch: "Adjuster," used without further specification, "includes all types and classes of insurance adjusters, (company employee, independent, and public), subject to Chapter 626, F.S., regardless of whether permanent, temporary, apprentice, or emergency licensees."

Then the duty itself: "The work of adjusting insurance claims engages the public trust. An adjuster shall put the duty for fair and honest treatment of the claimant above the adjuster's own interests in every instance."

And the consequence: "A breach of any provision of this rule constitutes an unfair claims settlement practice," and violation of any provision "shall constitute grounds for administrative action against the licensee."

The standards that follow are the ones a shop and a claimant would recognise. An adjuster "shall not directly or indirectly refer or steer any claimant needing repairs or other services in connection with a loss to any person with whom the adjuster has an undisclosed financial interest". An adjuster "shall make truthful and unbiased reports of the facts after making a complete investigation." An adjuster "shall not advise a claimant to refrain from seeking legal advice, nor advise against the retention of counsel or the employment of a public adjuster to protect the claimant's interest." The rule text was re-fetched and matched at law.cornell.edu, read on 2026-09-02, and the definition sentence above was matched there again on 2026-09-03.

Behind the rule sits the licence. Fla. Stat. 626.611 provides that the department "shall" deny, suspend, revoke or refuse to renew the licence of an adjuster, among others, on grounds that include a "Demonstrated lack of fitness or trustworthiness to engage in the business of insurance" and "Fraudulent or dishonest practices in the conduct of business under the license or appointment." One ground is written for this exact person, and we pulled it in full rather than relying on a partial retrieval: it applies where, "as an adjuster, or agent licensed and appointed to adjust claims under this code, he or she has materially misrepresented to an insured or other interested party the terms and coverage of an insurance contract with intent and for the purpose of effecting settlement of claim for loss or damage or benefit under such contract on less favorable terms than those provided in and contemplated by the contract."

The words "or other interested party" are broader than "an insured", and we note them because they are there. We are not going to tell you what they cover, because we found no determination applying them to a third-party automobile claimant.

The estimating paragraph, and where it stops

This is the finding a collision readership will not expect.

Paragraph (3)(m) of the same rule opens: "In order to ensure fair dealing in estimating losses, an adjuster must adhere to all of the following requirements when preparing and submitting a detailed estimate of the amount of the loss to an insured or insurer." Adjusters "must utilize an electronic estimating program", which must produce "an itemized, per unit estimate of damage to the property, including itemized information on equipment, materials, labor, and supplies" and must apply "market price data that consists of unit-cost breakdowns consistent with those that may be expected from a contractor or repair company in the relevant geographic market area."

Then the part that has no equivalent anywhere else we looked: "Modification to, or variation from, the market prices applied by the electronic estimating program, or to any other program input or output, is strictly prohibited unless the adjuster can demonstrate with additional documentation that modification is required to produce an accurate detailed estimate of the amount of the loss and that each and every modification applies current market prices within the relevant geographic market area". The rule adds that "The adjuster modifying the estimate must provide his or her name on the modification document." The estimate handed over must include "the line-item estimate produced by the electronic estimating program, a variation report, or other similar report showing whether and to what extent the program was modified by the adjuster, and the additional documentation required to support any modification".

So a departure from the platform's prices has to be documented, attributed to a named individual on the modification document, and handed over with a variation report. Three limits sit on that, all in the rule itself. The rule requires a name on the document, not a signature. The requirement carries its own carve-out: "This subparagraph (3)(m)3. does not apply when an insurer agrees to settle a claim under residential coverage based upon a quote produced by the insured's contractor." And then the rule says where the whole paragraph applies: "This paragraph only applies to residential coverage described in s. 627.4025(1), F.S."

Both halves belong in the same breath. One state has already written the estimating discipline that collision repairers have asked for. It stops at the driveway.

Put the sections together. In Washington the employee adjuster is not personally liable for insurance bad faith. In California the independent adjuster owes the insured no duty of care in negligence, though an adjuster there can be sued for negligent misrepresentation. In Texas, on a real-property claim from a force of nature, the carrier can post a letter and end the adjuster's exposure. In Florida the same person must put the claimant's fair and honest treatment above their own interests in every instance, on pain of the licence, and is answerable for it to the regulator rather than to the claimant. And in Montana the adjuster has been held personally answerable to the third-party claimant in court. Four of the five run one way. One does not.

Washington states the point most starkly, because its statute says the opposite of its case law. RCW 48.01.030 provides that "The business of insurance is one affected by the public interest, requiring that all persons be actuated by good faith, abstain from deception, and practice honesty and equity in all insurance matters," and that the duty of preserving the integrity of insurance rests on the insurer, the insured, "their providers, and their representatives". In Keodalah v. Allstate Insurance Company, No. 95867-0, the Supreme Court of Washington sitting en banc held that "we hold that RCW 48.01.030 does not create an implied cause of action for insurance bad faith" and that "we hold that employee adjusters are not subject to personal liability for insurance bad faith or per se claims under the CPA," reversing the Court of Appeals and reinstating the trial court's dismissal of the claims against the employee adjuster, over a dissent by Justice Yu. The statute names the representative. The court held the sentence gives you nothing to sue on.

The case nobody has found

Across this work, no decided case has been located, anywhere, in which a third-party claimant actually recovered a judgment from an individual adjuster on an automobile claim. That is a narrower claim than it may look, and the narrowing is the point: O'Fallon, set out above, is a Montana decision in which third-party claimants injured in a car crash sued a named individual adjuster and the state's highest court held that such a claim lies. What O'Fallon does not record is a recovery. The case went back for trial.

An absence is worth nothing unless the instrument that found it can be shown to fire. This one fires, and during this pass it fired on the article's own thesis. Re-run against the question of third-party claimants suing individual adjusters, the same searching produced O'Fallon and produced Moe v. GEICO Indemnity Company, neither of which was in the earlier draft, and both of which cut against the short answer as it was first written. It also produced four federal decisions in which a Texas adjuster's personal amenability to suit was litigated at length, three of them holding the individual properly joined; a Mississippi standard under which an adjusting company can be held independently liable, applied in a case that reached that state's highest court; a California rule stated in a case the policyholder brought, and a later California decision cutting the other way; a Texas privity holding; and a Florida rule that names the claimant in terms. The instrument returns adjuster-liability material readily, including material we did not want.

What it has not returned is the driver standing at the car, suing the person who wrote the number, and collecting. That is a narrow, falsifiable claim, and a single decided case would falsify it. We are not saying that no third-party claimant has ever been paid by an adjuster on a car claim. A settlement leaves no decision to find, and a case we did not locate is not a case that does not exist. If you have one, the corrections log below is open.

What we could not verify, and the walls

Recorded, not worked around, and dated. Every entry below was tested during a verification pass that ran from 2026-09-02 into 2026-09-03; retrievals are stamped 2026-09-02, the date the pass was opened and the fetches were issued, except where a later date is given.

Not established.

• That "most states" bar a third-party claimant from suing the insurer. Five states were read. Three no, two yes. We refuse to generalise from five.
• Allstate Insurance Co. v. Watson in its own words. The opinion was not read. Its holding appears here only as a legislative staff description, tagged as such in the sentence that carries it.
• Whether Texas H.B. 1216 of the 76th Legislature passed. It does not affect the finding; what Texas has now was read directly.
• Whether O'Fallon's common law cause of action against an individual adjuster survives the 2023 amendments to Mont. Code Ann. 33-18-242. No decision applying the amended text to that holding was located. The amendments and the holding are both reported above; the interaction is not.
• What became of the claim against the adjuster Terry Falcon after O'Fallon was remanded for trial.
• The O'Fallon holding in the court's own printed words on a second independent host. The quotation used here is single-route, corroborated in substance but not character for character.
• Whether Bock v. Hansen reaches a third-party automobile claimant. No California decision applying it to one was located.
• Any adjudicated case in which a third-party claimant recovered a judgment against the adjuster who inspected a damaged vehicle.
• Any state insurance department final order revoking or suspending an adjuster licence for conduct toward a claimant in an automobile claim. The prior pass reached enforcement documents in one state only, and all of them concerned public adjusters, which is the one class that works for the claimant. That absence is scoped to that one directory and nothing wider.
• Whether anything equivalent to the Tex. Ins. Code 542A.006 election exists for automobile claims. Chapter 542A itself does not reach them.
• When the words of Tex. Ins. Code 541.002(2) last changed. A 2014 federal opinion rendered the definition as ending with "life and health insurance counselor"; the current text ends at "adjuster". We quote the current text as current and assert nothing about the amendment history.
• The five out-of-state cases cited inside Sanchez. Not read, not reproduced, not relied on.

Walls and route failures.

• courtlistener.com, for Watson: robots-disallowed. A standing wall, not attempted.
• case-law.vlex.com, for Watson: paywalled. Not used.
• courts.ms.gov, for the Jeffcoat opinion at the Mississippi court's own host: the robots.txt fetch returns HTTP 500. A robots.txt that fails is not a permission. FindLaw was used instead.
• capitol.texas.gov/BillLookup, for the H.B. 1216 history: robots-disallowed. This is a path-level block, not a host block; the same host's /tlodocs/ path served the bill analysis without difficulty, and statutes.capitol.texas.gov served Chapter 542A in full, both read on 2026-09-02. The host was re-tested on 2026-09-03 and answered HTTP 200 with no robots refusal, so nothing about it should be recorded anywhere as a host-level block.
• alfainternational.com, for a secondary summary of Montana adjuster liability: HTTP 403. Not used; the O'Fallon and Moe findings rest on the opinions themselves.
• flrules.org/gateway/ruleNo.asp for Rule 69B-220.201, retested today: returns HTTP 200 with the rule title "Ethical Requirements", the 4/21/2025 effective date, rulemaking history and a link, and no operative rule text. A 200 that is not the document is still not the document. The title was taken from this page; law.cornell.edu renders the same rule under a longer descriptive heading, "Ethical Requirements for All Adjusters and Public Adjuster Apprentices", read there on 2026-09-03. Anyone comparing this article with another in the series will meet both forms of the title, and this is why.
• flrules.org/gateway/readFile.asp for the same rule, at the address the ruleNo.asp page links, https://flrules.org/gateway/readFile.asp?sid=0&tid=29438547&type=1&file=69B-220.201.doc: re-tested on 2026-09-03 and it still returns binary content from which this fetcher extracts no text at all. That is a tool limitation, not a site refusal, and it is recorded as such. It is also not the whole of this series' record on that file. Our companion article on how the adjuster is paid reports that the same file was requested as raw bytes and decoded locally at its own host, using no archive and no mirror, and that the decode has since been repeated by a second and independently shaped retrieval with the two decodes agreeing. Both statements are about the same file by different routes, and neither cancels the other: a byte-level decode succeeded where this fetcher's decoder fails. What matters for the reader is provenance, so it is said plainly here. No rule text published in this article came from either decode. Every word of Rule 69B-220.201 quoted above was read at law.cornell.edu.
• The Dagley opinion PDF at txcourts.gov, retested today through a second fetcher: HTTP 200, content type application/pdf, 56,078 bytes, and a text extraction consisting only of "-- 1 of 11 --" through "-- 11 of 11 --". The document is plainly there; it is an image-based scan with no extractable text layer on that route. An empty extraction is not an empty document. The three Dagley quotations were confirmed on a second route this pass, at caselaw.findlaw.com, and are no longer single-route.
• Direct HTTPS from this session's own shell was refused at the egress proxy for every host attempted, including govinfo.gov and law.justia.com. That is this session's policy, not any site's conduct, and it is recorded so that it is not mistaken for one. All fetching was done through the sanctioned fetchers.

One further limitation shaped this piece. The summarising fetcher enforces a quotation ceiling of about 125 characters and says so rather than truncating in silence. Long statutory quotations here were therefore reproduced as consecutive verbatim fragments and reassembled, and each was matched against the source wording before use. That ceiling is also how the Moradi-Shalal truncation corrected below came to be published in the first place, which is a reason to reassemble every long quotation deliberately rather than accepting the first fragment a fetcher returns.

Sources

Every item below was re-fetched and matched during this pass, which ran from 2026-09-02 into 2026-09-03.

Statutes and rules

• Tex. Ins. Code 541.002, 541.060, 541.151, https://law.justia.com/codes/texas/insurance-code/ (read on 2026-09-02)
• Tex. Ins. Code 542A.001 and 542A.006, https://law.justia.com/codes/texas/insurance-code/title-5/subtitle-c/chapter-542a/section-542a-006/ and the chapter text at https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/IN/htm/IN.542A.htm (read on 2026-09-02; the 542A.001 definitions of "Claim" and "Agent" were re-matched at https://law.justia.com/codes/texas/insurance-code/title-5/subtitle-c/chapter-542a/section-542a-001/ on 2026-09-03)
• RCW 48.30.015, https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=48.30.015 (read on 2026-09-02)
• RCW 48.01.030, https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=48.01.030 (read on 2026-09-02)
• Fla. Stat. 624.155, http://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&URL=0600-0699/0624/Sections/0624.155.html (read on 2026-09-02)
• Fla. Stat. 626.611, http://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&URL=0600-0699/0626/Sections/0626.611.html (read on 2026-09-02)
• Fla. Admin. Code R. 69B-220.201, https://www.law.cornell.edu/regulations/florida/Fla-Admin-Code-Ann-R-69B-220-201 (read on 2026-09-02, definition sentence and page heading re-matched on 2026-09-03)
• Mont. Code Ann. 33-18-242, current text and history note, https://mca.legmt.gov/bills/mca/title_0330/chapter_0180/part_0020/section_0420/0330-0180-0020-0420.html (read on 2026-09-02)
• Mont. Code Ann. 33-18-242, 2011 text, for the comparison, https://law.justia.com/codes/montana/2011/title33/chapter33-18/part33-18-2/section33-18-242 (read on 2026-09-02)

Decisions

• Keodalah v. Allstate Ins. Co., No. 95867-0 (Wash., en banc), https://law.justia.com/cases/washington/supreme-court/2019/95867-0.html and the slip opinion at https://www.courts.wa.gov/opinions/pdf/958670.pdf (read on 2026-09-02)
• Moradi-Shalal v. Fireman's Fund Ins. Cos., https://law.justia.com/cases/california/supreme-court/3d/46/287.html (read on 2026-09-02, holding sentence re-read and reassembled from consecutive fragments on 2026-09-03)
• Sanchez v. Lindsey Morden Claims Services, Inc., https://law.justia.com/cases/california/court-of-appeal/4th/72/249.html (read on 2026-09-02)
• Bock v. Hansen, No. A136567, https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/ca-court-of-appeal/1662472.html (read on 2026-09-02)
• O'Fallon v. Farmers Ins. Exchange, No. 92-024, https://law.justia.com/cases/montana/supreme-court/1993/fdd44978-cc93-4c85-af00-e0d512433ea8.html (read on 2026-09-02, single route)
• Brewington v. Employers Fire Ins. Co., https://caselaw.findlaw.com/mt-supreme-court/1489050.html (read on 2026-09-02, used only to corroborate the O'Fallon citation)
• Moe v. GEICO Indemnity Co., D. Mont., https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-mtd-2_19-cv-00023/pdf/USCOURTS-mtd-2_19-cv-00023-6.pdf (read on 2026-09-02)
• Gallagher Bassett Services, Inc. v. Jeffcoat, https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/ms-supreme-court/1378700.html (read on 2026-09-02)
• Dagley v. Haag Engineering Co., https://www.txcourts.gov/All_Archived_Documents/14thCOA/Case/Opinions/031600/981053f.PDF and https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/tx-court-of-appeals/1172561.html (read on 2026-09-02)
• Advanced Indicator and Mfg., Inc. v. Acadia Ins. Co., https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-ca5-21-20092/pdf/USCOURTS-ca5-21-20092-0.pdf (read on 2026-09-02)
• Grigson v. Allstate Vehicle and Prop. Ins. Co., https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-txnd-5_22-cv-00040/pdf/USCOURTS-txnd-5_22-cv-00040-0.pdf (read on 2026-09-02)
• Holmes v. Acceptance Cas. Ins. Co., https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-txed-1_12-cv-00584/pdf/USCOURTS-txed-1_12-cv-00584-0.pdf (read on 2026-09-02)
• Esteban v. State Farm Lloyds, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-txnd-3_13-cv-03501/pdf/USCOURTS-txnd-3_13-cv-03501-0.pdf (read on 2026-09-02)
• Edwards v. State Farm Lloyds, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-txnd-3_17-cv-00171/pdf/USCOURTS-txnd-3_17-cv-00171-0.pdf (read on 2026-09-02)
• Randall v. State Farm Lloyds, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-txwd-1_24-cv-00466/pdf/USCOURTS-txwd-1_24-cv-00466-0.pdf (read on 2026-09-02)

Other official and company documents

• Office of House Bill Analysis, H.B. 1216, 76th Legislature, introduced version, 4/11/1999, https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/76R/analysis/html/HB01216I.htm (read on 2026-09-02)
• Florida Senate Committee on Judiciary, Interim Report 2012-132, "Insurance Bad Faith", November 2011, https://www.flsenate.gov/publishedcontent/session/2012/interimreports/2012-132ju.pdf (read on 2026-09-02)
• Sedgwick, auto claims, https://www.sedgwick.com/loss-adjusting/auto-claims/ (read on 2026-09-02)
• Crawford, catastrophe FAQ, https://www.crawco.com/cat/faq (read on 2026-09-02)

Corrections

This log opens with this publication and is open now.

Corrections were made to our own working research during the verification passes that produced this article, and they are recorded here rather than quietly fixed.

1. Gallagher Bassett v. Jeffcoat, standard misquoted. Our research file rendered the Mississippi standard as reckless disregard for the rights of the claimant. The opinion says "reckless disregard for the rights of the insured". The article uses the opinion's words.
2. Grigson, disposition overstated. Our research file recorded remand as granted. The document is a magistrate judge's Findings, Conclusions, and Recommendation, which recommended that remand be granted. The article says recommended.
3. Keodalah, date conflict between routes. Reads of the filing stamp on the slip opinion at the court's own host return 3 October 2018. The opinion text at law.justia.com gives 3 October 2019, that host files it under 2019, and two further secondary routes read this pass also give 2019. We have used 2019 and we record the conflict rather than hiding it, because it is a reading of a stamp on a scanned page and not a difference in the text.
4. Montana, a controlling decision was missing. An earlier draft said that every adjuster-liability decision read had been brought by a first-party insured, and its short answer said the duty runs to the carrier or the state and not to you, without qualification. Both were wrong. O'Fallon v. Farmers Insurance Exchange (Mont. 1993) was brought by third-party claimants injured in a car crash against a named individual adjuster, and the court held that the claim lies. The short answer, the summary paragraph and the absence-claim section have been rewritten, and O'Fallon now has a section of its own.
5. California, a later decision was missing. An earlier draft presented Sanchez as the plainest available answer in California without noting Bock v. Hansen (2014), which held that a cause of action for negligent misrepresentation can lie against an insurance adjuster and distinguished Sanchez. Bock now sits in the same passage as Sanchez.
6. Montana, a quotation was truncated in a way that changed it. An earlier draft quoted subsection (7)(b) as forbidding filing "until after the underlying claim has been settled or a judgment entered". The statute continues "in favor of the claimant on the underlying claim". The full clause is now quoted.
7. Moradi-Shalal, a quotation was truncated twice, and this log certified the second truncation as complete. An earlier draft ended the holding quotation at "private civil cause of action". A correction made when this article was published extended it to "against an insurer" and described that as "the full phrase". That was wrong, and it was wrong in the worst available place, because a corrections entry that certifies an incomplete quotation as complete tells a reader to stop checking. The opinion, re-read at law.justia.com on 2026-09-03 and reassembled from consecutive verbatim fragments, ends the sentence: "Neither section 790.03 nor section 790.09 was intended to create a private civil cause of action against an insurer that commits one of the various acts listed in section 790.03, subdivision (h)." The sentence ends there with a full stop, and the next sentence begins "The contrary Royal Globe holding". Eleven words had been dropped from inside the quotation marks, and the subdivision citation that identifies which acts the holding is about had been dropped with them. The holding is now quoted to its final punctuation mark, and the earlier certification of completeness is withdrawn.
8. Florida estimating rule, a requirement overstated and an exception omitted. An earlier draft said a named individual must sign every departure from the platform's prices. The rule requires a name on the modification document, not a signature, and subparagraph (3)(m)3. does not apply where an insurer settles a residential claim on the insured's contractor's quote. Both corrections are in the text.
9. Dagley, date conflict between routes. The txcourts.gov file path encodes 16 March 2000; caselaw.findlaw.com gives 23 March 2000. The article now says March 2000 and records the conflict rather than picking one silently.

Made on 2026-09-03: cross-article consistency closeout

A consistency audit compared this article against seven others in the same series and found places where two of our own pages disagreed. Four entries.

10. The Moradi-Shalal holding, and the corrections entry that certified it. Item 7 above has been rewritten in place. What it used to say was that an earlier draft had stopped the quotation at "private civil cause of action", that "The opinion continues 'against an insurer'", and that "The full phrase is now quoted." The last of those three sentences was false: the sentence in the opinion runs eleven words further, to "that commits one of the various acts listed in section 790.03, subdivision (h)." A sibling article in this series quoted the longer form from the same URL on the same day, which is how the disagreement surfaced. The body text and item 7 now both carry the sentence to its end.
11. The flrules.org binary, reconciled with the opposite report elsewhere in this series. This article recorded that the readFile.asp route "still returns a binary .doc the fetcher cannot decode", while our companion article on how the adjuster is paid records that the same file was decoded locally from its raw bytes and that the decode has since been repeated and agreed. Read side by side those two sentences look like a contradiction about our own capability. They are not: they describe different retrieval routes to the same file. The walls section above now says so, names the exact address the ruleNo.asp page links, carries the 2026-09-03 retest, and states that no rule text published in this article came from any decode of that binary.
12. The rule title, made checkable. This article said only that "law.cornell.edu renders the same rule under a longer descriptive heading" without printing it, while a sibling article printed the longer heading with no explanation, so a reader meeting both had no way to see they were the same rule. The Cornell heading is now printed here in full, "Ethical Requirements for All Adjusters and Public Adjuster Apprentices", read on 2026-09-03.
13. Two findings were tested against sibling articles and stand unchanged, recorded here so the disagreement is closed on the record rather than in silence. First, Chapter 542A. A sibling consumer article published that it had not read Chapter 542A's scope provision and made no claim about whether an auto physical damage claim falls inside or outside it. This article had already read and quoted that provision, and the definitions of "Claim" and "Agent" in Tex. Ins. Code 542A.001 were re-matched at law.justia.com on 2026-09-03: the chapter is confined to first-party real property claims arising from forces of nature, no automobile or motor vehicle appears in the list of causes, and nothing here changes. Second, statutes.capitol.texas.gov. A sibling consumer article recorded that host as refusing, and downgraded its Texas sourcing on that basis. This article's account, that the robots block is path-level at /BillLookup and that the statutes host serves, is the correct one; the host was re-tested on 2026-09-03 and answered HTTP 200 with no robots refusal.

A precision point also belongs here. The Florida Senate's Interim Report 2012-132 quotes Fla. Stat. 624.155 as making an action available to "any party." The statute says "Any person". Both were read from their own hosts on the same day. Where an official body's quotation of a statute differs from the statute, use the statute.

If anything above is wrong, tell us what and where and we will correct it here in public, with the date. We will not remove a finding quietly, and we will not soften one that turns out to be unsupported; we will cut it and say we cut it.

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

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