This blog is an extension of my September 27th and October 18th posts. The decision that is the focus of today’s blog is brief and not-so-recent, but one of the holdings toward the end of the opinion is very well put and worth noting.
In Bankers Security Insurance Company v. Symons,1 Florida’s Fifth District Court of Appeal held as follows:
Even if the court agrees that a ‘claims file’ is work product, it is not necessarily true that every document in a claim file is work product. Putting a document in a claim file doesn’t make it immune; it is only immune if it is work product.
Remember the recurrent topic in these three posts is the overly-broad argument that a carrier is immune, during the contract action, from producing all documents contained within a claim file simply because such documents are contained within a folder that the carrier has labeled “claim file.” There is much more to the analysis than an insurer’s file labeling.
To read previous posts in my series on dynamite discovery decisions, click here.
1 Bankers Sec. Ins. Co. v. Symons, 889 So. 2d 93 (Fla. 5th DCA 2004) (The decision largely pertained to privilege logs, which is a very important aspect of discovery; the privilege log will be the topic of next week’s blog).
