Turning the Tide
Georgia Court Rejects Plaintiff’s Counsel’s Fishing Expedition into Insurance & Expert Records
If you’ve spent any time defending civil cases in Georgia lately, you know exactly what the “expert audit” strategy looks like. It’s a familiar, high-pressure tactic from the plaintiff's bar: serve non-party subpoenas not only on experts, but on liability insurers and defense firms, demanding at least a decade of raw financial data, thousands of internal invoices, and a library of expert reports from entirely unrelated cases.
The goal isn't actually to discover evidence about the crash at hand. The goal is to launch an invasive, administratively paralyzing fishing expedition designed to drive up defense costs, harass qualified expert witnesses, and back-door evidence of liability insurance into the record.
We recently went to battle over this very issue in Anita Nicole Breland v. Marty Lynn Deal (Case No. SUV2023000167) in the Superior Court of Fannin County. Following a heavily contested oral argument, the Court has explicitly indicated exactly how it intends to rule on the cross-motions to quash and enforce. While the formal written order is currently forthcoming, the Judge has drawn a firm line in the sand, soundly rejecting the most egregious of these “institution-wide” discovery demands.
The Context: Behind the Plaintiff's Strategy
In this routine automobile collision case, the defense retained an orthopedic surgeon and a biomechanical engineer to challenge the causation of the plaintiff's alleged injuries. In response, the plaintiff issued sweeping subpoenas to the experts, the defense law firm, and non-party liability insurer Owners Insurance Company, demanding up to thirty categories of historical records.
The plaintiff relied heavily on a commonly cited Cobb County State Court trial order, Summerhill v. Garcia-Ferrer, arguing that “bias is never collateral” and that they had an unfettered right to fish through ten years of the insurer's proprietary financial data.
The reality of this strategy is threefold:
The Financial Narrative: By demanding a decade's worth of total payments, the plaintiff's bar seeks to manufacture a sensationalized story of "litigation-driven financial incentive" for the jury, completely ignoring whether an expert also regularly works for plaintiffs or other independent entities.
The Insurance Trap: Georgia law strictly prohibits introducing evidence of a defendant's liability insurance because it injects immediate prejudice into a trial. These subpoenas try to circumvent that rule by making an insurer's global business practices the centerpiece of pre-trial litigation.
The War on Experts: By making the process as intrusive, public, and burdensome as possible, the tactical end-game is to deter highly qualified medical and scientific professionals from ever testifying for the defense.
The Court’s Indicated Ruling: A Win for Proportionality
The Court’s detailed direction for the upcoming formal order systematically dismantles the plaintiff’s overbroad demands.
Crucially, the Court has indicated that the plaintiff’s subpoenas are materially distinguishable from the Summerhill precedent. The Court explicitly recognized that stretching requests across nineteen to thirty categories over a 5-to-10-year period placed an impermissible, disproportionate administrative burden on non-parties.
The upcoming order will cleanly separate legitimate, case-specific bias discovery from prohibited global audits:
What Is Blocked (The Win): The Court has indicated it will quash all requests for "all invoices," raw financial history, global 10-year earnings data, and expert reports from unrelated cases in the insurer's or law firm's possession. It also firmly protects the insurer's internal operations by denying access to Owners’ complete claim file.
What Is Allowed: The discovery is strictly reined in to standard, case-specific information. The experts must produce credentials, fee schedules, and a list of case retentions limited to an appropriate three-year window, alongside invoices and communications unique to this litigation.
The Takeaway for the Defense Bar
This ruling is a refreshing reminder that the discovery limits contemlated by the Civil Practice Act are meant to keep trials focused on the facts of the case - not to grant a license to ransack a non-party insurer's files with respect to wholly unrelated cases.
While we await the final execution of the formal order, the defense bar can take heart that courts are increasingly willing to lean into the proportionality standards of the Civil Practice Act and relevant case law. Pushing back against these sweeping audits protects not just individual clients and claims files, but preserves the willingness of top-tier medical and technical experts to participate in the defense of Georgia citizens.
