A Washington Court of Appeals panel has upheld a trial court finding that defence counsel Cozen O’Connor, representing Safelite Fulfillment, Inc., violated Washington Civil Rule (CR) 26(g) by failing to make a reasonable inquiry into its client’s insurance coverage during discovery, but reversed the accompanying $1 million sanction as an abuse of discretion. The dispute arose out of a personal injury suit brought by Abraham Jok, in which a jury returned an $11.25 million verdict in his favor. For claims, coverage and litigation-management teams, the ruling sets out — in unusual factual detail — what a carrier’s counsel must actually do to answer a standard coverage interrogatory, and how far a court can go to punish getting it wrong.
What Interrogatory No. 27 asked, and what defence counsel produced
The underlying request was unremarkable. Plaintiff Abraham Jok’s Interrogatory No. 27, served December 23, 2021, asked whether any insurance or indemnification policies existed that could satisfy a judgment in the action, and requested the complete contents of each policy. The response, when it came, covered only the base of the coverage tower. On December 28, 2021, third-party claims administrator Sedgwick furnished defense counsel a 2020 CHUBB/ACE American Insurance Company auto policy naming Safelite as insured, with a $5 million liability limit — the only policy produced during discovery. Nothing in that response flagged that the primary layer was not the whole picture. The appellate record shows it was not.
Two excess layers surfaced only after trial was underway
The first gap emerged well before trial but was not passed on to opposing counsel until it was almost too late to matter. On August 1, 2024, Travelers Property Casualty Company of America notified defense counsel Robert Lee that Safelite held a $25 million excess follow-form and umbrella liability policy through Travelers, sitting above the $5 million CHUBB primary layer. That policy was not disclosed to Jok’s counsel until December 17, 2024, during the second week of trial. Trial had commenced on December 9, 2024, after discovery had closed on June 17 and an original August 5, 2024 trial date had been continued. Defense counsel later said, in a declaration, that the four-month delay in disclosing the Travelers policy after learning of it was due to an “inadvertent error”. By the time jurors deliberated, Jok asked them to return a $25 million verdict, unaware at that point of either the Travelers policy or a further excess layer behind it; they awarded $11.25 million. The second gap came to light only after the case had already gone to the jury and the trial court had already sanctioned Cozen once. On February 4, 2025, Safelite’s new counsel, Carney Badley Spellman, disclosed a second, previously unknown $25 million excess policy issued by Everest National, sitting above the Travelers layer and bringing total excess coverage to $50 million above the $5 million primary CHUBB policy. A coverage tower that plaintiff’s counsel had been told, in effect, stopped at the primary layer turned out to sit beneath two further excess policies.
What the court says a reasonable coverage inquiry looks like
On the merits of the discovery violation, the Court of Appeals gave defence counsel no room. The court held that Cozen failed to make a reasonable inquiry regarding Safelite’s insurance policies and affirmed the trial court’s ruling that Cozen violated CR 26(g) and was subject to sanctions. The standard applied is not forgiving of good intentions: whether an attorney has conducted a reasonable inquiry is judged by an objective standard, not by counsel’s subjective belief that the file was complete. The rule underpinning the sanction is broad by design. CR 26(g) mandates that a court impose an appropriate sanction — potentially including reasonable expenses and attorney fees — on the attorney, the party, or both, when a discovery certification is made in violation of the rule’s requirement of a reasonable inquiry. The practical lesson for defense counsel and the carriers who instruct them is that a coverage interrogatory calling for “any” policy that “may satisfy” a judgment reaches the full tower, not just whichever policy a claims handler happens to forward first — and that an incomplete answer will not be excused merely because the omission was unintentional.
Why the seven-figure sanction did not survive review
The size and target of the sanction shifted twice at the trial-court level before the appeal was even filed. At a January 17, 2025 hearing, the superior court orally ordered defense counsel Cozen O’Connor and Safelite jointly to pay a $1 million sanction to the American Red Cross, describing the figure as roughly one twenty-fifth of the then-known undisclosed $25 million Travelers policy and less than ten percent of the $11.25 million verdict. After the Everest National policy came to light, the court’s written order following a March 7, 2025 hearing revised the sanction to fall on Cozen O’Connor alone, keeping the figure at $1 million but recharacterizing it as one-fiftieth of the combined $50 million in undisclosed excess coverage, still under ten percent of the verdict. The Court of Appeals rejected that arithmetic. It reversed the $1 million sanction amount as excessive, holding it was not compensatory and that the trial court had failed to consider the least severe sanction that would still educate, deter, and punish Cozen, remanding the case for further consideration of the sanction amount. The governing principle, drawn from the Washington Supreme Court’s Fisons decision, is that the least severe sanction adequate to serve the sanction’s purpose should be imposed, without being so minimal as to undermine the purpose of discovery. Applying it, the panel found the trial court had not tied the number to anything in the record: because the value of Safelite’s insurance was not itself an issue at trial, Jok ultimately won an $11.25 million verdict, and the record showed nothing about what expenses Jok may have incurred, the $1 million figure was unsupported. The court drew a pointed contrast with its own recent precedent on the same rule. It compared the case to King County v. Aquatherm GmbH, in which it had upheld a $1.5 million CR 26(g) sanction against the company and a separate $23,000 sanction against its attorney personally, but distinguished that case because it involved information critical to the merits and a compensatory element absent here. In other words: the violation was real, but a sanction untethered to actual harm will not stand simply because the nondisclosure was serious.
An unpublished opinion, but a working checklist for claims teams
Carriers and defense firms should not read the reversal as a soft landing. The Court of Appeals awarded Jok his attorney fees and costs on appeal under CR 26(g) and the applicable appellate rule, while declining Cozen’s own request for costs because Cozen had failed to properly brief it. The CR 26(g) violation itself stands affirmed; only the dollar figure goes back to the superior court for a fresh, record-based calculation. One caveat matters for anyone citing this case: the opinion, authored by Judge Lee and joined by Judges Glasgow and Chief Judge Veljacic on a unanimous three-judge panel, was designated unpublished and filed for public record under RCW 2.06.040 rather than printed in the Washington Appellate Reports. That designation means it carries limited precedential weight under Washington practice — but its reasoning on what CR 26(g) demands, and on tying sanctions to the record rather than to round fractions of policy limits, is one other panels are likely to draw on. For coverage counsel answering the next Interrogatory No. 27, the working assumption should be that “the policy” means the whole tower, primary through every excess layer.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this Washington Court of Appeals decision binding precedent?
What must defense counsel do to satisfy a coverage interrogatory like Interrogatory No. 27?
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For related coverage of disclosure and market-conduct enforcement, see this state supreme court ruling on insurance producers and consumer fraud, this state attorney general’s suit over storm claims handling, and this survey on business owners’ concern about coverage gaps. On the litigation-exposure side, see the recent turn in primary directors and officers pricing and how the US cyber insurance market has split between admitted and surplus lines. The full opinion is available via CourtListener.
