Pre-Suit Bad-Faith Notices as a Market Signal

Several states share a quiet structural feature. Before a policyholder can bring a statutory bad-faith claim, the law requires a written notice to be filed with the state insurance regulator. That notice names the carrier, the line of coverage, and the nature of the alleged misconduct. In aggregate, those filings form a real-time market signal on carrier conduct that plaintiff-side coverage attorneys have barely begun to use.

What a pre-suit notice requires

A statutory bad-faith framework gives policyholders a private right of action when a claim is unreasonably denied or delayed. These statutes often carry enhanced remedies, such as multiplied damages and attorney's fees. That makes them a serious tool against carriers who handle claims in bad faith.

To reach those remedies, the policyholder must first put the carrier and the regulator on notice. The filing describes the basis for the alleged violation and starts a short cure period. If the carrier fixes the problem within that window, the enhanced remedies fall away. If it does not, the claim can proceed.

The regulator receives and keeps these notices. Each one is a structured, standardized record. It identifies the carrier, the policy line, and the alleged conduct. Because the regulator is a public agency, those records are open to the public.

The dataset in aggregate

One notice tells you about one dispute. Thousands of them, assembled across carriers and tracked over time, tell you something no single claim ever could. Patterns emerge: which carriers draw notices, in which lines, at what pace, and how those rates move from quarter to quarter. These are patterns that plaintiff-side coverage attorneys have never had systematic access to.

The exact signals DAIS surfaces from this record, and how they become carrier propensity intelligence, are part of what Founding Members receive. The foundation is simple to state. It is a real-time public dataset on carrier conduct, assembled at scale for the first time for the attorneys who represent policyholders. These are real people whose claims were wrongfully denied or delayed by insurers who counted on them not having this information.

Corroborating conduct across states

The signal grows stronger when you read it across more than one state. Pre-suit notice frameworks differ in scope. Some cover a broad range of unfair practices and generate high volumes. Others target unreasonable denial or delay specifically and produce a narrower, more concentrated signal. No single state's record is the whole picture.

For carriers that operate in several states, comparing a carrier's notice profile across those jurisdictions gives a cross-market read that no one dataset provides alone. A carrier that runs elevated in multiple states, in the same line of coverage, is showing a pattern that is not local to any one market. That kind of corroboration is hard to dismiss.

Using the signal in practice

For attorneys handling coverage disputes, the aggregate notice record provides context that individual claim experience cannot. Before filing, knowing a carrier's notice history helps calibrate expectations. Is this carrier likely to cure within the notice period? What does its posture imply for settlement if the case moves forward?

The record also has evidentiary value. Courts have long recognized that a carrier's course of conduct across claims is relevant to whether its handling of any one claim was reasonable. Aggregate data drawn from public-record filings is not individualized claims data. It does not disclose specific claimants or claim decisions. It documents carrier behavior at the market level, in a form that can inform expert analysis and litigation strategy.

The public-record baseline

These notice records are public by operation of law. What turns a public record into market intelligence is the assembly and the analysis. That work takes advanced AI and engineering infrastructure that most plaintiff practices have no reason to build in-house. DAIS has built it, specifically for the attorneys who represent policyholders whose claims were wrongfully denied.

That is what DAIS's Carrier Intelligence product delivers: pre-suit notice records assembled, analyzed, and presented as aggregate carrier propensity intelligence for plaintiff bad-faith attorneys. Coverage spans multiple states, so a carrier's conduct can be read in one market and corroborated across others. For an overview of the approach, see the Methodology page.