A Montana Supreme Court ruling could change how claims adjusters communicate with third-party claimants and what happens when those conversations go sideways.
In a decision handed down on March 31, 2026, the Court found that Cincinnati Insurance Company may face spoliation of evidence and equitable estoppel claims after one of its claims specialists told an injured woman to stop gathering evidence, only for the insurer to later contest liability.
The case stems from a December 2020 slip-and-fall at a Missoula tire shop. Amber Rose D'Hooge broke her leg walking across the parking lot of The Tire Guys Inc., operating as Tire Rama, and filed a claim with the shop's liability insurer, Cincinnati Insurance. Within weeks, a Cincinnati claims specialist emailed D'Hooge, told her she did not need to collect any additional information, and said the company was accepting liability for her claim. Cincinnati then began paying certain medical bills and lost wages.
D'Hooge took the insurer at its word. She did not hire an attorney. She did not chase down witnesses. She did not try to obtain security footage from nearby businesses. For the next two and a half years, she and Cincinnati tried to negotiate a settlement. When those talks collapsed, D'Hooge retained counsel and sued both Tire Rama and Cincinnati in 2023.
That is when things got complicated. Tire Rama disputed liability. Cincinnati said it had only been paying expenses it considered reasonable, necessary, and causally related to D'Hooge's injuries – and that it reserved the right to reevaluate liability. By the time D'Hooge's attorney tried to gather evidence, a food truck employee who had been working nearby on the day of the incident could not remember anything specific about the day of the incident. Security footage from a neighboring business was gone. And Tire Rama had surfaced a former employee who claimed to have seen D'Hooge running when she fell.
The district court sided with Cincinnati, granting summary judgment on all of D'Hooge's claims. It initially ruled from the bench that Cincinnati was estopped from denying liability, but reversed itself in its written order, concluding that Montana's Uniform Trade Practices Act limited third-party claimants to bad faith or fraud claims against insurers.
The Supreme Court disagreed – in part.
On the question of whether the pre-2023 version of the UTPA restricted third-party claimants to bad faith actions, the Court said no. Writing for a unanimous bench, Justice James Jeremiah Shea noted that while the statute limits the types of claims an insured can bring against its own insurer, it contains no equivalent restriction for third-party claimants. This was a matter of first impression in Montana. Federal courts interpreting the same statute had already reached the same conclusion.
The Court did uphold summary judgment on D'Hooge's breach of contract and promissory estoppel claims. The email from Cincinnati's claims specialist, the Court found, lacked the essential terms necessary to form an enforceable contract – it did not spell out what damages Cincinnati was agreeing to cover or how those damages would be determined. On promissory estoppel, the Court acknowledged the email may have misled D'Hooge, but said it did not provide sufficient clarity to constitute a clear and unambiguous promise.
Where the decision gets most interesting for claims professionals is on spoliation of evidence. The Court reversed summary judgment on that claim, holding that Cincinnati had a duty to preserve evidence once it instructed D'Hooge to stop collecting it. Liability insurers, the Court reasoned, are familiar with litigation, understand the importance of gathering evidence promptly, and could reasonably foresee that telling a claimant to stand down would impair her ability to prove the insured's negligence down the road. The Court was pointed in its reasoning: allowing insurers to accept a claim without an express reservation while simultaneously telling a claimant to stop collecting evidence – without any corresponding duty to preserve that evidence – can hamstring a claimant's ability to recover.
The Court also reversed summary judgment on D'Hooge's equitable estoppel claim, noting that Cincinnati had failed to present any substantive argument on the merits.
The remaining claims – unjust enrichment, interference with economic advantage, and constructive fraud – were affirmed as properly dismissed because they had not been adequately raised in D'Hooge's complaint.
The case now heads back to the Missoula district court for further proceedings on the spoliation and equitable estoppel claims.
The Court has signaled that when a claims specialist tells a third-party claimant to stop gathering evidence, that instruction carries consequences. If the insurer later reverses course on liability, the claimant may have a viable spoliation claim – and the insurer may find itself answering for the evidence that disappeared in the interim.
It is worth noting that the Montana Legislature amended the UTPA in 2023 to explicitly restrict third-party claimants to fraud or statutory bad faith claims against insurers. That amendment did not apply to D'Hooge's case because her causes of action arose before it took effect. But the spoliation and evidence-preservation issues raised here exist independently of the UTPA and are likely to remain relevant regardless of the statutory framework.
