Now We Know Why Allstate Couldn’t Supply Florida the Documents Demanded

Apparently, Allstate’s been very busy trying to head off bad PR from publication of a new book purporting to air alleged dirty laundry in Allstate’s claims shop.

You can now find 150,000 pages of claims handling documents from the ’90’s on Allstate’s website. A press release explains why they’re there:

Allstate announced today that it publicly released approximately 150,000 pages of documents pertaining to a review of its claim practices conducted in the 1990s. Allstate was assisted in the review by business consulting firm McKinsey & Co.[...]

Allstate believes public criticisms by people with a vested interest in creating an inaccurate picture of the company’s claim practices have been based unfairly on only snippets from the documents taken out of context.

We continue to believe that the documents deserve protection as containing trade secret and confidential proprietary information and that our actions to protect them from general disclosure have been appropriate. However, because of the need to address misunderstandings resulting from the growing misplaced focus by our critics on very small pieces of the whole, we have decided to make the documents public.

While I agree that providing context is one way to combat comments taken out of context… I’m not sure that providing so much more material to abuse is the savviest idea in this day and age.