Idaho Gave the Insured the Personal-Knowledge Point and Threw Out the File Anyway

The district court in Bonner County found that Espinosa had not prepared, sent, or received the public adjuster's transmittal email. The Idaho Supreme Court read the record on October 6, 2026 and held that unsupported: he received the email directly.¹ The exhibit came out anyway. Nobody had said who prepared the documents attached to it.¹

A rough-framed barndominium and outbuildings outside Sandpoint went down under snow load on December 26, 2022.¹ The family was already living in an RV on the property, and the collapse took out its water, power and sewer lines.¹ Against a homeowners policy written in May 2022, State Farm paid $7,500 on January 9, 2023 and $115,966.47 on February 23, 2023.¹ Judge Lamont Berecz granted summary judgment. A unanimous Court affirmed, MEYER, J., writing, costs to State Farm under I.A.R. 40(a).¹

Who prepared this?

Espinosa is circulating as Idaho striking a public adjuster's estimate as hearsay. The estimate in that file was a contractor's. North Western General Contracting produced a one-page, nine-line $272,300 bid, and the public adjuster forwarded it.¹ No hearsay ruling touched it. It failed on substance: too thin to assess scope, and carrying $75,300 the policy does not cover, a $70,000 foundation upgrade plus $5,300 for a c-channel staircase never shown to have existed.¹ Neither one is repair or replacement with similar construction under Harmon v. State Farm Mut. Auto. Ins. Co., 162 Idaho 94, 100-01, 394 P.3d 796, 802-03 (2017).¹ Their own engineer had written that the original foundations were undamaged.¹

Exhibit D was the May 4, 2023 transmittal email from Gary Johnson of Sun Point Public Adjusting, with attachments including a Gantt chart, a fee list and a cost-breakdown chart.¹ The email was hearsay under I.R.E. 801(c).² The attachments were hearsay inside hearsay, unauthenticated.¹ One arrived "from an unknown sender to an unknown recipient on an unknown date."¹ I.R.E. 801(d)(2)(D) was never available: the adjuster was the insureds' agent.²

Espinosa won the personal-knowledge point and lost the file. "Mr. Espinosa did not identify who prepared the email attachments."¹ Personal knowledge of a cover email does not travel into the documents attached to it, because "Authentication or identification of documentary evidence is a condition precedent to its admissibility."¹ Admissibility turned on per-document authorship, not on the adjuster's credentials, the bid's size, or how deep in the thread the insured sat. Trade coverage read the case as a parable about undocumented claims⁵; the litigation bar's standing advice is to designate the adjuster as an expert.⁴ The defect was narrower. If you have ever audited line-item ownership on somebody else's estimate, you know what the Court wanted.

Every exclusion ran through I.R.C.P. 56(c)(4): a summary-judgment declaration must rest on personal knowledge and set out admissible facts.¹ A Dr. Charlotte Smith letter attached to counsel's declaration went out too, as did parts of the insureds' timeline, compiled from emails and calls between other people.¹

What goes into the file at intake

Name an author and a date on every document as it enters the file, because a fee list with no sender, no recipient and no date is finished before anyone reaches relevance. The person who built an estimate signs it; forwarding a contractor's bid converts a document somebody could have sponsored into one nobody can. Build the I.R.E. 803(6) foundation while the record is being created rather than at deposition: made at or near the time by someone with knowledge, kept in the course of a regularly conducted activity, made as a regular practice, shown by the custodian or another qualified witness or by a Rule 902(11) certification.² A written, repeatable intake routine is what makes those subsections provable a year later, the same discipline a business interruption file runs on.

Idaho Code § 41-5817 requires a licensed public adjuster to keep a complete, itemized record of every transaction, open to Department examination, for at least five years.³ The same chapter requires a written contract, § 41-5815.³ Read § 41-5817 as the evidence policy it is.

Keep scope upgrades off the repair estimate. Price them on a separate schedule.¹

Espinosa does not hold that a public adjuster cannot sponsor his own work, and it does not reach whether Gary Johnson could have authenticated these attachments.¹ He was never asked to.

Questions adjusters are asking