State Farm Wants Out of Lawton: Six Weeks Before Trial, It Asks to Move West v. State Farm — or Push It Past the Election — and Brings In Sullivan & Cromwell

Lawton, Oklahoma — September 23, 2026

For a year, the Oklahoma hail-claim litigation against State Farm has been fought over documents — 800,000 pages in Comanche County, roughly 110,000 marked confidential in Oklahoma County, 31 exhibits unsealed, a CEO ordered to sit for deposition. This week the fight moved to something more basic: where, and when, twelve citizens will first hear the case.

The filing that does it is titled, in full, Defendants State Farm Fire and Casualty Company and Nancy Holcomb Insurance Agency, Inc.’s Motion for Change of Trial Venue or Later Trial Setting and Brief in Support. It runs five pages of argument and 26 pages of exhibits, and its first sentence is not about hail. It is about an election.

What is State Farm asking Judge Sheperd to do?

Two things, in the alternative. First, under 12 O.S. § 140 — the Oklahoma statute that lets a court “change the place of trial to some county where such objections do not exist” when “a fair and impartial trial cannot be had in the county where the suit is pending” — State Farm asks that the trial be moved out of Comanche County, and specifically “to a county outside the judicial district where Plaintiff Neil West is campaigning for district judge.” Second, if the court will not move the trial, State Farm asks that it be set “on a docket after November 2026.”

The motion is signed by Timila S. Rother, Paige A. Masters and Amanda M. Finch of Crowe Dunlevy in Oklahoma City, State Farm’s trial counsel in the case, on behalf of both State Farm and the Holcomb agency. It was served by mail on the homeowners’ lawyers at Whitten Burrage, Burgess & Hightower of Lawton, and Durbin, Larimore & Bialick.

Why does State Farm say a Comanche County jury can’t be fair?

Because of the calendar. Neil West, one of the two plaintiffs, is a Lawton public defender who is running for District Judge in Judicial District 5, Office 1, the seat that covers Comanche, Cotton, Jefferson and Stephens counties. He led a four-candidate field in the June primary and advanced to the November 3 general election against Special District Judge Christine Galbraith. The trial, by the homeowners’ account, would start November 2 — the day before the vote.

State Farm’s argument builds from there. If the trial begins on the November 2 jury docket, the motion says, it “would occur at the very same time Mr. West is sending mailers to potential jurors’ homes; canvassing potential jurors’ neighborhoods and knocking on their doors; shaking potential jurors’ hands” — and, in the line the whole motion turns on, “jurors might literally be voting for Mr. West to serve as their district judge on the very same day they are asked to neutrally evaluate his case against Defendants.”

The motion adds two more layers. One is publicity: State Farm says there has been “substantial pretrial publicity about this case, in part in connection with Mr. West’s campaign,” and that the homeowners’ lawyers have given interviews about the case “at length, and in highly inflammatory terms.” Its Exhibit 3 is the August 17 Oklahoma Watch investigation published by The Oklahoman, in which Reggie and Hannah Whitten and Jeff Marr discuss the litigation and the sealed documents — the story that also reported Judge Amy Palumbo’s remarks from the bench in Hursh. Its Exhibit 4 is two pages of Google results for the plaintiff’s name and county, which State Farm says put “a litany of articles about this lawsuit on just the second page.” The other layer is the bench itself: should Mr. West win, the motion says, he “would be set to be Your Honor’s newest colleague, which may present considerations by Your Honor for recusal as well.”

“Comanche County is not a large county,” the motion concludes. “It is going to be very difficult, if not impossible, to find jurors who have not been exposed to Mr. West’s campaign.” State Farm says that even asking prospective jurors about the campaign during jury selection “would itself risk tainting the jury.”

All of that is State Farm’s argument, made in a brief, and it has not been tested. The homeowners have not responded, and Oklahoma’s venue statute leaves the decision to the trial judge’s discretion. The exhibits, notably, are drawn entirely from public sources: a local newspaper, a campaign’s public Facebook page, a statewide news story and a search engine. Nothing in the motion suggests any impropriety by the plaintiff; the argument is that a candidate’s lawful campaign and a jury pool drawn from his voters cannot overlap in the same week.

Is the West trial actually set for November 2?

This is the quiet surprise inside the motion. Since August, coverage of the case — including this series — has treated November 2 as the West trial date. State Farm’s first footnote says the court has never set it: “The Scheduling Order says only that the trial date will be set at the Pretrial Conference. To Defendants’ knowledge, no trial date has been set by the Court.” The pretrial conference is October 22. November 2 is the first jury term after it, and the homeowners’ lawyers have written in their briefs that the case will therefore begin then. State Farm says it is filing now “out of an abundance of caution.”

The same footnote argues the timeline is “unrealistic” for reasons that have nothing to do with the election. According to State Farm, the homeowners have not yet responded to State Farm’s or the agency’s motions for summary judgment; they have not supplemented their expert discovery, which State Farm says prevents it from completing rebuttal expert work and filing challenges to plaintiffs’ experts; and on September 17 they served eleven more document requests — seventy in all — including requests aimed at State Farm’s board of directors, their compensation, and their communications about claim handling, as well as “all communications … on any communication application or platform between [all] State Farm employees” about wind and hail claim handling. State Farm calls those requests “irrelevant and vastly disproportionate,” says its responses are not due until October 20, and predicts that “motion practice relating thereto is a certainty.” Whether the homeowners see the discovery record the same way will show in their response.

Who is Sullivan & Cromwell, and why is a partner from Los Angeles joining a hail case in Lawton?

At 1:08 p.m. on September 23, the day after the venue motion, Crowe Dunlevy filed a motion to associate counsel asking Judge Sheperd to admit Diane Lee McGimsey of Sullivan & Cromwell LLP’s Los Angeles office to practice in the case for State Farm. The attached application shows a California lawyer admitted in 2004, with admissions to the United States Supreme Court and three federal circuits, whose out-of-state registration the Oklahoma Bar Association approved on September 22 — application number 2026-594 — the day the venue motion was filed.

Sullivan & Cromwell is the New York firm that has represented Wall Street banks and Fortune 100 companies since the 19th century. It does not ordinarily appear in county courthouses in southwest Oklahoma. Its arrival in West follows the same pattern in Hursh: on September 18, State Farm moved to admit two lawyers from the Los Angeles office of Alston & Bird LLP, Kathy J. Huang and Samuel J. Park, pro hac vice as “additional counsel of record” for the State Farm defendants, and the Oklahoma County docket notes that the orders admitting them were signed September 21. Read the Huang motion.

Read together with the motion to move or delay the first trial, the sequence says something about how State Farm now regards these two cases: not as two hail claims from Lawton and Tulsa, but as the first jury tests of the wind-and-hail claim practices that more than 800 Oklahoma lawsuits and the Attorney General’s petition put at issue. Big verdicts travel. So, apparently, do big firms.

What happened in the Hursh case this week?

The December 7 trial date held — on paper, at least. On September 22 Judge Amy Palumbo entered an agreed amended scheduling order, signed for the homeowners by R. Ryan Deligans and for State Farm by Lance E. Leffel, that sets the deadlines from here to the courthouse door: all motions, including dispositive motions, and expert disclosures by October 15; motions in limine by November 1; Daubert challenges to experts by November 10; the pretrial conference on November 19 at 1:30 p.m.; and a seven-day jury trial beginning December 7, 2026, at 9 a.m. The order is “agreed,” which means State Farm signed it. On August 31 State Farm had told the court that the discovery extension it wanted “will necessarily extend beyond the current trial setting of December 7, 2026.” The amended order it agreed to three weeks later keeps that setting.

Also on the Oklahoma County docket: on September 21 the homeowners applied to file under seal an unredacted supplement to their motion to de-designate State Farm’s documents — the motion Judge Palumbo hears September 28 — because the supplement quotes exhibits still marked confidential. The docket notes the order granting it was signed September 22, and on September 23 the homeowners filed a notice of supplemental authority on the same motion, also under seal. Whatever the supplement says will surface, if at all, on September 28.

What happened in the Attorney General’s case?

Two things, both in Cleveland County. On September 21 State Farm filed its reply brief in support of its motion to dismiss the State’s lawsuit, the last filing before the September 28 hearing. The six-page brief makes two arguments. First, that the Oklahoma Consumer Protection Act exempts conduct “already regulated by another executive officer,” and that the business of insurance is regulated by the Insurance Commissioner, so the AG’s consumer-protection claim fails — and with it, State Farm says, the racketeering and conspiracy claims that depend on it. Second, that the Oklahoma Constitution gives the Insurance Commissioner authority over insurance companies that “trumps and precludes” the Attorney General’s general authority. In support, State Farm attached a transcript excerpt from an August 17 hearing before Oklahoma County District Judge Natalie Mai in separate litigation over the AG’s investigative demands to State Farm and Farmers, in which the judge found that the conduct at issue fell within the consumer-protection statute’s insurance exemption while allowing the AG’s antitrust demands to proceed. The AG’s response, filed in August, argued the opposite on every point; the court has not ruled.

On September 22 the court set State Farm’s motion to disqualify Whitten Burrage as the State’s counsel — the subject of Part 6 — for hearing on November 9, 2026, at 9 a.m. before Judge Jeff Virgin at the Cleveland County Courthouse in Norman. Read the notice. The date lands a week after the expected West trial and four weeks before Hursh. The Attorney General and Whitten Burrage have not yet responded to the motion on the docket.

One housekeeping addition to the archive: the August 5 entry of appearance by Reggie Whitten, Michael Burrage, Blake Sonne and Hannah Whitten for the State of Oklahoma — the one-page filing behind the date State Farm’s disqualification motion cites — is now hosted with the rest of the Cleveland County docket.

What does this mean for Oklahoma homeowners?

Nothing has been decided, and it is worth saying plainly what a venue motion is and is not. It is not a ruling that a Comanche County jury is biased; it is State Farm’s request that a judge find one could be. It does not dismiss or delay anything by itself. If Judge Sheperd grants it, the West case would be tried in another county, or later, by a different jury pool; if he denies it, the case proceeds to the October 22 pretrial conference and whatever date is set there. The documents that came out of the case — the 31 unsealed exhibits, the re-designation deadline State Farm stopped contesting on September 21 — stay public either way.

For policyholders with their own denied or underpaid storm claims, the practical facts are unchanged: the allegations in these cases are allegations, State Farm disputes them, and a policyholder’s own claim is governed by their own policy and their own insurer’s decisions. What the week does change is the calendar and the cast. The first trial may not be first, or in Lawton; the second has a signed order behind it; and the lawyers walking into both courtrooms for State Farm now include two of the largest firms in the country.

What happens next

September 28 is still the double-header: Judge Palumbo on the confidentiality designations in Hursh at 9 a.m. in Oklahoma County, and the hearing on State Farm’s motion to dismiss the Attorney General’s case in Cleveland County. October 15 is the Hursh dispositive-motion and expert-disclosure deadline. October 22 is the West pretrial conference, where the trial date is formally set — and, presumably, where the venue motion is decided if it has not been by then. November 2 is the West jury docket; November 3 is the election; November 9 is the disqualification hearing; November 19 is the Hursh pretrial conference; December 7 is the Hursh trial. All of it is on the Trial Watch page, which is updated as the dockets move.

Read the documents

The motion for change of venue or later trial setting, with all four exhibits (32 pages, OCR’d and searchable) · Motion to associate counsel (Sullivan & Cromwell) · Motion for admission pro hac vice (Alston & Bird), Hursh · Agreed amended scheduling order, Hursh · Application for leave to file under seal, Hursh · State Farm’s reply on its motion to dismiss, AG case · Notice of the November 9 hearing · Whitten Burrage’s entry of appearance for the State · Search the full archive.

Earlier in this series: “The Denial Enterprise” · Part 3: State Farm is deposing the roofer · Part 4: Two Trials, 800,000 Pages · Part 5: The Accenture Motion · Part 6: State Farm Asks a Judge to Throw the Attorney General’s Lawyers Off the Case.

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