Just Friends — Vol. 1 | Q2 2026

Welcome to my first quarterly letter on behalf of the team at Just. If you’re on this list, you’re someone we value. We hope you’ll want to follow what we’re building and engage in a deeper discussion about our space. You’re a “friend of Just.”

This is not meant to be a marketing email or sales pitch. Friends help each other out. That’s why I’m writing this. To share our perspective on the space, events that might affect you, and ways we might be able to work together. Each quarter I’ll hit on a few relevant topics that I think might interest you and give a brief update on the company. This issue focuses on:

• How the world’s most expensive technology (AI) faceplants on insurance policies.
• How AI appears to be increasingly used by insurers to lowball property owners (and the contractors they engage).
• A couple regulatory developments that shed light on some of the underhanded tactics being employed by the insurance industry.
• And the (scary!) strong start we are seeing to storm season.

As this is my very first letter, I’d love to hear from you on what you’d like to see in future editions. With that, let’s dive in.

AI and Insurance: The Two Biggest, Wordiest Probability Businesses Of All Time

In so many ways, it’s fitting that AI and insurance meet. They have so much in common. Each uses a mountain of words, deals in probability, and (when the incentive is right) presents assumptions as facts.

Charlie Munger wasn’t talking about insurance when he famously said, “Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.” But his intuitive link applies quite well in our context and two examples come to mind here.

I spend a lot of time with owners, and I’ve been a CRE investor for 15 years. No owner I’ve ever met truly understands everything in their 200-page insurance policy beyond the most basic points. So, as with many things in business and life these days, policyholders turn to LLMs. AI models are powerful, as they should be — the top four players alone have invested over half a trillion dollars in theirs. LLMs are language-based and probabilistic, and when they can’t understand complex language, they guess! Insurance brokers have told me about getting hundreds of AI-generated slop questions from policyholders desperate to understand what they’re buying (or what they bought). It’s well intentioned, but it does little to increase understanding, or strengthen the relationship between broker and policyholder.

I think about this conundrum a lot. The most powerful technology of our generation can’t understand the fine print, contradictory language, and exclusions of a 20-unit apartment building. How can the policyholder!? The author of the policy has an incentive to make it hard to use, of course. Our team has been working hard to make AI serve the policyholder. It has taken significant investment in model crafting, logic, and iteration. Help is on the way, and I’m excited to share more soon.

Separately, AI is likely behind the increasingly rapid payouts of smaller claims, a trend expected to continue.¹ This would be great, if the determinations were fair and just. It depends on the playbook being automated. I fear it’s a version of the decades-old insurance carrier playbook to offer small payouts early and hold firm.² I’ve been able to find only 462 slides of the estimated 12,500 (!) in McKinsey’s playbook for Allstate commonly referred to as “From Good Hands to Boxing Gloves.” But even this sneak peek is eye popping. Contemporary spinoffs are building on Allstate’s work to turn Claims into a profit center. Merlin Law Group just wrote about State Farm’s “Hail Focus Initiative” that sought to apply standards different from those listed in the policy itself.

When I put two and two together, I see the same old payout-minimizing processes put on modern tech rails. Underpayment masquerading as speed. The incentives show us the way.

Just (Or Not So Just!) Regulatory News

The big news to kick off 2026 came out of California, where the Department of Insurance found a slew of bad behavior³ related to the 2025 Palisades fires. In just 220 State Farm claims, the DOI found 398 violations related to delays, underpayment, smoke damage testing disputes, and other unneighborly behavior. State Farm spent $1,139,000,000⁴ on trust-centric advertising in 2025.

Where there’s fire, there’s smoke. And given that wildfire season is upon us, I want to highlight Aliff v. California FAIR Plan Association.⁵ This case was decided in California, but it informs the approach to smoke claims everywhere. The gist is that policyholders were protected from having to satisfy “permanent physical changes” and “sight and smell” requirements. Carriers had previously used these tests to exclude rigorous scientific evidence of smoke damage. We like this ruling because we like science.

Meanwhile, in Kentucky, recent legislation⁶ took a sledgehammer to policyholder rights in order to, you know, protect policyholders. New regulation imposed two-year moratoriums on new public adjuster licenses and, more importantly, the ability of any public adjuster to negotiate with an insurer on behalf of an insured on a claim. The likely outcome of the new law is that insureds will file fewer claims and settle for lower amounts. If that’s correct, who is actually being protected here?

But it’s not all bad. Earlier this month, Texas released prudent and clarifying guidance on claim-related appraisals. The implementation rules are still forthcoming, but the basic gist is that either party may unilaterally demand appraisal, no impasse needs to be established first, and the appraisal award is binding. We applaud this regulatory clarity, and recently wrote a longer piece about it here.

Storm Season Starts Super Strong

Fire season is off to a scary start, with over 25,000 fires burning almost 2 million acres⁷ in the central plains and southeast US. We’re above the 10-year average for this time of year, and the west hasn’t had significant fires yet. There’s certainly high risk this year; in our beloved Colorado, this year’s snowpack was the worst in recorded history.

In just the first three months of 2026, we’ve seen 280 tornadoes, which is 80% above average,⁸ and the eighth most extreme start on record. Significant hail has fallen with (and outside of) these storms. HailTrace calculates that hail reports this year are 22% above average,⁹ and close to 5 million properties have been hit by severe hail. JustClaims just released the billion-plus dollar Hail Reports for Denver and Dallas.

Just A Quick Update Before Signing Off

Our technology team is cranking on a robust roadmap, developing both productivity tooling and AI products. We’re making real progress, and also witnessing both the power and deficiencies of the LLMs first hand. We can’t wait to share more about what’s coming here.

And…we’re hiring! We’re looking to recruit a senior full-stack engineer, a great Business Development Rep (BDR), and senior claims professionals in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami. Please share with anyone you know who might want to help us evolve the insurance claims industry.

And, as always, if you think there’s a way we might work together, please feel free to reply directly to this email and we can explore together.

Until next quarter, thanks for reading and good luck out there.

Chris Himes

¹ Sedgwick; Crawford; Lemonade.

² Montana Supreme Court.

³ CA DOI overview.

⁴ Popular Information.

⁵ AP.

⁶ Legiscan.

⁷ National Interagency Fire Center.

⁸ NOAA.

⁹ HailTrace.