Second-Place Winner of Constantine Cannon’s Sixth Whistleblower Essay Contest: Katherine Clark
By the Constantine Cannon Whistleblower Team
Kudos to Katherine Clark, the second-place winner of the Constantine Cannon Whistleblower Team’s Sixth Law School Scholarship Essay Contest!
About Katherine
Katherine received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona in Africana Studies with a minor in American Indian Studies, a foundation that deepened her understanding of justice and its complex historical roots in the United States. She will begin law school this fall at the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law, with aspirations to pursue a career in civil rights law.
Katherine’s Winning Essay
Katherine’s winning essay detailed her experience handling catastrophe claims at her job after Hurricane Helene. She learned how internal practices can conflict with policy language and what speaking up can do to help ensure families receive the compensation they are owed. Katherine also shared how she was inspired by the Rigsby sisters’ brave sixteen-year fight to expose insurance fraud.
Read on to catch Katherine’s complete essay:
When a family files a catastrophe claim, they are trusting that the process will be honest with them. They have just lost something: a home, the contents of a travel trailer, years of accumulated life, and they are relying on a policy they paid for to help them recover. What they cannot see is how many decisions get made before their check is written, and how much those decisions depend on whether the person making them is willing to say when something is wrong.
After Hurricane Helene in 2024, I was assigned a claim for a family in North Carolina whose travel trailer had been gutted by the storm. For this family, it was home, and everything in it was gone. The coverage itself was not being denied. What was being contested was the structure of the payment. A manager had given us direction on how content claims should be structured, capping certain categories of items at a maximum dollar amount the policy never established. This family’s policy stated only that no single item could exceed five hundred dollars, with no category caps and no blanket limits.
Every policy is different. Some provide broader content coverage than others, which meant a blanket structure applied across all claims made no sense. I was fairly new to the position when Hurricane Helene made landfall, but what I understood from the beginning was that the policy language was the only thing that mattered. I could have followed the instructions and sent a check for the reduced amount. That is how the pressure works, quiet and practical, one claim out of hundreds. Instead I wrote a detailed analysis making the case for what the policy actually required. It worked. The family received the full amount they were owed.
What that moment clarified for me is that pushing back rarely looks like bravery from the inside. It looks like staying late to write an analysis nobody asked for, knowing the person who gave the original instruction will not appreciate it. Whistleblowers operate under that same logic, except the consequences they risk are not friction with a manager but the loss of their livelihood and sometimes their freedom. That understanding deepened when I learned about Cori and Kerri Rigsby.
The Rigsby sisters were catastrophe claims adjusters, the same job I do, working in Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina. What they discovered was a systematic scheme: State Farm was reclassifying wind damage, the kind private insurers pay for, as flood damage, shifting the cost onto the National Flood Insurance Program and onto taxpayers. Thousands of families who deserved compensation from their private insurer were left without it while the government paid a bill that was never its to cover.
The Rigsby sisters did not stay quiet. They collected documentation and filed a whistleblower lawsuit under the False Claims Act in 2006. It took sixteen years. State Farm sued them back, alleging breach of contract. They faced the real possibility of losing their careers for following their conscience. In 2022, State Farm agreed to pay the federal government one hundred million dollars to settle.
What moves me about the Rigsby sisters is that they were adjusters, people trained to evaluate damage and close claims, not to fight the largest insurer in the country in federal court for sixteen years. They knew exactly what staying quiet would have cost them, and they filed anyway.
When Cori Rigsby said after the verdict that Katrina was devastating, but so was State Farm, she was describing something I recognize from my own work. Institutions behave after a disaster in ways that cause harm that never makes the news. I have talked to families trying to piece their lives back together, and I have seen how much turns on whether the person handling their claim reads the policy as written rather than as convenient. The gap between those two things is where people fall through.
That gap is what I want to address in law. Not one analysis at a time, but on the policies and legal protections that determine how claims are handled before an adjuster opens a file. The Rigsby sisters spent sixteen years in court because the law was not strong enough to protect them faster. I want to help change that.
Being a whistleblower means deciding that what you saw is not just your problem to carry. It belongs to the people it affected, and they deserve someone willing to say so out loud.
Tagged in: Importance of Whistleblowers, Scholarship,