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28 Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP 767 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10153-0119

Exhibit A 

Case: 19-30088 Doc# 2562-1 Filed: 06/17/19 Entered: 06/17/19 13:03:06 Page 1

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+1-212-474-1596

korsini@cravath.com

June 10, 2019

In re: PG&E Corporation and Pacific Gas and Electric Company 

Bankruptcy Case No. 19-30088

Dear Counsel:

I write concerning the open issues before the Court in connection with the 

Debtors’ Bar Date Motion, including the contested issues concerning the contents of the wildfire 

proof of claim form, the Bar Date itself, the wildfire noticing and claims process and the 

discovery you have recently served. 

As the Debtors have made clear from the outset of these Chapter 11 Cases, their 

primary goal is to compensate victims who are entitled to recovery from the Debtors as 

efficiently and fairly as possible. To that end, we filed our Bar Date Motion on May 1, 2019, 

and proposed an approach, including customized claims forms, that would allow for a single-step 

process to both identify the number of wildfire claims that exist and obtain basic documentation 

that would permit all parties to assess those claims. The Debtors believed then—and still believe 

now—that their proposed approach provides the most efficient mechanism to position all of the 

interested stakeholders to resolve the question that is at the core of these proceedings: the value 

and validity of all wildfire claims.

1 

Unfortunately, although the Debtors originally scheduled a hearing on their Bar 

Date Motion of May 22, 2019, that hearing has now been delayed for over a month because of 

actions taken by the TCC. First, at your request, we adjourned the hearing to June 11, 2019. 

 1 The Official Creditors Committee also appears to share this view and, in its recent filing in 

support of the Debtors’ Bar Date Motion, it stated that the Debtors’ Wildfire Claimant Proof of 

Claim Form and proposed Bar Date were “designed to elicit information that must be made 

known to all parties in interest in the near term in order to properly estimate the Debtors’ wildfire 

liabilities and bring these cases to [a] swift and successful conclusion.” UCC Statement [Docket 

No. 2308], at ¶17.

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Second, just over a week ago—after not raising any of these issues with the Debtors in the more 

than two months we have been discussing the Bar Date and claims issues or the month since we 

filed our proposed notice plan—the TCC filed its own motion seeking a completely different 

notice process and the appointment of a new noticing agent for wildfire claims that, to our 

knowledge, has never once been involved in such a process in any Chapter 11 proceeding and 

has been criticized repeatedly for inadequacies in the class action claims administration process.2 

Not surprisingly, given the significance of these issues and the limited time you proposed to 

provide to the Court to consider your motion, the Court adjourned the hearing to June 26. Most 

recently, you notified us on Friday that you would seek to compel compliance with untimely and 

irrelevant discovery requests and ask the Court to shorten time to address an urgency of your 

own making. 

During the past month, the TCC has also urged the Debtors to abandon their 

proposed claim form in favor of the TCC’s, arguing primarily that there is extensive information 

about individual claimant’s alleged damages already contained in the so-called BrownGreer

database. As you know, the BrownGreer database was created as a result of a so-ordered 

stipulation entered by the state court in the North Bay Wildfire cases prior to the commencement 

of these Chapter 11 Cases. The very purpose of the database and the state court’s order was to 

provide PG&E a mechanism to obtain basic information about the scope and size of wildfire 

claims that are being asserted against it. It was, therefore, explicitly contemplated in the original 

state court order that PG&E would have direct access to this database. 

Notwithstanding that history—and the TCC’s repeated insistence to us, the UCC,

and the Court that the BrownGreer database already contains or will contain all the information 

the parties could need to assess and value the wildfire claims—the TCC has refused numerous 

requests by the Debtors and the UCC to be granted access to the database to assess what

information is actually in the database. We have also held at least two meetings among the 

Debtors, the TCC and the UCC at which the Debtors and the UCC have requested some detail 

from the TCC about what is currently in the database, what the TCC envisions in regards to 

documentation supporting the asserted claims that would be added, and the specific mechanisms

the stakeholders could use to ensure that the claims asserted through the database are valid, nonfraudulent and not inflated. That, of course, is a legitimate interest that all stakeholders share 

and a concern the Court has appropriately identified.

3

 

 2 See, e.g., Pollard v. Remington, Case No. 13-0086-CV-W-ODS (court ordering a rework of 

Steven Weisbrot’s notice program due, in part, to the “low response rate” of claim forms that 

have been completed); Remijas v. The Neiman Marcus Group, Case No. 14-cv-1735 (court decertifying a settlement class noting the “poor response rate demonstrated” by the number of 

claim forms that had been submitted and the court encouraging the “parties to consider whether 

further attempts at notice are warranted”). 

3 See, e.g., Hr’g Tr. (May 22, 2019) at 86:3-6 (the Court stating that if “the debtor filed a plan 

tomorrow and there was a claim’s [sic] deadline, every one of the victims would have to file a 

proof of claim and be subject to whatever proper inquiry as to the entitlement to the claim”), and 

Hr’g Tr. (May 9, 2019) at 11:19-21 (the Court stating that “we know there are countless real 

claimants in this case, but there might be some not real claimants” and that there would be an 

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The result of the events described above has been significant delay and the 

inability of the Debtors, the UCC, or anyone outside of the TCC and the wildfire plaintiffs’ 

lawyers to conduct any real assessment of whether the database that you claim is critical to 

noticing and claims valuation and validity work is actually sufficient. While we are concerned 

about this conduct and what it suggests in terms of the path forward, our goal is the same as it 

always has been: to ensure that wildfire victims are fairly compensated as soon as possible. As 

a result, in the interests of moving these cases forward to the chapter 11 plan process, we are 

writing to notify you that we propose the following approach in connection with these disputed 

issues. 

Claims Form and Bar Date

In light of the TCC’s objections and failure to work productively towards a 

solution, and our desire to move forward as promptly as possible, the Debtors are prepared to 

adopt the TCC’s proposed wildfire proof of claim form. This is by no means an admission or 

acknowledgment that the information requested in the TCC Proof of Claim Form is sufficient as 

you admit by your suggested two-step process. Accordingly, we reserve all rights to take 

discovery with respect to, among other things, all wildfire claims that are filed. That is a critical 

way to address what should be our shared concern: the possibility of fraudulent, invalid or 

overstated claims, which undermine the fairness of the process. We continue to believe this 

approach will result in overall delay (and increased costs) in determining the validity and value 

of wildfire claims, but we have been unable to persuade you to adopt our single-step approach. 

Continuing motion practice with the TCC to resolve these issues itself has costs, which the 

Debtors seek to minimize. Note, however, that we also do not concede that the BrownGreer 

database provides sufficient claim information and reserve all of our rights with respect thereto

and to all other discovery matters as well.

Because we are willing to adopt the TCC’s simple wildfire claim form, we believe 

there is no reasonable argument that the Bar Date should be delayed until January 31, 2020. 

While we understand and share the concern about the difficulties that are being experienced by 

the victims of the tragic Camp Fire (and all other Northern California wildfires), we also believe 

it is in the best interests of all stakeholders—including those victims—to establish an earlier Bar 

Date. Our proposed Bar Date provides more than enough time for wildfire claimants to submit 

the basic TCC wildfire claim form, which does not require any supporting documentation, any 

detail about the nature of the claim, or any valuation of the claim itself.4 Furthermore, 

 

issue “if there’s a claim that should be defeated not because of the nature of the injury suffered 

by the victim, but rather that the person isn’t even a victim at all”).

4 Indeed, even members of the constituency the TCC represents would likely support an earlier 

bar date. See, e.g., Objection to Motion of Debtors Pursuant to 11 U.S.C. §§ 502(b)(9) and 

105(a), Fed. R. Bankr. P. 2002, 3003(c)(3), 5005, and 9007, and L.B.R. 3003-1 for Order (i) 

Establishing Deadline for Filing Proofs of Claim, (ii) Establishing the Form and Manner of 

Notice Thereof, and (iii) Approving Procedures for Providing Notice of Bar Date and Other 

Information to all Creditors and Potential Creditors [Docket No. 2240] (specifically stating that 

the Interested Parties do not object to the setting of a bar date in the timeframe proposed by the 

Debtors) and Objection by the Singleton Law Firm Fire Victim Claimants to: (1) the Proof-ofCase: 19-30088 Doc# 2562-1 Filed: 06/17/19 Entered: 06/17/19 13:03:06 Page 4

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representations have been made by you and the trial lawyers managing the BrownGreer database 

that it already contains over 10,000 claims related to the Camp Fire. See Declaration of Philip R. 

Strunk in Support of Objection of the Official Committee of Tort Claimants to Motion of the 

Debtors For Order (i) Establishing Deadline for Filing Proofs of Claim, (ii) Establishing the 

Form and Manner of Notice Thereof, and (iii) Approving Procedures for Providing Notice of 

Bar Date and Other Information to All Creditors and Potential Creditors [Docket No. 2306-6], 

at ¶7.

Given our willingness to adopt the TCC’s wildfire claim form to avoid further 

costly and inefficient disputes, we expect that you will withdraw the discovery requests served 

by the TCC on May 30, 2019. As Mr. Fuller conceded in his various emails to me on Friday, 

those requests are driven by your assertion that the Debtors’ do not need the information sought 

in the Debtors’ proposed wildfire claim form given the public disclosures the Debtors have made 

about potential wildfire liabilities. The Debtors’ adoption of the TCC’s wildfire claim form

eliminates any dispute about whether the Debtors are entitled to the customized wildfire claims 

information through their proposed wildfire claim form, thereby mooting the contested discovery 

based on your own description of its purpose.5 We trust that you will not continue to waste the 

Debtors’ resources or the Court’s time by pushing for discovery you do not need on the proposed 

expedited schedule that you created, or otherwise. 

Notice Procedures and Wildfire Noticing Agent

As noted above, we are mystified as to why the TCC never raised the issues 

directly with us that it set forth in its motion filed last week. We do, of course, share the desire 

 

Claim Forms Proposed by PG&E and the Tort Claimants Committee (Including a Proposed 

Alternative Form); and (2) the Wildfire-Claim Cut-Off Date Proposed by PG&E [Docket No. 

2248] (proposing November 8, 2019 as a bar date).

5 The requested discovery was inappropriate even before we agreed to use the TCC’s proposed 

wildfire claim form. The discovery sought information concerning the Debtors’ estimations of 

wildfire liabilities as a whole, including accruals for accounting purposes. These estimations of 

potential liability are largely based on public information since, as you well know, the Debtors 

do not have access to claim specific information from any of the individual wildfire claimants for 

the North Bay and Camp Fires. We have already provided the TCC with a list of the public 

sources used by the Debtors’ economic consultant, Compass Lexecon, whose work I have 

already explained is protected work product and would not, therefore, be subject to discovery in 

any event. The simple fact is that PG&E does not have access to documents and information 

from any of the individual 2017 or 2018 wildfire claimants that would validate the existence of 

their claims or their magnitude and permit the estimation of the size of those claims based upon 

actual losses incurred. Modeling of potential damages for required public disclosure purposes 

based on primarily publicly-available data is no substitute for documents and other information 

necessary to establish actual losses suffered by claimants who are seeking payment, particularly 

if (as we expect) the TCC is unwilling to agree that the Debtors’ current estimate of probable 

loss of approximately $14.0 billion for all North Bay and Camp wildfire claims is sufficient for 

the chapter 11 process. 

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to ensure that sufficient notice be provided to the wildfire claimants. We disagree with your 

characterizations of our proposed notice process, as well as the statements that your proposed 

approach is required to satisfy due process. We nonetheless are considering your proposed 

supplemental notice mechanisms to determine whether we believe any of them should be 

incorporated into our plan, which is the same approach we would have taken had you raised any 

of these suggestions with use before filing your motion. A simple phone call to discuss these 

issues would have been the appropriate method to proceed rather than a complete lack of 

communication while you spent resources of the estates pursuing your own strategic maneuvers. 

Simply put, the TCC has no basis to co-opt the noticing process and its proposal to use a

seemingly unqualified noticing agent is completely inappropriate. We will submit our 

opposition to those proposals at the appropriate time. 

The Debtors’ accommodations described above moot much of our dispute with 

the TCC regarding the Bar Date Motion (including the related TCC discovery request). 

However, a live dispute remains over the TCC’s proposed noticing agent and notice plan, as well 

as the timing for the Bar Date, and discovery is appropriate on those contested issues. We will,

therefore, serve appropriate discovery requests on those issues later today. 

Regards,

Kevin J. Orsini

Robert A. Julian, Esq.

Baker Hostetler

11601 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 1400

Los Angeles, CA 90025

Eric Goodman, Esq.

Baker Hostetler

Key Tower, 127 Public Square

Suite 2000

Cleveland, OH 44114

Lars Fuller, Esq.

Baker Hostetler

1801 California Street, Suite 4400

Denver, CO 80202

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