A decade of sustained original research on a single subject
The Purpose
For more than three decades, insurers have retained financially dependent experts to provide opinions supporting the denial or underpayment of claims. The major national and state treatises address expert bias issues minimally or not at all. Regulators have taken no meaningful enforcement action. Courts have developed a doctrinal framework — most clearly articulated in Demer v. IBM Corp. LTD Plan (9th Cir. 2016) — but the case law is scattered across jurisdictions and lines of coverage, and no comprehensive practitioner resource existed to synthesize it.
This site and the accompanying publication exist to fill that void. The insurance industry's use of biased experts affects virtually every line of coverage in every jurisdiction. Private litigation is the only working enforcement mechanism — and it depends on practitioners who can recognize, document, and defeat the bias when they encounter it.
The Author
Christopher L. Dion is a California-licensed attorney who has focused exclusively on the insurance industry's use of biased experts to deny and underpay claims pretextually since January 2016. Over the past decade, he has built the most comprehensive research corpus on this subject available to the plaintiff-side bar: more than 1,000 reported decisions from state and federal courts, nearly 500 scholarly and practitioner articles, and a 14-chapter legal treatise analyzing the doctrinal, evidentiary, and regulatory dimensions of expert bias in insurance claims from the ground up.
He is the author of two practitioner articles on expert bias in insurance claims (2017, 2024) and provides expert bias evaluation services to plaintiff-side attorneys across California. He has submitted regulatory commentary to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners on Model Privacy Act No. 672 and to the California legislature on SB 354 (2025 and 2026), AB 1680 (2026), and AB 1642/AB 1795 (2026).
His work addresses the full litigation arc — from initial evaluation of the insurer's expert through discovery, motions practice, trial preparation, and appeal — applying a consistent analytical framework grounded in the standards, factors, and presumptions courts have developed to identify and remedy expert bias in insurance claims.
The Publication
The research underlying this site is published weekly in Expert Bias Report: Insurance Claims — a practitioner-focused Substack publication providing analysis and advocacy on the insurance industry's use of biased experts to deny and underpay claims.
Each week, the publication covers:
Reported decisions across all lines of coverage and all 51 jurisdictions — patterns, doctrinal development, and decisions that deserve more attention than they receive.
Firsthand analysis of proceedings at the NAIC and state legislatures affecting claims handling practices and expert disclosure obligations.
Selected chapters from the 14-chapter e-treatise, available in full to paid subscribers ($200/year).
Discovery frameworks, factor indices, and analytical resources for attorneys applying the Demer standards, factors, and presumptions.
Free subscribers receive all legislative and regulatory content. Paid subscribers ($200/year) receive full access to the e-treatise and all subscriber-only practitioner tools.