Practical Tips
A plain-language series on proving insurance expert bias — the standard the courts apply, the factors that establish it, and why it is the fight that matters.
These Practical Tips translate the framework behind this site into working guidance for insureds and their attorneys. The most recent tips appear first. New to the series? Start with The Loss the Insurer Is Happy to Take, then follow the standard and the four Demer factors that establish an inference of bias.
The ideas and the seminal authority are free here. The implementing corpus — the lesser-known cases that apply the framework, the curated synthesis of them, and the operational tools (discovery sets, disclosure demands, motion language) — is the paid product, available to subscribers of Expert Bias Report: Insurance Claims and through the bias-evaluation service.
Start Here · Field Guide · July 2026
New here? Start with the field guide. Three series distilled to one page each: the duty of good faith and fair dealing, the standards-factors-presumptions framework for proving expert bias, and the discovery objections insurers use to bury the proof, with the controlling authority for each point. A printable seven-page PDF, free to download and share.
Start Here · The Big Picture · July 2026
Insurers buy the expert opinions that let them deny claims they owe, then game the legal system to bury the proof so the scheme keeps running. The whole picture in one place: the scheme itself, the legal foundations that make it unlawful, the four Demer factors that expose it, and the fight over the evidence that decides every case. Free overview, paid implementing corpus.
The Discovery Objections Series · Recap · July 2026
Insurers game the discovery rules to keep their biased-expert scheme hidden. The whole series mapped: the five objection families sorted into one decision architecture, the master objection-by-evidence-type reference that predicts each fight, and the ten tactics that carry across all five parts. Free recap, paid master reference.
The Discovery Objections Series · Field Guide · July 2026
Five reach-for-it checklists that run as one system, from the sentence you plead in the complaint to the objection log you hand a jury. Each carries the single tactic that decides its fight: plead the pattern, offer the cheaper form, split the burden objection, concede the names, build the log. Free field guide, paid Implementing Kits.
The Discovery Objections Series · Part 5 · Checklist · July 2026
The residual objections rarely appear alone — they arrive stapled to the four this series already answered. Nineteen moves: sort the boilerplate from the substantiated, press the possession-or-control objection where it has teeth and only there, define the insurer broadly at the front end, serve pattern-and-practice discovery first and document unavoidable delay, meet prejudice with the discovery-admissibility line, define your own terms, and log every objection — because the catalogue is the obstruction record. Free checklist, paid Implementing Kit.
The Discovery Objections Series · Part 5 · Case Study · July 2026
Pattern-and-practice evidence is the slowest, most-fought dig in bad-faith discovery. Cecena v. Allstate (N.D. Cal. 2006): a two-page order that granted the Colonial Life relevance argument and denied the request anyway — not on the merits but on the calendar, for nine months’ unexplained delay — while the trial date the court invoked to deny it slipped sixteen months, and the request was never renewed. Free story, paid ground-by-ground.
The Discovery Objections Series · Part 5 · Overview · July 2026
The leftover objections — possession or control, untimeliness, prejudice, vagueness, trade secrecy, undue hardship — mostly lose one at a time, because each has a codified answer. Insurers raise all of them at once anyway, because the aggregate buys attrition. Only lack of possession or control has real teeth, and even it fails against the insurer’s own financial records. Raise the whole unsupported set, and it becomes the claimant’s obstruction evidence. Free overview, paid full map.
The Discovery Objections Series · Part 4 · Checklist · July 2026
You defeat the privacy objection by conceding away everything legitimate it protects. Nineteen moves: sort the four piles, stipulate the protective order and load it with the two terms that matter — identifiers redacted in filings, no contact with insureds — take production unredacted under it, waive the names you never needed, quote the whole statute including its judicial-order exception, treat the consent letter as a specialty tool, and hold privilege to logs and its narrow empire. Free checklist, paid Implementing Kit.
The Discovery Objections Series · Part 4 · Case Study · July 2026
The claimants had won the argument that pattern discovery survives into common-law bad faith — and lost every request anyway. Dobro v. Allstate (S.D. Cal. 2016), read as a checklist of concessions never made: opt-in consent letters where a protective order belonged, a demand for 10,082 nonparty identities a pattern theory never needed, and a truncated privacy statute their own motion assumed. Free story, paid ground-by-ground.
The Discovery Objections Series · Part 4 · Overview · July 2026
Privacy is the only objection in the catalogue asserted on behalf of someone other than the insurer — which is exactly why the winning move is to concede it. Offer a generous protective order, promise no contact, waive the names, take the files unredacted under the order, and quote the whole statute. What survives is a corporation holding a ledger, standing where a person is supposed to be. Free overview, paid deep-dive.
The Discovery Objections Series · Part 3 · Checklist · July 2026
The burden objection wears two faces — a real search-and-production cost with a demanding proof discipline, and an imagined “mini-trial” that pattern discovery has never produced. Twenty-one moves: bound the request on its face to collapse the universe, split the two faces, demand the quantified request-specific declaration, turn the self-induced burden around, kill the mini-trial fiction with the nature of the proof, and re-specify — never merely refuse — the compromise, tracing the full payment path first. Free checklist, paid Implementing Kit.
The Discovery Objections Series · Part 3 · Case Study · July 2026
An arbitrator had already rejected the insurer’s expert, and the discovery court found the bias statistics relevant — and the motion still failed. Morales v. Allstate Northbrook (C.D. Cal. 2021), the four avoidable layers of the loss, and the vendor-routed payment structure that had quietly booby-trapped the tax-ID compromise she refused when she should have re-specified it. Free story, paid ground-by-ground.
The Discovery Objections Series · Part 3 · Overview · July 2026
Once scope is settled, the insurer’s last objection is the most intuitive one: this will cost too much. It arrives wearing two faces. One is real — and must be quantified, request-specific, and not of the insurer’s own making. The other is the “mini-trial,” a proceeding that never occurs, because pattern proof is used as statistics, not relitigated claims. Tell them apart, and each falls to its own law. Free overview, paid deep-dive.
The Discovery Objections Series · Part 2 · Checklist · July 2026
The scope objections concede relevance and argue only about how much — so control the dimensions yourself. Fifteen moves: the six boundaries drafted onto the face of every request, the graduated sequence, the cheaper form offered early in writing, the particularity demand, and the two proportionality factors — relative access and the stakes — you put on the scale yourself. Free checklist, paid Implementing Kit.
The Discovery Objections Series · Part 2 · Case Study · July 2026
A single order denied the untethered pattern discovery and granted the targeted vendor discovery in the same breath — same judge, same insurer, same day. Armas v. USAA (N.D. Cal. 2019), the four avoidable failures behind the loss, the concession that defined the fishing expedition on the record, and the roadmap the court wrote into its denial that no one ever filed. Free story, paid ground-by-ground.
The Discovery Objections Series · Part 2 · Overview · July 2026
Once the relevance gate is cleared, the insurer stops saying the bias evidence is beside the point and starts saying you asked for too much of it. Overbreadth concedes relevance; proportionality disputes only the exchange rate. Courts narrow rather than deny — and whoever proposes the narrowed terms controls them. The six boundaries, and the two factors the reported denials leave off the scale. Free overview, paid deep-dive.
The Discovery Objections Series · Part 1 · Overview · July 2026
The series that takes the insurer’s wall of discovery objections apart, one at a time, opens with the objection guarding the gate. Relevance is the objection insurers assert most and win least, because in a bias case the insurer’s patterns and practices are elements of the claim — and the “fishing expedition” epithet has been an invalid objection in California since Greyhound (1961). Why the few losses happen, and how to avoid them. Free overview, paid deep-dive.
The Discovery Objections Series · Part 1 · Case Study · July 2026
A sophisticated, well-represented policyholder sought exactly the other-insureds discovery the law allows — and lost it to a relevance objection before serving a request, because its own complaint pleaded no pattern. San Diego Unified Port District v. Underwriters at Lloyd’s (2016), and the three drafting decisions that would have changed the outcome. Free story, paid ground-by-ground.
The Discovery Objections Series · Part 1 · Checklist · July 2026
The relevance objection is won at the drafting stage, not the hearing. Every move, from the complaint you file to the reply brief you sign: plead the pattern, key to the nexus, build the limits in, assemble the reason-to-believe file, and force the codified frame when the objection lands. Free checklist, paid Implementing Kit.
The Foundation Series · Recap · July 2026
Five parts, one argument — reduced to a single checklist: the six enforceable obligations the duty of good faith imposes, each keyed to the California case that anchors it, with a note on whether the same protection survives into ERISA. The duties converge; the remedies do not. Free and paid editions.
The Foundation Series · Part 5 of 5 · July 2026
The same bought expert, the same rigged denial — and, depending only on where your coverage came from, a heavy price or almost none. Two regimes, one built on trust law and one on contract, converge on the identical suspicion of the conflicted decisionmaker (Glenn, Demer); then ERISA preemption strips the remedy (Pilot Life, Davila) — the residue of a pension statute stretched over insurance claims it was never designed to govern. Free and paid editions.
The Foundation Series · Part 4 of 5 · July 2026
Where the series lands: the general duty of good faith resolves into concrete claims-handling obligations — not to deny unreasonably, equal consideration, to investigate fully and fairly, and honesty — and each one, standing alone, condemns the biased expert. An insurer “cannot insulate itself… by the simple expedient of hiring an expert… to manufacture a ‘genuine dispute.’” Free overview, paid deep-dive, and a Wilson v. 21st Century case study.
The Foundation Series · Part 3 of 5 · July 2026
Why insurance, almost alone among contracts, carries a duty of good faith enforceable in tort — the “special relationship” coined in 1979. California built the tort, then fenced it in; the fence is the evidence, because every reason it gave for keeping the remedy out of employment and lending is a description of what a biased expert is built to exploit. Free overview, paid deep-dive, and an Egan v. Mutual of Omaha case study.
The Foundation Series · Part 2 of 5 · July 2026
What the covenant actually requires: the decades-long Summers–Burton debate, and the working answer California reached that the academy never did — Burton’s discretion as the trigger, Summers’s objective unreasonableness as the measure. In Carma (1992), the covenant “can be breached for objectively unreasonable conduct, regardless of the actor’s motive” — the standard that disarms the insurer’s no-one-meant-any-harm defense. Free overview, paid deep-dive, and a Foley/Carma case study.
The Foundation Series · Part 1 of 5 · July 2026
The ground floor beneath the Practical Tips: the duty of good faith and fair dealing is an ordinary term of every contract that becomes, in insurance, the source of the insurer’s duties. The covenant’s origin from Kirke La Shelle (1933) through Comunale (1958) — and the 1914 insurance case, Brassil, sitting mostly unnoticed at the doctrine’s root. Free and paid editions.
Series Recap · Standards, Factors & Presumptions · July 2026
Twenty-one posts, one architecture: the inference-of-bias standard, the four Demer factors, and the rebuttable presumption, laid out together with the case study anchoring each piece — and why putting them in this order is a critical development in insurance law.
Capstone Kit · Master Checklist · July 2026
Six modules, one sequence. Most losing bias cases lost on order, not on facts — the whole architecture on one page: eight phases, the decision fork each turns on, and the module checklist that carries each phase’s detail.
Capstone Kit · SKILLS File v1.0 · July 2026
Not an essay — the evaluation instrument itself, versioned and machine-readable: the four factors converted into declaration paragraphs, computable metrics, and coding rules you (or your AI, handed the file verbatim) can run against any claim file. Including the issue the bar hasn’t absorbed: the token payment — a 97.5% denial wearing a payment’s clothes.
Practical Tip · The Capstone · Presumptions & Burdens · July 2026
Every factor in this series builds to one moment: the burden flips from claimant to insurer. The access principle behind that shift, the four-step Demer sequence, and the question the law hasn’t settled — what defeats an insurer’s genuine-dispute defense at summary judgment.
Practical Tip · Case Study · Presumptions & Burdens · July 2026
Demer v. IBM read as a litigation story rather than a doctrine machine: what the insurer left on the table by never tracking its reviewers’ neutrality, and what the claimant left on the table by skipping the deposition and the pattern evidence that would have won more.
Practical Tip · Checklist · Presumptions & Burdens · July 2026
The presumption does not win itself. Six steps that shift the burden to the insurer — lead with the modest showing, make silence cost something, match the rebuttal to the conflict — stated plainly, no case cites required.
Practical Tip · The Demer Factors · Factor Four · July 2026
The fourth factor doesn’t ask what the insurer got wrong in your claim — it asks what the insurer never built. Glenn’s active-steps catalog, the paper-safeguards playbook insurers run once courts start asking for measures, and the single test that cuts through it.
Practical Tip · Case Study · Factor Four · July 2026
Five years of litigation, one self-authored “Principles” document produced only after the claimant’s motion was on file, and a discovery denial that decided the case before the merits did — and the same insurer, caught the same way years later, once the record met the paper.
Practical Tip · Checklist · July 2026
The insurer says its process is fair. Nine moves for making it prove that — argue the omission, lead with metrics, treat the paper as a claim to test, and the standard deflections to expect at each step.
Practical Tip · The Demer Factors · Factor Three · July 2026
Flawed methods and procedural irregularities are the earliest bias evidence in a claim file — visible before discovery is served. The two layers of the defect, the “says who?” test for unsourced principles, and why in first-party insurance it reaches bad faith rather than mere credibility.
Practical Tip · Checklist · July 2026
Read the expert’s report cold, before anything else in the file. Ten defects visible on the face of the report — including the unsourced-principle tell — and ten irregularities in the process around it, with the three disciplines for spending them.
Practical Tip · Case Study · July 2026
Regulators documented the industry’s largest biased-expert operation — then settled it with an affidavit, two unenforceable sentences, and a mandate to hire more of the experts they declined to regulate. Twenty years of federal decisions document what happened next.
Practical Tip · The Demer Factors · Factor One · July 2026
What the insurer paid its expert — and how often it had paid before — is the cheapest, most-discoverable proof of bias. In a bad-faith claim it is not private; it is evidence the investigation was built to deny, and Valley Bank is not the wall insurers pretend.
Practical Tip · Checklist · July 2026
Most compensation-discovery motions are lost in the drafting, not the law. Ten moves that win an expert’s pay records — lead with the duty, ask for 1099s not tax returns, reach the vendor, pre-empt the Valley Bank objection — and the four mistakes that quietly lose them.
Practical Tip · Case Study · July 2026
The plaintiffs in Brzezinski v. Allstate pled a selection-bias theory, then subpoenaed the examiner’s income instead of his outcomes, argued “credibility,” served no concurrent interrogatories, and answered half the privacy objection. Four avoidable mistakes — and the corrective for each.
Practical Tip · Other Insureds’ PII · June 2026
The proof of a biased claims practice lives in the other insureds’ files, not in the people who filed them. The names and addresses are the hardest discovery to get and the one you least need — and asking for them can taint the file discovery you would otherwise win.
Practical Tip · Case Study · June 2026
Insurers wave Shirley v. Allstate as a privacy wall. Read closely, it is a wrong-question case: the plaintiffs asked for the names instead of the files, drew a fishing-expedition denial, and lost the whole case on summary judgment a month later.
Practical Tip · Checklist · June 2026
Six moves that keep a request for other insureds’ personal information from sinking the discovery around it — don’t lead with the names, get the files first, meet the privacy statute with its own exceptions, concede redaction, target litigated claims, and reach PII only through certification, never opt-in.
Practical Tip · The Demer Factors · Factor Two · June 2026
Factor two is the expert’s pattern across other insureds’ claim files — the proof that turns one convenient opinion into a practice. It lives in the insurer’s cabinet, reachable only by discovery; California has allowed that discovery since Colonial Life (1982), and courts grant it far more often than the industry admits.
Practical Tip · Case Study · June 2026
The OICF-discovery denial insurers quote above all others is Tilem v. Travelers. Read in full, it is a catalog of how to lose — wrong claim pled, no threshold showing, a “without prejudice” treated as the end of the road — not a rule that the files are off-limits.
Practical Tip · Checklist · June 2026
The affirmative corrective to Tilem: seven steps drawn from what the granting orders share and the denials lack — match the tool to the claim, make the threshold showing, key the request to the biased participant, beat the burden objection with the search method and AI, hold proportionality caps in reserve, pre-answer privacy without volunteering opt-in, and name the recognized purposes.
Practical Tip · Case Study · June 2026
A rare look behind an unpublished summary-judgment loss. The full record survives — including the insurer’s admission that it could not name a single time its expert ever sided with a policyholder — and shows how a strong set of facts collapses when the three layers of a bias case (standard, factors, presumption) are never assembled.
Practical Tip · Checklist · June 2026
The affirmative corrective to that loss: five steps to develop the inference-of-bias standard, the four Demer factors, and the rebuttable presumption — in order, and before the summary-judgment cutoff forecloses them.
Practical Tip · The Standard · June 2026
The rule the factors exist to satisfy: the inference-of-bias standard. Borrowed from a century of adjudicator-bias law (Tumey, Commonwealth Coatings, Caperton, Haworth), graduated rather than binary, and already affirmed for insurer-retained experts — the test you plant before you ever argue the money.
Practical Tip · The Demer Factors · Factor One · June 2026
Factor one is the money — the expert’s compensation and assignment volume. The two metrics that trigger the burden-shift, in plain language, and how to recognize financial-dependence bias before you ever draft a discovery request.
Practical Tip · Start Here · June 2026
Why attacking the expert’s thoroughness wins the wrong battle — and why bias is the only fight that reaches bad-faith damages. The place to start the series.