Practical Tips · Case Study · Factor Four · July 2026
Five years of litigation, one self-authored “Principles” document, and a discovery denial that decided the case before the merits did.
Donald Fessenden’s long-term disability claim was denied by Reliance Standard Life Insurance Co. on the strength of paper reviews — doctors who never examined him, supplied through an outside vendor. His lawsuit, filed in federal court in Indiana in 2015, ran nearly five years, went up on appeal and came back down, and ended in a settlement while he was still trying to get one thing: the file that would show whether the insurer’s experts were as independent as the insurer said. He never got it. The story of why is the clearest lesson this series has on the fourth bias factor — the insurer’s reasonable measures — and on how it is won and lost in practice.
Early in the case, Fessenden asked for discovery into the insurer’s relationship with its reviewing doctors — a sensible request. Under Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. v. Glenn, the insurer’s structural conflict matters more or less depending on what it actually did to keep its evaluations fair. Under Demer v. IBM Corp. LTD Plan, decided by the Ninth Circuit just months earlier, the reviewing doctors’ own financial stake is a separate conflict — and a claimant who shows enough volume and money shifts the burden to the insurer to prove its experts clean. But Fessenden’s motion had a soft spot: it offered almost nothing to support the inference it asked the court to draw. A couple of cases involving the same doctors, neither involving this insurer. No compensation figures. No volume numbers. The modest showing that Demer rewards was never assembled.
The insurer’s response did not merely oppose the motion. It attached a self-authored “Claim Handling Statement of Principles,” describing in confident detail how its process was fair: examiners not paid or evaluated on their denial record and walled off from the finance department; vendors chosen on quality and timeliness, not outcomes; reviewing doctors required to keep outside practices so their income didn’t depend on insurance work. Fessenden had never seen this document. It arrived in supplemental briefing — after his motion was already on file, too late to test, too late even to respond to in the ordinary course.
The court read the Principles and did three things with them. It held they defeated any inference that the reviewing doctors were financially conflicted. It held they reduced the insurer’s structural conflict toward what Glenn calls the vanishing point. And it denied all further discovery as a fishing expedition — reasoning, in its own words, that there was “no reason to doubt” the insurer had followed its own document. The measures were never tested. No deposition, no audit trail, no records of how vendors were actually chosen or reviewers actually evaluated. A description of fairness, written by the party whose fairness was in question, produced at a moment when it could not be answered, was accepted as the fact of fairness. Summary judgment for the insurer followed — the court saying it affirmed “reluctantly.”
The appellate court reversed — on other grounds entirely, a deadline the insurer blew. Back in the district court, Fessenden tried again: a subpoena to the vendor for the expert file, compensation metrics, other claim outcomes. Motion after motion, into 2020, and each time the same wall — he had still not offered evidence of bias sufficient to justify the discovery that would supply the evidence. The circularity never broke. The case settled with the expert file still closed.
Here is the epilogue that turns the story into a lesson. In Stambaugh v. Reliance Standard Life Insurance Co., decided in Arizona in 2024, the same insurer faced a similar discovery motion — but this time the claimant’s motion was built on the insurer’s record, and the court granted everything, including discovery into the insurer’s bias-mitigation steps and a deposition on its hiring, management, and firing of its review vendors. The insurer settled within months. Same company, same playbook, opposite outcome — because the record met the paper. A record was available to Fessenden all along, too: a federal judge in another state had already reviewed the insurer’s history across a hundred-plus decisions and described an unbroken pattern of wrongful denials. It never made it into his motions.
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The factor this case illustrates: The Bias Factor Everyone Argues Wrong. The moves distilled to a field card: The Reasonable-Measures Checklist. Part of the four-factor arc that begins with The Standard Comes Before the Factors.
Distilled from the converted Fessenden litigation filings (docket, motions, and orders in Fessenden v. Reliance Standard Life Insurance Co., No. 3:15-CV-370 (N.D. Ind.); 927 F.3d 998) and the project’s Factor 4 doctrinal synthesis. Named authorities: Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. v. Glenn, 554 U.S. 105 (2008); Demer v. IBM Corp. LTD Plan, 835 F.3d 893 (9th Cir. 2016); Stambaugh v. Reliance Standard Life Insurance Co., 708 F. Supp. 3d 1388 (D. Ariz. 2024). Educational and informational only; not legal advice.