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.
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.