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.
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A rare look behind an unpublished summary-judgment loss.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.