Plaintiff's expert was excluded for never having seen the property. Wehman v. State Farm Fire and Casualty Co., 2015 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 117445 (D. N.J. Sept. 3, 2015). Plaintiff's home was damaged by Superstorm Sandy on October 29, 2012. He reported his loss to State Farm on Octorber 25, 2013, claiming that some roof shingles had come loose during the storm. No other damage was reported. An investigator for State Farm visited the property. The investigator determined that the damage to the roof was not caused by Sandy, but by age, wear and tear, all of which were excluded causes under the policy. Plaintiff informed the investigator there was no damage to the interior of the home and denied the investigator's request to enter the house to inspect. Plaintiff then sued State Farm for breach of contract and bad faith. Plaintiff designated Timothy Fife of Gulf Coast Estimating Services as his expert in the litigation. Fife's estimate of damages consisted of twelve pages of allegedly required repairs for both the interior and exterior of Plaintiff's property totaling $86,351.01. Fife never visited the property to inspect and never spoke with Plaintiff regarding the condition of the property prior to Sandy or the damage allegedly caused by Sandy. Instead, Fife relied upon an inspection conducted by someone else. State Farm moved to strike Mr. Fife's estimate and opinions. State Farm argued that Fife's estimate was unreliable because it was prepared without any knowledge of the condition of the property prior to Sandy or the weather conditions to which the property was subjected during Sandy. Further, Mr. Fife failed to distinguish between damage caused by Sandy and preexisting damage to the property. Plaintiff contended that Mr. Fife employed someone to photograph the home, reviewed the photographs, and entered his calculations into an industry-accepted computer program to generate an estimate. The court excluded the Fife estimate because Plaintiff failed to prove it should be permitted under FRE 702 and Daubert. Mr. Fife did not explain what let him to conclude that the damage to Plaintiff's property resulted from conditions that occurred during Sandy rather than from other sources of damage, such as wear and tear and deterioration. Without inspecting Plaintiff's property, Mr. Fife's conclusion that the listed damage to Plaintiff's property was caused by Sandy was speculative and offered little more than the mere possibiltiiy that Sandy caused damage to Plaintiff's property.
Follow our page in Facebook "Insurance Online". from Insurance Law Hawaii
