Background
A tree fell on Dustin and Amanda Cain’s Mississippi home in August 2022. Their homeowners’ insurer, State Farm, concluded that the impact caused only a roof puncture and attributed other damage to excluded conditions such as long-term thermal movement, deferred maintenance, and settlement. State Farm ultimately paid the Cains $13,172.98, while the Cains maintained that the tree caused substantially greater damage to the home, swimming pool, and concrete.
The Cains sued for breach of contract, bad faith, and related damages. They designated Sean Fee as their sole expert but submitted a report jointly authored by Fee and Jim Irmiter that did not identify which opinions or analysis belonged to Fee. On the discovery deadline, they supplemented their disclosures without prior leave of court with a similarly coauthored repair estimate totaling $149,325.66.
The district court struck the reports because they did not distinguish Fee’s work and opinions from Irmiter’s, even though only Fee had been designated as an expert. With no admissible expert evidence establishing causation or damages, the court granted State Farm summary judgment, dismissed the suit with prejudice, and later denied the Cains’ post-judgment motions.
The Court’s Holding
The Fifth Circuit affirmed. It held that the district court did not abuse its discretion by excluding the reports. Although experts may rely on information supplied by others and multiple designated experts may sometimes prepare a joint report, the disclosed opinions must belong to the testifying expert, and a joint report must clearly delineate the opinions and work attributable to each expert. The Cains’ reports established only that Fee and Irmiter both contributed to, reviewed, and agreed with their contents; they did not identify Fee’s particular analysis, opinions, or supporting reasons.
The court also affirmed summary judgment. The Cains conceded that, without Fee’s testimony and the FBS estimate, they could not prove their claimed damages. Because determining the cause of the disputed property damage required specialized construction or repair knowledge, the absence of admissible expert testimony left them unable to prove causation or their breach-of-contract claim.
The Cains’ extra-contractual claims failed as well because Mississippi law requires an underlying breach of contract to support an insurance bad-faith claim. The court also found no abuse of discretion in the denial of post-judgment relief because the Cains did not identify a manifest legal or factual error or newly discovered evidence bearing on the exclusion of their expert evidence.
Key Takeaways
- A jointly prepared expert report must clearly identify the opinions, analysis, and work attributable to each expert.
- An expert may rely on others’ data but cannot merely serve as the mouthpiece for another person’s unidentified opinions.
- When specialized knowledge is necessary to prove property-damage causation, exclusion of the plaintiff’s expert evidence can support summary judgment on both contract and derivative bad-faith claims.
Why It Matters
The decision underscores the litigation risk of submitting a joint expert report while designating only one author as an expert. Agreement among the authors does not substitute for a disclosure explaining what the designated witness personally analyzed, concluded, and intends to testify about.
For insurance litigants, the ruling also illustrates how exclusion of causation and damages evidence can dispose of the entire case. Where state-law bad-faith claims depend on proving a contractual breach, those claims ordinarily cannot survive after the underlying coverage claim fails.