Dallas Fort Worth Insurance Lawyer Blog
Insurance claims usually don’t need an expert to testify but an attorney handling these types of claims needs to know when to hire an expert. This is illustrated in a 2024 opinion from the Fort Worth Court of Appeals. The opinion is styled State Farm Lloyds v. John Hilmi.
Hilmi had his home and contents insured by State Farm. Helms asserts a lightening strike caused almost $200,000 of personal property at his home to be ‘fried”. State Farm disagreed and this lawsuit was filed against State Farm for breach of contract and violations of the Texas Insurance Code.
A jury trial was conducted and resulted in a favorable verdict for Hilmi. State Farm appealed and this Court reversed the judgment. The opinion should be read to get an understanding of the facts and testimony at trial. What follows is the legal logic.
According to State Farm, even though the jury implicitly found that lightning struck the Hilmis’ land, it was beyond a layperson’s common understanding to discern whether lightning had caused the damage to all of the Hilmis’ spreadsheeted items of personal property. The Hilmis, however, argue that a layperson did not need an expert to tell him what common sense dictated: that lightning could damage electronics.
We agree with the Hilmis that a lay juror’s common experience allows him to understand lightning’s ability to cause a power surge that damages a plugged-in electronic device. And we agree with the Hilmis that this common experience—taken together with lay evidence that a given electronic device operated without issue immediately before the lightning strike, was plugged in at the time of the strike, and stopped working immediately after the strike—is sufficient to establish a sequence of events which provides a strong, logically traceable connection between the event and the condition. Some of the Hilmis’ damaged personal property items fit this bill.
But for other personal property items on the Hilmis’ spreadsheet, the family relied on a more complex theory of causation. The Hilmis claimed that when the lightning strike(s) hit their property, the resulting power surge damaged not just a single plugged-in electronic device but all or most plugged-in devices throughout their home, that it traveled through many of those devices to damage the devices’ attachments and that it continued to linger in the home so as to damage items that were plugged in days later. An ordinary layperson lacks sufficient familiarity with lightning’s electrical
current and effects to determine how—or whether—the lightning strike(s) that hit the Hilmis’ land could or did produce such extensive, multi-layered damage. Indeed, while the jury was free to disregard State Farm’s expert testimony, the very nature of that testimony demonstrated the complexities of the Hilmis’
causation theory.
Even Mr. Hilmi acknowledged that he lacked sufficient expertise to determine the lightning strike’s effects. He admitted that, when it came to the family’s desktop computers and laptops that would not turn on, the family “just assumed since everything else was fried that they were too.” And he made similar statements regarding the family’s Apple watches, admitting that he “had no idea” what had
happened to them while speculating that it was “something . . . going on with the current in the house.”
Such testimony manifests an honest reflection of a layperson’s limitations. While the Hilmis could speculate that lightning was to blame for the extensive personal property damage that they had sustained or discovered in the months after the storm, such suspicion was legally insufficient to support the Hilmis’ multi-layered causation theory.
For many—if not most—of the Hilmis’ spreadsheeted personal property items, then, the causal link between the lightning strike(s) on their land and the damage to the listed item was a matter beyond common understanding. Expert testimony was required. And because it is undisputed that the Hilmis offered no such expert testimony, there was legally insufficient evidence to support the full amount of breach of contract damages awarded.