There’s an old saying that fits squarely with how the recent Ohio case of Leonard v. State Farm decision 1 came down: “The devil is in the details.” In insurance disputes, those details start with the policy language. The Ohio Court of Appeals’ recent opinion shows what happens when a policyholder’s counsel fails to make the policy part of the record. Without it, the court simply had nothing to interpret and nothing to enforce.
But the opinion also raises deeper questions about the nature of the appraisal process and the ever-contentious issue of matching. The court accepted State Farm’s position that this was a coverage dispute rather than a question of the amount of loss. I fundamentally disagree. Matching disputes are valuation issues. They go to the scope and cost of necessary repairs, not whether coverage exists.
As I explained in my United Policyholders amicus brief before the Connecticut Supreme Court in Karl Klass v. Liberty Mutual Insurance Company, public policy favors appraisal because appraisal can be a “simple, speedy, inexpensive, and fair method of determining the amount of loss.” This is exactly the kind of disagreement that matching represents. When one part of a roof or wall can’t be replaced without rendering the structure mismatched, the appraisers’ task is to decide how much it will cost to restore the property to its pre-loss uniform appearance. They can even take depreciation on that amount to come to an actual cash value amount, as discussed in The Stupidity of Taking Matching Out of Actual Cash Value.
That is squarely within the appraisal clause’s function. Readers interested in that case and how Connecticut views matching within the appraisal panel’s authority should read Matching is a Factual Determination and Can Be Resolved by Appraisal. I also suggest reading Does Colorado Require Matching? Is Matching a Coverage Issue or a Factual Issue For an Appraisal Panel.
In Leonard, the policyholder’s roofer argued that the replacement shingles couldn’t be matched and that the existing decking didn’t meet code. Those are classic construction and valuation questions. These are not abstract legal interpretations of policy coverage, but something that property insurance adjusters study and debate every day in their line of work. But the trial court, and later the appellate court, framed the dispute as one of coverage rather than scope. Once the policyholder’s counsel failed to introduce the policy itself into evidence, the fight was effectively lost.
The result is unfortunate not only for Mr. Leonard but also for policyholders in general. When courts categorize matching disputes as “coverage” issues, they transform common factual questions of repair cost into legal questions that bar appraisal. This erodes the very purpose of the appraisal clause, which I always hear good ole’ Steve Badger saying is ‘the fair and efficient resolution of disagreements about value.’
Of course, Steve Badger was never around several hundred years ago to know why the appraisal clause was placed in a policy, and the people who wrote it into the policy did not leave anything for us to determine why they included it. But, as we emphasized in the Klass amicus brief, “[o]n an everyday basis, insurance appraisers and adjusters deal with scope of damage issues such as matching, actual cash value, wear and tear, depreciation, and other mundane adjustment issues.” Why can’t they also do it in an appraisal to put the dispute to rest?
The lesson here isn’t simply that policyholders need competent counsel because they certainly do to prevail against the insurance industry’s very competent counsel. Instead, it’s that everyone in the insurance claims business must remember that everything starts with the policy language and with the understanding that appraisal is meant to resolve factual disagreements over the extent and value of a loss. Matching isn’t about expanding coverage, but about quantifying what it takes to make the insured whole, consistent with the policy’s promise of indemnity.
As lawyers, adjusters, and claims professionals, we should resist the creeping trend of labeling factual valuation disputes as “coverage” questions. Courts should enforce appraisal clauses as intended and as a means of resolving exactly these types of conflicts before they spiral into unnecessary litigation.
I want to give a shout-out to a fine insurance policyholder attorney, Robert Rutter, for bringing this case to my attention to share on this blog.
Thought for the Day
“Facts are stubborn things.”
—John Adams
1 Leonard v. State Farm Fire & Cas. Ins. Co., 2025-Ohio-5089, 2025 WL 3140754 (Ohio App. Nov. 10, 2025).