Ohio Says an Appraisal Award Is Nearly Unbreakable. Scope It Before It Closes.

Brotherhood Mutual closed the file on August 23, 2019 with a check for $3,192.67, enough to replace forty-two shingles and repair the locker-room ceiling underneath them. The accompanying letter said the rest of the wind damage was not covered.² One Church had the check voided five months later, invoked the appraisal clause in its commercial property endorsement, and on May 30, 2020 the two appraisers signed an award for $313,271.98.² Thirty days from demand to award, and ninety-eight times the carrier's number.

The award listed no open items. On July 23, 2026 the Supreme Court of Ohio held that the omission was fatal to everything that came after it.¹

The appraisal did exactly what appraisal is for

The storm hit the church property on North Hamilton Road in Gahanna on February 24, 2019. One Church reported it on May 9. Brotherhood answered on June 4 with a reservation of rights, sent an engineer from Haag Engineering to inspect on June 20, and had his report in hand by July 25.² The August 15 letter enclosed that report and drew the coverage line at forty-two shingles.

Nothing moved for five months. Then, on January 28, 2020, One Church's representative told Brotherhood to void the check, and on April 30 the church invoked the appraisal provision in the Broadened Building and Personal Property Coverage Part, Form BCP-12(B) (4.0).² One Church named Land Claims Services. Brotherhood named Engle Martin & Associates. The two appraisers inspected together on May 28 and agreed two days later. No umpire was needed.

The record makes the case for appraisal about as cleanly as a record can. A carrier's engineering report had priced the loss at roughly one percent of what two independent appraisers reached when they walked the buildings together. The same instrument did comparable work in Iowa, where an appraisal moved a disputed amount of loss that litigation had not budged. On an amount-of-loss fight, appraisal moves money that argument cannot.

It is also the one step in the file that cannot be taken twice.

What the award form did not say

Brotherhood issued payment on August 3, 2020 for $312,371.98, the award less a $900 deductible, and told One Church that recoverable depreciation would follow once repairs were complete. The church accepted and negotiated the check.²

Repairs started. Damage appeared that nobody had priced. In October 2020 One Church asked for another $206,663.09, two thirds of the award all over again, on the ground that the damage had not been known or discoverable while the appraisers were on site.

Brotherhood's answer came on November 24, and the reasoning in it is the whole of this case. It enclosed $39,089.52 in recoverable depreciation and refused the supplemental demand because of the binding appraisal award, "which did not list any open or outstanding items."² One Church negotiated that check too. On January 25, 2021 it wrote asking Brotherhood to reopen the appraisal. On February 19 it sued.

Look at what the signed award actually contained. The appraisers certified that they "have conscientiously performed the duties assigned to us, agreeably to the foregoing stipulations, and have appraised and determined, and do hereby award as the amount of loss *** $313,271.98."² A number, and the attestation that produced it. Not a word about what the May 28 inspection could not reach, which assemblies stayed closed, or what remained open pending demolition. The Tenth District's own recitation notes that the appraisers "jointly agreed to the scope of necessary repairs" before they stated the amount. Scope was settled that day, by agreement, in a document that recorded only a figure.

Paragraph 22 is a documentation standard

The Supreme Court of Ohio reversed and reinstated the dismissal. Justice Deters wrote for five colleagues; Justice Fischer dissented alone.

The governing rule is old and was not disturbed. An appraisal award is conclusive between the parties, and a court will interfere only where the defect is egregious enough to undermine the award itself, "something more than error of judgment, such as corruption in the arbitrator, or gross mistake." To qualify as manifest mistake, the Sixth Circuit's formulation controls: the error must be of such character that the appraiser "would have corrected it had it been called to his attention."³ A mere error of judgment falls short of that.

What the court added is procedural, and it is the part that reaches into a claim file. Civ.R. 9(B) requires that mistake be pleaded with particularity,⁵ and the court held that particularity means the alleged facts must satisfy each element of the claim. Applying that to One Church's complaint, paragraph 22 reads like an inspection checklist. The complaint said additional hidden damages were discovered. It did not say who discovered them, how they were discovered, where they were found, why they had been hidden, or why any of it rose to a mistake the appraiser would have corrected.¹ One Church never used the word mistake at all.

Then the sentence that should change how a scope is documented: "One Church's complaint does not allege that the appraisers were mistaken but instead that the award is incomplete."¹

A footnote does quieter damage. The parties had briefed the Haag Report at length, and the court refused to look at it, because a Civ.R. 12(C) motion tests the pleading and One Church's complaint neither attached the report nor referred to it.¹ The engineering analysis existed. It sat in the claim file through the whole appeal. For the purpose that mattered, it was not there.

Eighteen decisions, and none of them went the other way

Briefing on both sides of these disputes treats the fraud-or-manifest-mistake exception as a live possibility. The published record suggests otherwise.

A full-text search of the Ohio Reporter of Decisions across the Supreme Court, all twelve districts and the Court of Claims, for opinions decided between 2000 and 2026, returns twenty-four decisions across five phrase queries. Eighteen of them are insurance appraisal decisions. Reading all eighteen, the number in which a property-insurance appraisal award was actually set aside for fraud or manifest mistake is zero. The closest any of them comes runs the other direction: in Stuckman v. Westfield Insurance, the Third District held that a trial court had erred by modifying an award absent fraud, mistake or misfeasance, and put the original number back.

What the data does not support is a claim that no Ohio court has ever disturbed an award. The Reporter's search engine will not combine two quoted phrases in one query, so the set above is the union of five separate searches and an opinion that discusses appraisal in other words would be missed. Reporter coverage of appellate opinions thins before roughly 2002, trial-court rulings are excluded entirely, and federal courts applying Ohio law are not in the database. A common pleas judge who vacated an award in a case nobody appealed would not appear here. What the eighteen support is narrower and still useful: across the published appellate record a public adjuster can actually search, the door has not opened.

One more thing from the record is worth carrying into a negotiation rather than a pleading. Below, One Church argued that Ohio Adm.Code 3901-1-54(E)(5) barred Brotherhood from treating the $3,192.67 payment as final and then refusing to look at more damage, since policy limits were nowhere near exhausted.⁴ Neither court adopted the argument. The rule is real and it does prohibit an insurer from indicating on a draft or in an accompanying letter that payment is final before limits are paid or a compromise is agreed, but it is a communication rule, it carries an exception for an agreed compromise, and paragraph (A) states that nothing in it creates or implies a private cause of action.

Read the dissent as a drafting instruction

Justice Fischer agreed that One Church never pleaded mistake. He thought the case was never about mistake. His question was narrower and better: binding as to what property damage?

One Church's complaint had alleged that the appraisal "resulted in a determination of an amount of loss for known and discoverable damage at the time that said process was completed." Taking that as true, Fischer wrote, there is no evidence in the pleadings that any language in the insurance contract refutes it. The award would then be binding on what it covered and silent on what it did not.¹

Five justices went the other way, largely because of how One Church had litigated. The majority pointed to its repeated demand that Brotherhood "reopen the appraisal process" and to its express disclaimer, in the memorandum opposing judgment on the pleadings, that it had submitted any new claim.¹ A party that spends three years asking to reopen an award has conceded it is challenging the award. Fischer thought one word should not carry that weight.

The instruction sits in what Fischer could not find. He was looking in the pleadings for contract language limiting the award to known and discoverable damage, and there was none, because nobody had written any. That language belongs on the award, signed by both appraisers, on the day they agree. A complaint drafted eight months later comes far too late to supply it.

So, for a file sitting in appraisal: conditions that cannot be inspected get identified in writing before anyone signs, with the physical reason they are inaccessible. The award says on its face which assemblies were opened and which were not. And where a carrier's appraiser declines to sign anything but a bare number, that refusal belongs in the file, dated, because it is the record that a later scope dispute was foreseen and resisted.

Keep the holding the size it is. This was a judgment on the pleadings, and the court said only that this complaint failed, hedging even that: it is not clear, paragraph 22 begins, that One Church pleaded mistake at all. Nothing in the opinion makes post-award damage categorically unrecoverable in Ohio, and the majority never says what a sufficient pleading would have looked like. The decision also runs in both directions, since a carrier unhappy with an award is bound by the same rule. One detail from the docket does not appear in any of the coverage: Acuity, the Ohio Insurance Institute, the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies, the American Property Casualty Insurance Association and the Ohio Association of Civil Trial Attorneys all filed urging reversal, and no one filed for the insured.¹ The appraisal award One Church signed on May 30, 2020 is still worth $313,271.98 more than the position it replaced.

Questions from the field

Ohio's statutory claim clocks, which run independently of any of this, are collected in the Ohio deadlines field guide. For the matching fight over what an award is allowed to cover, see the Eighth Circuit's treatment of matching inside an appraisal.