Engineering accompaniment during a court-appointed expert's visit

Does it matter whether the building engineer who did the inspection is present when the court-appointed expert visits the apartment?

This article looks at accompanying the expert a court appoints in a construction defects lawsuit. When that expert arrives at the apartment, is it worth having the engineer who prepared the home inspection report there too?

We will answer through a case in which we reached a settlement for one of our clients, and explain why a resident benefits from having a suitable engineer alongside them in legal proceedings: it gives them better backing through the process.

There have been cases where a court-appointed expert let a personal view creep into the opinion, or ruled less strictly against the contractor than the facts warranted. When a resident is accompanied by the engineer who did their inspection, that protects the resident's rights, because the court's expert is far more careful.

He knows that any argument contradicting the standard, or past precedent, will be caught and exposed by the accompanying engineer, putting him in an embarrassing position before the court.

A contractor typically shows up backed by a battery of lawyers. Put an expert engineer at the resident's side, one who knows the system well and is backed in turn by excellent construction-defects lawyers, and the balance of power evens out.

Anyone who gets a home inspection report from Arad Bedek Bayit Ltd. also gets our accompaniment through the proceedings, to make the report count. Engineer Ron Arad's presence through the court's expert-opinion process gives the resident strong backing. He has often brought precedent-setting rulings or counterarguments to bear against an expert's position.

Just as a law on its own is not enough in court, and a good lawyer has to raise the right arguments, a lawsuit against a contractor needs the same: an experienced, well-known expert engineer at the resident's side, backed if necessary by a skilled lawyer who handles construction defect suits, is what secures the resident the maximum amount they are owed.

In the case at hand, a resident and a contractor reached a settlement of ₪73,000, at the resident's request, so the matter could be closed quickly. The client had ordered a home inspection over a minor dampness problem, and it turned up real construction defects in the duplex apartment the contractor had built.

Two defects stood out. One was in the stairs connecting the first and second floors, costing about ₪15,000 to fix. The other was a non-standard slope in the kitchen floor: the standard allows a slope of up to 0.3%, meaning the floor can be off by 3 mm per meter before it needs to be lifted and redone.

This floor sloped more than double the permitted maximum, at 0.7%. That matters in practice: it is easier to slip, especially on a wet floor; water travels under the kitchen cabinets when the floor is mopped; the kitchen table wobbles instead of standing level; and some people can feel a slope like this underfoot.

The case closed with that ₪73,000 settlement.

Generally, fewer than one percent of the cases Arad Bedek Bayit handles end up in litigation, meaning fewer than one apartment in a hundred we inspect ever reaches legal proceedings. In the other 99%, the contractor chooses to make the repairs without a fight, so there is no need to sue.

This shows how much weight rests on the engineer behind the inspection report. Take the sloped floor above as an example of where a resident's own engineer can be decisive: a court-appointed expert might argue that the slope is not severe enough to justify tearing out and replacing the entire kitchen and living-room floor, a job costing ₪25,000. On the face of it, a resident might simply accept that determination.

In a case like this, Engineer Arad would show the court expert the standard, plus rulings establishing that a court-appointed expert cannot deviate from it, and lay out the practical implications of the defect in detail, as described above.

We have withheld the names in this case because it involves a settlement agreement, not a published court ruling, and privacy rules apply.