Why you need your own engineer at a court expert's inspection

When a court appoints its own expert in a construction-defects lawsuit, having an engineer of your own present can change the outcome of the case, and that same kind of support extends to residents appearing before a committee. Here's what that looks like and why it matters.

Why you need an engineer at the inspection

This article looks at accompanying the expert a court appoints in a construction-defects lawsuit. When that expert visits the apartment, should the engineer who wrote the original home inspection report be there too?

We'll answer that through a case that ended in a settlement for one of our clients. Having a qualified engineer alongside you in legal proceedings gives you real backing: there have been cases where a court's expert let a personal view, or a ruling more lenient toward the contractor than it should have been, creep into the opinion.

A building inspection with your own engineer present protects residents' rights: the court's expert is far more careful knowing that any argument that contradicts the standard, or ignores precedent, will be caught and exposed in front of the court.

A contractor backed by a battery of lawyers, facing an ordinary resident, is a mismatch. A resident backed by an engineer who knows the system, and by good lawyers who specialize in construction defects, is not.

What this looks like at Arad Bedek Bayit

Anyone who has a home inspection report drawn up by Arad Bedek Bayit gets more than a professional report: they get support all the way through the process of making full use of it. Engineer Ron Arad's presence during the court's expert-opinion process gives residents real backing, and he has repeatedly brought precedent rulings or counter-arguments to challenge an expert's conclusions.

In other words, just as a law on the books isn't enough without a good lawyer to argue it, a lawsuit against a contractor needs an experienced, respected engineer to make the right arguments, and, where needed, an experienced construction-defects lawyer too, to get the resident the maximum compensation they're owed.

Case study: a sloped kitchen floor

In one case, a settlement gave a resident 73,000 NIS, at the resident's own request, since he wanted to resolve things quickly. During a home inspection our client had ordered, originally for a minor dampness problem, we found construction defects in the duplex the contractor had built: a defect in the stairs between the first and second levels, costing about 15,000 NIS, and a non-standard slope in the kitchen flooring.

The standard allows a flooring slope of up to 0.3%, meaning the floor can be off by 3 mm per meter before it needs to be lifted and relaid. This floor was more than double that maximum, at 0.7%. A sloped floor isn't just cosmetic: it makes the floor more slippery when wet, sends water under the kitchen cabinets when mopped, leaves the kitchen table wobbling instead of standing level, and some people can simply feel the tilt underfoot.

The case settled for 73,000 NIS. Fewer than one percent of the cases Arad Bedek Bayit handles ever reach a lawsuit, meaning fewer than one apartment in a hundred we inspect ends up in legal proceedings.

In the other 99%, the contractor simply fixes what the report finds, without a fight, so there's no need to sue. That's exactly why the engineer behind the report matters. In the sloped-floor case, the court's expert could easily have argued that the slope wasn't serious enough to justify tearing out and replacing all the flooring in the kitchen and living room, at a cost of 25,000 NIS, and a resident without support might simply have accepted that.

Instead, engineer Arad could show the standard and the rulings establishing that a court expert cannot deviate from it, and spell out exactly what the defect meant.

*Names have been withheld for privacy, since this was a settlement rather than a published court ruling.