Construction defect expert in Seville

A few months ago we were commissioned to have one of our experts prepare an expert report on construction defects in a residential development in the Andalusian capital.

Although at first some owners in the homeowners’ association had certain doubts (because they had the option of other experts), in the end they were very satisfied with the work done by our expert in Seville.

What EXPERT REPORTS should be like

Expert reports are far more important than they may seem at first sight. They are the decisive factor in the judgment. In a very high percentage of lawsuits, trials and legal claims, the outcome is swayed and decided by the effectiveness, forcefulness and know-how of the authors, or rather of just one author, of those reports.

The grounds of the judgments handed down are supported by, and based on, the best presented and best reasoned report, from among the experts (in our case, expert architects) taking part in the lawsuit: the developer’s, the building contractor’s, the insurer’s, the court-appointed expert and, finally, the expert for the claimants, the injured parties. It is not true that court-appointed experts dominate with their conclusions simply because they are appointed by the court. In the reasoning of the judgment, the judge normally leans towards the best justified report, the best prepared, most convincing, clearest, most instructive and best substantiated.

It does not matter where the expert comes from, but specialisation and experience in preparing this type of report do matter.

And how are these reports prepared? If they are good, it is because they reflect reality meticulously and logically, and when they are read, whether through their reasoning, their descriptions or well-taken photographs of the damage suffered by a building or development, they are very instructive; the damage appears vividly in the reader’s mind, not merely imagined but grasped and pieced together, so that the reader visualises it realistically and automatically. And that is very important because the main purpose of the expert report is to convince its final reader, the judge.

There was a brilliant member of the criminal investigation police who taught criminal law at university and used to tell his students that, to prove guilt in drug cases, you had to be forceful and see the drugs when reading the report, and even smell them when opening the case file. What he meant was that everything written in the investigation file had to be so clear that simply reading the documents, photographs, police reports, certificates of the drug weighings, the confessions of the accused, etc., the chemists’ certificates and the statements of the investigating officers, you could almost smell the drugs, and they would take shape in the mind of anyone reading and studying the file: you could practically sniff out the drugs.

It should be the same with construction damage and the corresponding expert assessments. The expert (normally an architect) must record in the report everything they see and have seen, in great detail. They must photograph everything in the most instructive way, and the images included in the report must reflect reality exactly. They must carry out their tests and technical checks and explain the cause of the damage very clearly.

When valuing the construction defects, the expert must present them together with the measurement and pricing database used, but above all the author must be convinced beyond doubt of the truth of what is written in the expert report. The expert is asked to prepare the report and to set down not their scientific opinion but what they have inspected and seen, whether they like it or not; but once the damage is recorded on paper, they must be 100% certain of its authenticity, its origin and its repair cost.

As an example, the link provides a sample of our expert reports; to see it, click HERE.

The expert must be convinced, without hesitation, that the reasons they set out to explain the damage are, beyond any shadow of doubt, true and scientifically justified.

The expert bears first and final responsibility for what they say in their report, which is why nobody should suggest or influence its content, since once at trial the expert architect’s job is to defend their report “to the death”. The expert must describe the damage, both in the wording used and by establishing how it corresponds to the damage described in the law (normally the LOE), with the help of the photographs taken, and must establish the cost of repair using up-to-date software, stating its author and source (for example, the updated database of the Escuela Técnica de Arquitectos Técnicos de Guadalajara, for 2022, say), and above all fitting the damage recorded into the groups the LOE establishes: habitability damage, damage affecting functionality, damage affecting the foundations, defects in building elements, or defects in finishing… The expert must have a thorough command of the Spanish Building Act (Ley de Ordenación de la Edificación, LOE) and fit the existing damage into the categories it establishes.

What most “sinks” an expert is doubt, contradicting themselves at trial, or saying the opposite of what they have previously written.

Many people nowadays offer to prepare expert reports, but bear in mind that the judge heeds only one in five of the experts who appear at trial. Only the opinion of the most confident, most reasonable and most instructive expert, and possibly the least proud, but above all the most convincing before the judge, ultimately succeeds in having the judge adopt their scientific or justified arguments in the judgment. Conversely, if an expert contradicts at trial what they stated in their report, or hesitates when asked questions that call their opinion into question and fails to give reasoned explanations, the judge may very well simply disregard their report altogether. That is why, in the proceedings conducted in Seville, we obtained a judgment upholding the claim, with the vast majority of the damage reported by our expert awarded and valued in line with the expert’s proposed repairs.

DPcon Reclamación Daños Constructivos.