Counsel retains me in workplace injury and fatality matters — machine guarding and lockout, falls, powered equipment, excavation, multi-employer sites and exposure cases. The work is less dramatic than the word “expert” suggests, and it is mostly done long before anybody testifies.
The site
Where the scene still exists, it is inspected and measured: guard positions, distances, sight lines, lighting, the actual force required to operate a control, the height and pitch of the surface someone fell from. Photographs are taken with a scale. Where the scene has changed, exemplar equipment and the original photographs carry the analysis, and the report says plainly which is which.
The documents
Training records, the injury and illness prevention program, tailgate meeting sheets, maintenance and repair history for the equipment, lockout procedures for that specific machine, purchase and modification records, prior incidents involving the same task, and whatever the manufacturer supplied — manual, guarding, warnings, service bulletins. Modification history matters more than almost anything else. A great many machine injuries trace to a guard removed years earlier for production reasons that nobody wrote down.
The opinion
An opinion is worth something only if it is anchored: to a standard, to a manufacturer’s instruction, to a recognised industry practice, or to measurement. “This was unsafe” is not an opinion; it is an adjective. What a report should say is which requirement applied, what was actually done, what the difference was, and how that difference relates to the mechanism of the injury.
It should also say what cannot be determined. A file with gaps is normal. An expert who has an answer for every question in the file is telling you that some of those answers were supplied by the retention rather than the evidence.
Who retains me
Both sides. The analysis does not change with the letterhead, and an expert whose conclusions track the retaining party across every case has a testimony problem waiting for him. My own background is twenty-five years in the fire service followed by a career in industrial hygiene and environmental health and safety, which means I read a scene and a records file with the same set of habits: preserve first, measure second, conclude last.
Michael Karl McNeil — forensic and expert consulting in occupational safety and industrial hygiene.
Michael Karl McNeil 