Part 6 of a 10-part series for clients navigating a dispute before the DIFC Courts or in DIAC arbitration.
Where a dispute concerns a physical asset — a building, a defect, an installation, or a piece of infrastructure — your expert will usually need to inspect it to the extent reasonably necessary to form a professionally competent opinion. Your job during this stage is mostly practical, but it matters more than clients often realise.
What you should be doing
- Provide timely access to the site, property, or asset in question.
- Provide the documents your expert reasonably requests — contracts, drawings, correspondence, photographs, variation records, and so on — including documents that don't necessarily help your case.
- Don't withhold, filter, or selectively present material. An expert whose opinion later turns out to have been based on an incomplete picture may need to revise it (we cover this in Part 8), which causes delay, adds cost, and can raise uncomfortable questions about how instructions were actually given.
When an inspection can't happen, or falls short
Sometimes a full inspection simply isn't possible — access might be denied, conditions might have changed, or timing might not allow it. Where that happens, your expert should say so explicitly in their report and explain what it means for the reliability of their opinion.
This isn't a weakness to be hidden. It's a legitimate, expected part of properly conducted expert evidence, and an expert who flags it honestly is doing their job correctly.
Joint inspections
In some cases, the Court or tribunal will order — or the parties will agree to — a joint inspection, attended by both parties' experts (and sometimes the parties or their representatives) at the same time. This is especially common where site conditions might change over time, or where each side otherwise risks basing their opinion on a different physical state of affairs entirely.
Next: Part 7 — What a Compliant Expert Report Contains.