What the market expects is real and almost never written down
A law firm was acting in a commercial dispute over an agricultural supply contract. Both sides read the contract the same way. What they disagreed about was what the market would have expected around it: how much variation is tolerated, when one shipment can be substituted for another, how timing is handled, and what counts as reasonable once goods are moving.
Almost none of that is written down. It is what experienced traders simply know. Establishing what the practice actually was, rather than what a party now says it was, needs someone who traded that commodity through comparable conditions. General trading experience is a much wider field and a much weaker one, because practice does not carry across from one commodity or route to another.
We searched by commodity, route and period not by sector
We defined the requirement by commodity, by trade route and by period, then searched for former traders, contract managers and operations leads who had worked in exactly those conditions. Practice is not uniform. It differs by commodity, by where the goods come from, by the route they travel and by the years in question, so a trader with the right title and the wrong route is of no use here.
Candidates were also assessed on whether they could separate what was customary in the trade from what they personally would have done. A tribunal presses hard on that distinction. Every candidate cleared our compliance checks before introduction. Instruction, the scope of any opinion and the duties owed to the tribunal stayed with the firm and the expert.
The firm met traders who had set the practice
The people the firm met had traded that commodity on comparable routes during the period in question. They could speak to what was customary from having done it, not from having watched it done. Specifying route and period is what made the shortlist useful: it kept the field small and every name on it relevant.
We identified and screened the candidates and introduced them, and stopped there. Everything after the introduction, including the relationship itself, belonged to the firm and the expert.
