The names that appear most often are already engaged
A law firm was acting in a construction dispute and needed an independent specialist to say why the program had slipped. Delay analysis on major projects is a narrow specialism. The names that come up first come up often, which is why, in a substantial dispute, a good number of them are already engaged by one of the parties.
The firm needed somebody genuinely independent who had also done directly comparable work, and searching the visible field was not going to produce that person. The people who fit had done the work and never presented themselves as available for instruction. They exist in far greater numbers than the visible field suggests, and they are harder to find precisely because they are not looking.
We searched for practitioners rather than the visible field
We scoped the requirement with the firm, then searched for former practitioners with directly comparable program experience: project directors, planners and commercial managers who had run schemes of the same kind. Conflict screening came first and was the primary filter. It covered prior involvement with the parties, with the project itself, with the contractors, and with any adjacent scheme.
Candidates were then assessed on whether they could explain a technical position clearly to somebody without the background. That is a separate skill from holding the expertise. Every candidate cleared our compliance framework before introduction. Instruction, the scope of the opinion and any duty to the tribunal were matters for the firm and the expert.
A shortlist the firm could actually instruct
The candidates were genuinely independent, directly experienced in comparable programs, and none of them had been visible through conventional channels. Reaching outside the recognized field was the whole of the value here, because dispute work of this kind is usually limited to the small number of people who present themselves as available.
The instruction, the scope of the opinion and every question of duty sat with the firm and the expert throughout. Our part ended at introduction, and nothing about the opinion itself was ours to shape.
