Engineering Reports That an Expert Will Have to Defend

The report has a required contents list

Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(a)(2)(B) sets out six things a written expert report must contain. The first is a complete statement of all opinions the witness will express, with the basis and reasons for them. The second is the facts or data the witness considered, and the third is any exhibits that will summarize or support them. The fourth is the witness's qualifications, including all publications from the previous ten years. The fifth is a list of every other case in which the witness testified as an expert, at trial or by deposition, in the previous four years. The sixth is a statement of the compensation for the study and the testimony.²

Two of those six are pure document work. The publication list and the prior testimony list are compiled, checked, and formatted, and an omission in either is discoverable and awkward.

The other four are where the editing question lives, and none of them can be settled by a technical reviewer alone.

What a document review can find that a technical review cannot

An engineer reviewing a colleague's report reads for whether the analysis is right. That is the correct review and it is not the only one needed, because a report can be technically sound and still fail on its own terms.

Four faults recur, and each is visible without any knowledge of the subject. All four can be found by someone who has never opened a calculation sheet.

The first is an opinion stated in the conclusions that appears nowhere in the analysis. Rule 26 asks for the basis and reasons for every opinion the witness will express.² An opinion with no traceable support in the body is a defect in the report rather than in the engineering.

The second is a figure that changes between the body, a table, and an appendix. Checking whether a stated figure matches the one three pages earlier is copy editing as Editors Canada defines it, covering correctness, accuracy, consistency, and completeness.³

The third is a source cited in the text and absent from the list of materials considered, or the reverse. Rule 26 asks for the facts or data considered, and a mismatch between the two lists is the first thing an opposing expert will run.²

The fourth is hedging that shifts between sections. A finding described as consistent with on page 12 and as demonstrating on page 40 has changed its strength without anyone deciding to change it.

Why consistency is the property under attack

Cross-examination of a technical report rarely begins with the technique. It begins with the document, because a contradiction inside a report can be shown to a jury in one sentence and a disagreement about method cannot.

That makes internal consistency an evidentiary property rather than a stylistic one. A report whose terms, figures, units, and qualifiers hold steady across sixty pages is harder to attack than one that does not, and the difference is produced by a reading nobody enjoys doing.

Editors Canada's Professional Editorial Standards place the surrounding discipline in the fundamentals. They ask an editor to understand how a project's scope shapes the work, and to make changes without altering the intended meaning or the register.⁴ On a report that may be read aloud in a courtroom, the last clause is the operative one.

Where an editor's authority stops

An editor does not decide whether a method was appropriate, whether a calculation is correct, whether a standard applies, or whether a conclusion follows from the data. Those are the engineer's determinations, and they are the ones Rule 702 asks the court to test.¹

What an editor supplies is a report on the document. It names which opinions lack a stated basis and which figures disagree with each other. It also names the sources appearing in one list and not the other, and the passages that can be read two ways. Every item on that list is something the author can fix or defend before anyone else finds it.

Everything a client sends is treated in confidence, including draft reports, underlying data, and correspondence with counsel. EditFast works on engineering reports and technical documents and on technical manuals, to whatever specification the client or their attorney supplies.

The most useful instruction an engineer can give an editor on this work is which sentences are opinions. Everything else follows from that list.