I confess that I winced at the lambasting of the expert in a recent construction case. The judge was (let’s not pull our punches) totally peed-off by what he described as the expert’s partisan, lopsided QS evidence. A whole six pages of the judgment were dedicated to slamming the chap. It was as though he were on trial with no chance of appeal. I wince again and again. 

No, I won’t give you his name. Nor the names of the other three experts in the same trial on the same side, all of whom were, said the judge, biased. And not long ago on this page I refused to name the expert architect in another trial, who was slammed for being honest. He argued in a publication that an expert witness was human and hard-pressed not to be biased. I refused to name yet another expert in a trial about whether a building design in Rotterdam was copied by the architect from a student architect’s design. The issue was bias. There are others I could name, but won’t. 

The real problem with bias is that the last person on earth to see the appearance of bias is the person accused of it. I guarantee you in real life this expert QS had not one ounce of actual bias 

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