Failure To Include Information In Engineering Report
CausalLink_Contradictory Post-Report Expl
Because the deficient report directly caused both the ethics violation finding and the need for a contradictory explanation, Engineer B's violation of professional honesty and accurate reporting obligations matters enormously here, since a misleading post-report explanation compounds the original documentation failures and undermines any corrective accountability that the downstream ethics process was meant to provide.
Issuing the deficient report was the convergence point of all prior omissions and failures, and because it produced both an ethics violation finding and a contradictory explanation from Engineer B, the violations of honesty, completeness, and client service obligations carried real consequences for the credibility of the entire expert process the municipality had initiated.
CausalLink_Equipment Failure Non-Disclosu
Concealing the equipment failure stripped stakeholders of information necessary to evaluate test validity, and because this omission fed directly into the ethics violation finding, the breach of complete and accurate reporting caused concrete harm to the integrity of the proceedings the municipality had commissioned.
Expert testimony given by the municipality feeds directly into the commissioning of the test pile program, so fulfilling client advocacy in a legal proceeding matters because the quality and credibility of that testimony shapes whether the technical investigation that follows is properly scoped and taken seriously by all parties.
Because the foundation design is the technical origin point that the contractor later challenged, fulfilling professional competence and relying on geotechnical expert recommendation matters because it establishes the defensible basis for all downstream dispute resolution, including the mediation and test pile program that the claim eventually triggered.
CausalLink_Independent Observer Retention
Engineer A commissions the independent observer directly after the test pile program begins, and fulfilling professional due diligence and protection of the technical record matters because the observer is positioned to detect the non-representative test execution and pile record exclusion that Engineer B later uses to produce a deficient report, making the observer the last practical check before ethics violations are found.
CausalLink_Mediation Settlement Agreement
The settlement resolves the contractor claim that construction completion set in motion, and fulfilling responsible resolution of professional disputes matters here because the agreement directly opens the path to expert testimony and the test pile program, meaning a poorly handled settlement would have corrupted the entire subsequent technical record.
CausalLink_Non-Representative Test Execut
Because the flawed test execution directly caused observable irregularities that undermined the validity of the entire pile program, violating professional competence and diligent fact-gathering meant that the downstream report and any decisions based on it rested on a corrupted technical foundation rather than reliable data.
Excluding pile records from the report directly caused the deficient report to be issued, meaning the violation of the obligation to include all relevant information was not merely procedural but materially shaped the output that the municipality and other parties relied upon to resolve a contested claim.
CausalLink_Stakeholder Consultation Omiss
Skipping consultation with relevant parties meant that critical perspectives and records were never gathered, and because this omission contributed directly to the deficient report, the violation of fact-gathering diligence and professional competence had a traceable causal role in producing a report that misled rather than informed.
CausalLink_Test Pile Program Commissionin
The test pile program produces the strength gain confirmation that could vindicate the original design, but it also creates the conditions under which Engineer B later commits irregularities and issues a deficient report, so fulfilling due diligence in the technical dispute matters because a rigorously commissioned program is the only safeguard against those downstream integrity failures.
It was unethical for Engineer B to issue his report without mentioning the failed operation of the testing equipment.
Beyond the Board's finding that Engineer B acted unethically by omitting the failed test equipment from his report, the omission is compounded by the fact that the equipment failure was not merely a peripheral procedural detail but a foundational validity condition for the entire test program. A report that draws quantitative conclusions about pile capacity from dynamic test data, while silently suppressing the fact that the dynamic test equipment malfunctioned during that very program, does not merely omit a fact — it affirmatively misrepresents the evidentiary basis of its conclusions. Under code provisions requiring objective and truthful professional reports and prohibiting material omissions, the ethical violation is not simply one of incompleteness but of constructive misrepresentation: a reader of the report would reasonably assume the test instrumentation functioned correctly, and Engineer B's silence on the failure exploited that assumption. The severity of this violation is heightened because Engineer B possessed actual knowledge of the failure, meaning the omission cannot be attributed to oversight.
The Board's conclusion that Engineer B acted unethically by omitting the equipment failure does not fully address the separate and independently significant ethical problem created by Engineer B's two mutually contradictory justifications for that omission. Engineer B first claimed the pile driving records were outside his scope of work, and later claimed he simply disbelieved them. These explanations cannot both be true simultaneously: if the records were genuinely outside scope, their credibility would be irrelevant and no belief judgment would have been formed; if Engineer B formed a substantive judgment that the records were suspicious, he necessarily engaged with their content, which means the scope limitation was not the operative reason for exclusion. The inconsistency strongly suggests that the scope-of-work rationale was a post-hoc rationalization constructed to deflect scrutiny rather than a genuine professional boundary observed at the time. This pattern of shifting justification is itself an ethical violation distinct from the underlying omissions, because it involves distorting the facts of Engineer B's own investigative process when challenged — conduct directly prohibited by the code provision requiring engineers to acknowledge errors and not distort or alter the facts. The Board's conclusions, while correct, do not capture this secondary layer of ethical failure.
The Board's conclusion that Engineer B was obligated to communicate with Engineer A's representatives extends beyond a procedural courtesy requirement. Because Engineer A's on-site representatives possessed direct, first-hand knowledge of the pile driving operations — including the conditions under which the 19 disputed piles reached refusal — their testimony was the most probative available evidence for resolving the central factual dispute in Engineer B's analysis. Engineer B's decision to form and publish a conclusion that those piles were structurally deficient, without consulting the people best positioned to explain why they reached refusal at shallower depth, substituted speculation for investigation. The post-report explanation referencing the vented closure plate and air escape as a possible cause of anomalous refusal readings illustrates this precisely: Engineer B was aware of a plausible alternative technical explanation but made no effort to test it through consultation before issuing conclusions. This transforms the failure to communicate from a procedural lapse into a substantive investigative failure that directly undermined the technical reliability of the report's conclusions. The ethical obligation to gather all material facts before issuing professional conclusions is not discharged by the existence of a litigation adversary relationship; the adversarial context creates pressure to avoid inconvenient evidence, but that pressure is exactly what the objectivity requirements of the code are designed to resist.
The Board's conclusion that Engineer B was obligated to consult the contractor's supervisor and workers should be understood in the context of a broader principle: when an engineer's conclusions rest on an inference about why a physical anomaly occurred — here, why 19 piles reached refusal before predicted depth — and direct witnesses to that anomaly are available and identifiable, consulting those witnesses is not optional diligence but a minimum threshold of investigative competence. Engineer B's report implicitly advanced a theory that the 19 piles were deficient in load-bearing capacity, yet the factual predicate for that theory — that the piles failed to reach adequate depth for reasons other than genuine soil resistance — was never tested against the accounts of the people who drove them. The workers and contractor's supervisor could have provided information about soil conditions encountered, hammer behavior, and driving observations that either corroborated or refuted the suspicion about the driving records. By bypassing these sources entirely, Engineer B issued a report whose central conclusion rested on an uninvestigated assumption. This is not merely an ethical failure under the code's objectivity requirements; it also constitutes a disservice to Engineer B's own client, because a report built on an uninvestigated assumption is vulnerable to exactly the kind of challenge that Engineer A's geotechnical consultant mounted — a challenge that ultimately undermined the municipality's litigation position.
The Board's conclusion that Engineer B acted unethically by omitting the wave equation analysis showing the 19 piles met refusal raises a principle that the Board did not articulate explicitly: when an engineer's report reaches a negative conclusion about structural adequacy — particularly for a public structure — and the engineer is aware of a recognized, accepted analytical method that produces a directly contrary result, the ethical obligation to disclose that contrary result is not merely a matter of completeness but of public safety. The wave equation calculations, applied to the driving records, indicated that the 19 piles had strength several multiples over the calculated load requirements. Engineer B's suppression of this analysis meant that the report presented a one-sided picture of structural deficiency without acknowledging that a standard industry method contradicted that picture. For a dock serving the public, the consequence of a false finding of structural deficiency could include unnecessary remediation, continued litigation costs, and erosion of public confidence in the structure — while a false finding of adequacy could endanger lives. In either direction, the suppression of material contradictory evidence in a report about a public structure implicates obligations that extend beyond the litigation context and into the domain of public welfare, which the code places at the apex of an engineer's professional obligations.
Taken together, the four violations identified by the Board reveal a systemic pattern rather than a collection of isolated lapses, and that pattern points to a structural tension in the role of litigation expert that the Board's individual conclusions do not fully address. Each omission — the equipment failure, the failure to consult Engineer A's representatives, the failure to consult the contractor's workers, and the suppression of the wave equation analysis — served the same directional interest: producing a report that supported the municipality's litigation position by presenting only the evidence consistent with pile deficiency while suppressing or ignoring evidence of adequacy. The convergence of these omissions on a single outcome is difficult to attribute to coincidence or independent professional judgments. This pattern suggests that Engineer B's role as a retained litigation expert created a structural conflict between the duty of faithful service to the retaining client and the independent duty of objectivity required of all professional engineers issuing technical reports. The Board's conclusions correctly identify each violation but do not address whether the litigation expert role, as practiced here, is inherently incompatible with the objectivity obligations of the engineering code — or whether the profession requires clearer guidance on the boundaries between legitimate advocacy support and the kind of selective, client-directed analysis that Engineer B produced. The case implies that engineers accepting litigation expert retentions must affirmatively resist client advocacy pressure and that the code's objectivity requirements apply with full force regardless of the adversarial context in which the report is produced.
It was unethical for Engineer B to not communicate with any representative of Engineer A about the project.
Engineer B's post-report admission that 'we just did not believe the driving records' constitutes a separate and distinct ethical violation beyond the omissions already identified by the Board. Substituting personal skepticism for objective engineering analysis — without consulting available witnesses, reviewing wave equation calculations, or documenting the basis for that skepticism — violates the engineer's independent obligation to ground professional opinions in verifiable fact rather than unexamined intuition. The admission reveals that Engineer B made an affirmative epistemic choice to disregard material evidence, which is categorically different from a passive omission. Under code provision II.3.a, objectivity and truthfulness require not merely avoiding false statements but actively ensuring that conclusions rest on a complete and honest assessment of available data. The decision to disbelieve a record without investigation, and then to issue conclusions as if that record did not exist, transforms a methodological shortcut into an act of intellectual dishonesty that stands independently of the reporting omissions the Board cited.
The two contradictory justifications Engineer B offered for excluding the pile driving records — first that it was outside his scope of work, and later that he simply disbelieved them — are mutually exclusive in a way that is itself ethically significant. A genuine scope-of-work limitation is a contractual boundary that exists independent of the content of the excluded material; it does not depend on whether the engineer found that material credible. The subsequent disclosure that Engineer B had in fact reviewed the records sufficiently to form a judgment about their credibility demolishes the scope-of-work defense entirely, because one cannot simultaneously claim not to have examined something and also claim to have found it suspicious. This inconsistency strongly suggests that the scope-of-work rationale was a post-hoc rationalization constructed to provide a professionally defensible explanation for what was actually an advocacy-driven decision. When an engineer's stated justification for a material omission is demonstrably unreliable, the ethical obligation under code provisions II.3.c and III.1.a is heightened: the engineer must either correct the record or acknowledge that the original justification was false. Engineer B did neither, compounding the original violation with a secondary failure of candor.
The municipality's dual role as both the retaining client and a party with a direct financial interest in the litigation outcome created a structural conflict of interest that Engineer B had an independent obligation to acknowledge, manage, and if necessary disclose. Unlike a purely private commercial dispute, the municipality is a public entity whose litigation position directly affects how public infrastructure is evaluated and maintained. Engineer B's retention by the municipality placed him in a position where his professional conclusions could be shaped — consciously or unconsciously — by the client's adversarial interest rather than by objective engineering analysis. Code provision II.3.c explicitly prohibits technical statements inspired by interested parties, and the structural relationship between Engineer B and the municipality satisfies the conditions that provision was designed to address. The ethical obligation arising from this conflict is not merely to produce an unbiased report in fact, but to affirmatively acknowledge the relationship in the report so that any reviewing authority — including a court — can assess the independence of the conclusions. Engineer B's failure to disclose this structural conflict, combined with the selective omissions in his report, suggests that the conflict was not merely unacknowledged but actively operative in shaping his conclusions.
Because the dock is a public structure whose pile foundation bears directly on public safety, Engineer B's obligations extended beyond his litigation role to encompass an independent duty to flag unresolved structural questions to an appropriate public authority. The 19 piles Engineer B identified as potentially deficient represent a live public safety concern regardless of how the litigation is resolved. Code provision III.1.b requires engineers to advise clients when a project will not be successful, but the underlying principle — that engineers bear a duty to the public that transcends their client relationship — implies a corollary obligation when the client's litigation interest may suppress safety-relevant findings. Engineer B's report, by omitting the wave equation data showing those same 19 piles had met refusal, created a misleading picture of the foundation's adequacy that could persist in the public record long after the litigation concluded. The ethical weight of this omission is amplified by the public nature of the structure: an engineer who knowingly produces an incomplete assessment of a public facility's structural adequacy, and takes no steps to ensure that the unresolved questions reach a competent authority, has subordinated the public interest to client advocacy in a manner that the NSPE code does not permit.
The tension between Engineer B's role as a faithful agent of the municipality and his independent obligation of neutrality as an expert witness cannot be resolved in favor of client advocacy when the two duties collide. The NSPE code does not create a litigation exception to the requirements of objectivity and completeness; code provision II.3.c explicitly prohibits technical statements inspired by interested parties, and that prohibition applies with equal force whether the interested party is a private corporation or a public municipality. An engineer serving as a retained litigation expert retains the full weight of professional ethical obligations and cannot discharge those obligations by pointing to the adversarial context as justification for selective disclosure. When the duties of faithful agency and expert neutrality conflict, the duty of neutrality must prevail because it is grounded in the engineer's obligation to the public and to the integrity of the technical record, whereas the duty of faithful agency is grounded in a contractual relationship that cannot override professional ethical standards. Engineer B's report demonstrates what happens when this hierarchy is inverted: the client's litigation interest displaced the engineer's obligation to produce a complete and honest technical assessment.
A contractually defined scope of work does not relieve an engineer of the ethical obligation to disclose material facts that bear directly on the validity of the conclusions in a professional report, particularly when those facts are known to the engineer at the time of reporting. The scope-of-work constraint is a legitimate tool for defining the boundaries of an investigation, but it cannot function as a license to suppress contradictory evidence that the engineer has already encountered. Code provision III.3.a prohibits statements containing material omissions that create a false impression, and that prohibition is not qualified by whether the omitted material fell within or outside the contracted scope. When Engineer B concluded that 19 piles were structurally deficient based on depth-of-penetration analysis, and simultaneously possessed knowledge that those same piles had, according to driving records, met refusal — a fact that wave equation analysis would translate into a strength several multiples over design requirements — the omission of that contradictory information from the report created precisely the kind of false impression that code provision III.3.a was designed to prevent. The scope-of-work limitation could have justified not conducting a wave equation analysis; it could not justify concealing the existence of data that would have prompted a competent reader to question the report's conclusions.
From a deontological perspective, Engineer B's omission of the dynamic test equipment failure from his report constitutes a categorical violation of the duty of complete and truthful reporting, independent of whether that omission affected the structural conclusions. The deontological analysis does not permit consequentialist escape routes: the ethical weight of the omission is not diminished by arguing that the conclusions would have been the same even with full disclosure. Code provision II.3.a imposes an unconditional obligation of objectivity and truthfulness in professional reports, and that obligation is violated the moment a material fact is knowingly excluded, regardless of outcome. The equipment failure was directly relevant to the reliability of the test data on which Engineer B's conclusions rested; a reader of the report had a right to know that the instrumentation had failed and to assess independently whether that failure compromised the results. By withholding that information, Engineer B denied the report's audience — including the court — the ability to exercise independent judgment about the evidentiary weight of his conclusions. This is a deontological violation of the first order: it treats the report's audience as a means to the client's litigation end rather than as rational agents entitled to complete information.
From a consequentialist perspective, the cumulative harm produced by Engineer B's selective omissions substantially outweighed any legitimate benefit his report provided to the municipality's litigation position. The report suppressed wave equation data, concealed equipment failure, and excluded driving records — three independent categories of evidence that collectively pointed toward the adequacy of the original foundation. The public safety implications compound the consequentialist calculus: a dock foundation that is publicly characterized as deficient based on an incomplete analysis may trigger unnecessary remediation costs, erode public confidence in the original design, and create a misleading precedent in the litigation record. Moreover, the municipality's own long-term interest was not well served by a report that could be — and apparently was — challenged on methodological grounds by Engineer A's geotechnical consultant. A complete and methodologically sound report, even if less favorable to the municipality's immediate litigation position, would have provided a more durable evidentiary foundation and avoided the reputational and professional consequences that flow from a demonstrably incomplete expert opinion. The net consequence of Engineer B's approach was to produce a report that was simultaneously harmful to the public interest, vulnerable to technical challenge, and ultimately less useful to the client it was designed to serve.
From a virtue ethics standpoint, Engineer B's dismissal of the pile driving records as 'suspicious' without consulting the contractors, workers, or Engineer A's representatives represents a failure of both intellectual honesty and epistemic humility — two virtues that are foundational to the role of an expert witness. Intellectual honesty requires that an engineer acknowledge the limits of his own knowledge and the existence of evidence that challenges his conclusions; epistemic humility requires that he recognize when his personal skepticism about a record is insufficient grounds for excluding it from analysis, particularly when the people who created that record are available and willing to be consulted. Engineer B possessed the capability to resolve his suspicion about the driving records through straightforward inquiry — the on-site representatives, contractors, and workers were available — yet he chose not to exercise that capability. This is not a failure of competence but a failure of character: the virtuous engineer in Engineer B's position would have treated the suspicious records as a prompt for deeper investigation rather than as a justification for exclusion. The virtue ethics framework also highlights the corrosive effect of Engineer B's conduct on the broader professional community: expert witnesses who substitute advocacy for objectivity undermine the epistemic authority that makes engineering expertise valuable in legal proceedings.
The counterfactual analysis of whether disclosure of the dynamic test equipment failure would have undermined the municipality's litigation strategy is highly probative of Engineer B's actual motivation for the omission. If the equipment failure was genuinely irrelevant to the conclusions — as a scope-of-work defense might imply — then disclosing it would have had no material effect on the municipality's position, and there would have been no rational advocacy-based reason to omit it. The fact that Engineer B omitted it, combined with the fact that Engineer A's geotechnical consultant identified it as a significant methodological flaw, strongly suggests that Engineer B recognized the disclosure would be damaging to the municipality's case and made a deliberate choice to suppress it. This inference is consistent with the pattern of selective omissions throughout the report: each omitted item — the equipment failure, the wave equation data, the driving records showing refusal — pointed in the same direction, toward the adequacy of the original foundation. The probability that three independent categories of exculpatory evidence were all coincidentally excluded by a scope-of-work limitation, rather than by a systematic advocacy bias, is vanishingly small. The counterfactual therefore illuminates not only the motivation for the omission but the degree to which Engineer B's report was structured around the client's litigation interest rather than around objective engineering analysis.
The counterfactual inquiry into whether consultation with Engineer A's representatives and the contractor's workers would have resolved the suspicion about the pile driving records reveals a critical asymmetry in Engineer B's investigative approach: he was willing to act on his suspicion by excluding the records from his analysis, but unwilling to test that suspicion through the most direct and available means. Had Engineer B consulted the on-site representatives and workers, one of two outcomes would have followed. Either the consultation would have corroborated the driving records — in which case Engineer B's conclusions about the 19 piles would have required fundamental revision — or it would have surfaced legitimate concerns about record accuracy that could have been documented and disclosed in the report. In either case, the resulting report would have been more complete, more defensible, and more consistent with the engineer's professional obligations. The fact that Engineer B chose neither path — neither accepting the records nor investigating his doubts about them — and instead simply excluded them without disclosure, suggests that the investigative omission was not an oversight but a strategic choice. This counterfactual therefore supports the Board's conclusion that the failure to consult was an ethical violation, and extends that conclusion by demonstrating that the omission was not merely negligent but structurally consistent with a pattern of advocacy-driven evidence selection.
The counterfactual question of whether methodologically consistent test conditions would have confirmed rather than undermined the original foundation's adequacy carries profound ethical implications for the weight that must be assigned to methodological consistency in expert testing. Engineer B's test program deviated from the original driving conditions in at least three documented respects: use of a vibratory hammer not used in original driving, failure to drive test piles to equivalent penetration depth, and pre-record hammer drops that Engineer A's geotechnical consultant testified would have broken the pile bond and undervalued skin friction. Each of these deviations systematically biased the test results in the direction of lower measured pile capacity. If replicating the original conditions would have produced results confirming the foundation's adequacy, then Engineer B's methodological choices did not merely introduce uncertainty — they produced a directionally biased outcome that served the municipality's litigation interest. This possibility does not require proof of deliberate manipulation; it is sufficient that Engineer B designed or permitted a test program that was structurally incapable of fairly evaluating the original foundation, and then issued conclusions based on that program without disclosing its limitations. The ethical obligation of methodological consistency in expert testing is therefore not merely a technical standard but a safeguard against the use of engineering expertise as an instrument of advocacy.
The counterfactual question of whether Engineer B should have declined the municipality's retention on conflict-of-interest grounds illuminates an important threshold obligation that precedes all of the specific violations the Board identified: the obligation to assess, before accepting an engagement, whether the adversarial litigation context is compatible with the engineer's ability to fulfill his professional obligations. Had Engineer B declined the retention on the grounds that the municipality's status as both client and litigation party created an irreconcilable tension with his duty to produce an objective expert report, the public interest would have been better served in two respects. First, the misleading report would not have entered the litigation record. Second, the refusal would have signaled to the municipality — and to the profession — that engineering expertise is not available as a litigation instrument when the conditions of the engagement preclude genuine objectivity. The NSPE code does not explicitly require engineers to decline retentions that create structural conflicts, but the obligations imposed by code provisions II.3.a and II.3.c are only satisfiable if the engineer enters the engagement with a genuine commitment to objectivity. When the structural conditions of an engagement make that commitment implausible — as they did here, given the municipality's dual role — the ethical engineer's obligation is to either restructure the engagement to preserve independence or decline it entirely. Engineer B's failure to exercise that threshold judgment set the conditions for every subsequent violation the Board identified.
It was unethical for Engineer B to not communicate with the contractor’s supervisor and workers who were on the job during construction.
The tension between Engineer B's role as a faithful litigation agent and his independent obligation of investigative completeness was never genuinely resolved in this case — it was simply collapsed in favor of the client. A faithful agent relationship in litigation permits an engineer to advocate for a client's position through legitimate technical means, but it does not permit the engineer to suppress material contradictory evidence or to decline fact-gathering that might undermine the client's case. Engineer B treated these two obligations as though they were in irreconcilable conflict, and resolved that conflict by abandoning investigative completeness entirely. The case teaches that when client loyalty and investigative completeness appear to conflict, the ethical resolution is not to choose one over the other but to recognize that a technically incomplete report cannot constitute legitimate client service in the first place. An expert report that omits the failed dynamic test equipment, the wave equation calculations, and the driving records showing refusal is not a stronger advocacy document — it is a professionally defective one that ultimately disserves the client by exposing the litigation position to impeachment. The correct resolution of this tension was available to Engineer B: conduct a complete investigation, disclose all material facts including those unfavorable to the municipality, and then offer a reasoned professional opinion. That path would have honored both obligations simultaneously.
The scope-of-work limitation and the obligation of investigative completeness represent a principle tension that this case resolves decisively against the scope limitation as an ethical shield. Engineer B invoked the contractually defined scope of work as a justification for excluding the pile driving records, but this justification is ethically untenable for two compounding reasons. First, a contractual scope of work can define the boundaries of compensated services but cannot relieve an engineer of the obligation to disclose material facts that bear directly on the validity of the conclusions in a professional report. When Engineer B concluded that 19 piles were structurally deficient, that conclusion was inseparable from the pile driving records showing those same piles had met refusal — omitting the records did not merely narrow the scope of the report, it rendered the conclusions affirmatively misleading. Second, the scope-of-work justification was subsequently abandoned by Engineer B himself, who admitted post-report that the real reason for excluding the records was disbelief rather than contractual limitation. This sequence reveals that the scope limitation was not a genuine professional boundary but a post-hoc rationalization, and the case teaches that when an engineer's stated justification for a material omission is demonstrably inconsistent with the engineer's own later explanation, the ethical violation is compounded: the original omission is unethical, and the pretextual justification for it constitutes a separate failure of intellectual honesty.
The interaction between methodological consistency and objective reporting reveals a structural ethical principle that this case makes explicit: an engineer who designs and supervises a test program that deviates materially from the original conditions being evaluated acquires a heightened, not diminished, obligation to disclose those deviations in the resulting report. Engineer B's test program departed from the original pile driving conditions in at least three documented respects — use of a vibratory hammer not used in the original driving, pre-record hammer drops that likely broke the pile bond and undervalued skin friction, and failure of the dynamic test equipment. Each deviation independently undermined the comparability of the test results to the original 90-pile installation. Taken together, they meant that Engineer B's conclusions about the 19 disputed piles rested on a methodologically compromised foundation. The principle of methodological consistency does not merely require that an engineer attempt to replicate original conditions; it requires that when replication fails or is not achieved, the engineer disclose the nature and likely effect of those deviations so that the report's conclusions can be properly weighted by the reader. By omitting all three categories of deviation from his report, Engineer B violated both methodological consistency and objective completeness simultaneously, and the case teaches that these two principles are not independent — methodological failures that are concealed become objective reporting failures, and the ethical weight of the concealment is proportional to the materiality of the deviation to the report's conclusions.
The substitution of personal skepticism for objective engineering analysis — as revealed by Engineer B's post-report statement that 'we just did not believe the driving records' — represents a distinct ethical violation that sits at the intersection of the principles of intellectual honesty, investigative diligence, and objectivity. Professional skepticism is a legitimate and necessary component of engineering judgment, but it carries an obligation: when an engineer disbelieves a material body of evidence, the ethical response is to investigate the basis for that disbelief, consult the parties with direct knowledge of the evidence, and either substantiate the skepticism with technical reasoning or revise the conclusion accordingly. Engineer B did none of these things. He neither consulted Engineer A's on-site representatives, nor the contractor's workers, nor the contractor's supervisor — all of whom were available and could have corroborated or refuted the driving records. The case teaches that unverified personal disbelief of material evidence, when used as the operative basis for excluding that evidence from a professional report without disclosure, is not a defensible exercise of engineering judgment — it is a form of adversarial data selection masquerading as professional discretion. The principle of investigative diligence requires that skepticism be tested, not merely asserted, and the principle of intellectual honesty requires that when skepticism cannot be substantiated through investigation, the engineer must acknowledge the contradictory evidence and explain the basis for discounting it rather than silently omitting it.
The public safety dimension of this case reveals an unresolved tension between Engineer B's litigation role and the broader public interest obligation that attaches whenever an engineer's conclusions bear on the structural adequacy of a public facility. The dock is a public structure, and Engineer B's report concluded that 19 of its 90 supporting piles were structurally deficient. That conclusion, if accurate, would implicate public safety directly. If inaccurate — as the omitted wave equation calculations and driving records suggesting refusal would indicate — then Engineer B's report created a false impression of structural deficiency that could itself generate unnecessary public concern or costly remediation. In either case, the public interest was at stake in a way that transcended the municipality's litigation position. The case teaches that the adversarial litigation context creates the greatest pressure toward selective disclosure precisely when the public interest obligation is strongest, and that the NSPE code provisions requiring objective and truthful reporting are not suspended by the litigation context — they are, if anything, more demanding in that context because the consequences of a biased expert report extend beyond the immediate parties to the proceeding. Engineer B's failure to resolve this tension in favor of public safety and complete disclosure, rather than in favor of the municipality's litigation strategy, represents the deepest ethical failure in the case: the subordination of the public interest obligation to client advocacy in a context where public safety was directly implicated.
It was unethical for Engineer B to issue his report without mentioning that the 19 piles questioned had, according to the driving records, met refusal.
Should Engineer B disclose in the report that dynamic test equipment failed, that pile driving records were not reviewed, and that the scope excluded material data sources, or present conclusions without flagging these limitations?
Engineer B, serving as a litigation expert, prepared a report on pile foundation adequacy without disclosing that dynamic test equipment had failed during testing, that pile driving records were not reviewed, and that the scope of work excluded data sources material to the conclusions drawn. The question is whether Engineer B was obligated to disclose these scope limitations and data gaps prominently in the report.
Prominently state in the report that dynamic test equipment failed, that pile driving records were not reviewed, and that the contracted scope excluded material data sources, so that readers can properly assess the weight of the conclusions.
Confine the report to findings within the contracted scope without volunteering information about equipment failure or excluded records, on the basis that scope definition is the retaining party's prerogative and that opposing counsel may surface gaps through cross-examination.
Communicate the equipment failure and data gaps privately to retaining counsel and allow counsel to decide whether and how to address them in the litigation record, treating the disclosure obligation as satisfied through the attorney-client channel rather than the public report.
Should Engineer B apply consistent analytical methodology to all available evidence, including data contradicting the retaining party's position, or confine analysis to data supporting the client's litigation theory?
Engineer B drew conclusions about pile adequacy while selectively relying on data favorable to the retaining party, failing to apply consistent methodology to contradictory evidence, and omitting from the report data that pointed toward different conclusions. The question is whether Engineer B was obligated to apply methodologically consistent analysis and disclose contradictory evidence.
Analyze all available data using consistent methodological standards, acknowledge findings that contradict the retaining party's position in the report, and allow the fact-finder to weigh the totality of the technical evidence.
Focus analysis on data that supports a technically defensible conclusion favorable to the retaining party, relying on the adversarial system and opposing experts to surface contrary evidence rather than volunteering it in the report.
Note the existence of contradictory data in the report without conducting a full reanalysis under the broader scope, flagging the limitation while staying within the contracted analytical framework and leaving comprehensive reconciliation to the trier of fact.
Should Engineer B present a complete and methodologically consistent technical report including all findings, or limit the report to data and methods that support the retaining party's position?
Engineer B was retained as an expert witness and conducted geotechnical investigations, but the final report omitted equipment failures, used inconsistent methodology, and presented incomplete findings. The core question is whether Engineer B must report all findings completely and consistently, or whether selective presentation is defensible given the adversarial litigation context.
Include all findings in the report, document equipment failures as part of the technical record, and apply consistent methodology throughout, even where results are unfavorable to the retaining party.
Limit the report to the specific questions posed by the retaining party, treating equipment failures and methodological variations as outside the contracted scope, and leave it to opposing counsel to surface additional issues.
Submit the primary report as prepared for the retaining party but attach a separate technical addendum documenting equipment failures and methodological deviations, making the limitations part of the record without restructuring the main findings.
Should Engineer B disclose contradictory evidence and scope limitations in the expert report, or withhold that information to protect the retaining party's litigation position?
Engineer B encountered contradictory evidence during the investigation, including data that undermined the retaining party's position, and also operated under scope limitations that were not disclosed in the report. The question is whether Engineer B must disclose both the contradictory evidence and the scope limitations to relevant parties, or whether non-disclosure is permissible given the litigation context and client confidentiality.
Include all contradictory data in the report and explicitly state the scope limitations under which the investigation was conducted, allowing the court and all parties to assess the findings with full information.
Present only the data supporting the retaining party's position and omit scope limitations, on the basis that the adversarial system assigns responsibility for surfacing contrary evidence to opposing counsel and competing experts.
Inform the retaining attorney of the contradictory evidence and scope limitations and defer to counsel's judgment on what must be disclosed under applicable legal and procedural rules, treating the disclosure question as a legal rather than purely ethical determination.
Engineers shall be objective and truthful in professional reports, statements, or testimony. They shall include all relevant and pertinent information in such reports, statements, or testimony, which should bear the date indicating when it was current.
Engineers may express publicly technical opinions that are founded upon knowledge of the facts and competence in the subject matter.
Engineers shall issue no statements, criticisms, or arguments on technical matters that are inspired or paid for by interested parties, unless they have prefaced their comments by explicitly identifying the interested parties on whose behalf they are speaking, and by revealing the existence of any interest the engineers may have in the matters.
Engineers shall acknowledge their errors and shall not distort or alter the facts.
Engineers shall advise their clients or employers when they believe a project will not be successful.
Engineers shall avoid the use of statements containing a material misrepresentation of fact or omitting a material fact.
The question arose because Engineer B occupied the dual role of test program supervisor and litigation expert for the municipality, which created pressure to frame findings favorably for the client. When the equipment failure was later raised through the Independent Geotechnical Observer and the Contradictory Post-Report Explanation, it became clear that Engineer B had the information, had the capability to disclose it, and chose not to, making the omission appear deliberate rather than incidental to scope.
This question arose because Engineer B simultaneously invoked a contractual scope limitation to justify not reviewing pile driving records and issued conclusions about pile foundation adequacy that those same records would directly inform. The tension between honoring client-defined scope and maintaining the investigative completeness required for any credible expert conclusion created a genuine conflict that neither warrant could resolve without contesting the other.
This question arose because Engineer B occupied two roles simultaneously, serving as a faithful agent to the municipality and as an independent technical authority whose conclusions had to be methodologically defensible. The test program deviations collapsed those two roles into a single contradiction, forcing the question of whether litigation service and technical integrity can coexist when the engineer controls both the test design and the reporting of its limitations.
The question emerged because Engineer B's retention by a municipality collapsed two normally separate roles into one engagement: the role of expert serving a client in adversarial litigation and the role of technical advisor whose work affects public infrastructure safety. The Deficient Report Issuance and Pile Record Exclusion actions made the tension visible, because those actions could be explained either as ordinary adversarial scope management or as a breach of the heightened honesty obligation that attaches when the client is a public body responsible for a 90-pile dock foundation affecting public safety.
This question emerged because Engineer B's omission of the failed dynamic test equipment created a direct collision between the deontological principle that truthful reporting is an unconditional duty and the professional norm that engineers may legitimately bound their reports to commissioned scope. The question forces a determination of whether the categorical character of the honesty duty survives a scope limitation rebuttal, which is precisely the condition that makes the ethical status of the omission genuinely uncertain rather than obvious.
This question arose because Engineer B occupied two roles whose obligations point in opposite directions: a retained litigation expert owes zealous service to the client, but an engineer issuing a technical report on a public structure owes completeness and neutrality to all affected parties. The cumulative pattern of omissions, each individually defensible as scope limitation, collectively produced a report that could not be tested against the full technical record, forcing a consequentialist audit of whether the litigation benefit to the municipality outweighed the risk transferred to the public through a potentially misevaluated dock foundation.
The question arose because Engineer B's characterization of the records as suspicious without consulting available witnesses created observable tension between what a virtuous expert would do when encountering anomalous evidence and what an expert operating under a client-defined scope is permitted to do. The subsequent contradictory post-report explanation compounded the concern by suggesting the dismissal was not a neutral scope decision but a conclusion reached without the epistemic groundwork that intellectual honesty and humility require.
The question emerged because Engineer B performed actions that are factually incompatible with a complete and honest report, specifically omitting equipment failure and contradictory pile driving records, and then offered a scope-of-work defense that, if accepted, would allow a contracted boundary to override a categorical professional duty. The deontological framing sharpens the question because Kantian ethics does not recognize consequentialist or contractual exceptions to duties grounded in honesty and non-deception, making the scope defense structurally suspect and forcing explicit analysis of whether any contractual limitation can discharge a categorical obligation.
This question arose because the same omission can be read as either a reasonable scope boundary or as selective suppression of damaging technical data, and the answer turns on whether the equipment failure was causally connected to the conclusions Engineer B chose to include. The question forces a determination of whether the litigation context shaped what Engineer B treated as within scope, which is precisely the condition under which the Expert Witness Neutrality Obligation overrides the Faithful Agent role.
The question arose because Engineer B's decision to omit stakeholder consultation created an unresolved gap between his suspicion about the pile driving records and any factual basis for confirming or dismissing that suspicion. The competing warrants governing investigative completeness and scope limitation left open whether the omission was a professional failure that distorted the conclusion or a permissible boundary that left the conclusion intact regardless of what consultation might have revealed.
This question arose because Engineer B supervised a test program that departed from the original driving conditions in multiple documented ways, then issued conclusions about foundation adequacy without acknowledging whether those departures affected the results. The question forces examination of whether methodological consistency is a procedural formality or a substantive ethical requirement, because the answer determines whether Engineer B's findings were a legitimate technical contribution or a misleading artifact of a flawed test design.
The question arose because Engineer B occupied two roles simultaneously, a technical investigator bound by fact-gathering diligence and an expert retained to defend the municipality, and those roles carry conflicting norms about whose knowledge should be sought. The omission of any contact with Engineer A's side left open whether Engineer B's investigation was technically incomplete or simply adversarially bounded, and that ambiguity is what makes the ethical status of the non-communication genuinely contestable.
This question arose because Engineer B did not decline the retention and then produced a report that violated multiple objectivity obligations, which forces a retrospective evaluation of whether the engagement itself was the root cause of the ethical failure. The question asks whether a refusal at the outset would have better served the public interest and professional integrity than participation followed by a biased report, and it emerges precisely because the data show that the adversarial engagement structure and the resulting Client Defense Bias State together produced outcomes that the Expert Witness Neutrality Obligation and the Adversarial Data Selection Prohibition Obligation both condemn.
This question arose because Engineer B occupied the role of litigation expert, a role that carries a heightened duty of objectivity and completeness beyond ordinary client service, and the contractor supervisor and workers represented the most direct available source of factual information about original construction conditions. The failure to consult them, combined with the issuance of a report that reached conclusions about those same construction conditions, created a direct conflict between the scope limitation Engineer B invoked and the investigative completeness standard that expert reporting demands.
The question arose because Engineer B drew affirmative conclusions about the adequacy of the 19 piles without acknowledging that driving records already on file indicated those piles had met refusal, making the omission appear selective rather than incidental. The adversarial context of his retention by the municipality sharpened the concern, because a neutral expert is expected to surface contradictory evidence rather than confine the analysis to data that supports the client's position.
The question emerged because Engineer B's verbal explanation after the report was issued created a second evidentiary event that exposed the reasoning process behind the original omissions, forcing a determination of whether undisclosed subjective disbelief constitutes a violation independent of the omissions it produced. The gap between what the report said and what Engineer B later admitted he believed is the structural source of the question, because it reveals that the report's silence on the driving records was not an oversight but a deliberate credibility judgment that was hidden from the reader.
This question emerged because the sequential inconsistency between Engineer B's two explanations created observable evidence that at least one of them was not the true basis for the omission, which forced the question of what ethical obligations attach when an engineer's stated justification is itself demonstrably unreliable. The contradiction transformed what might have been a routine scope dispute into a question about professional honesty, because an engineer who gives shifting reasons for an omission has undermined the credibility of both reasons and left no transparent account of why relevant evidence was excluded from an expert report.
This question emerged because Engineer B occupied two roles simultaneously, a paid agent of the municipality and a purportedly objective technical expert, and the NSPE code at the time did not explicitly require engineers in that dual position to affirmatively disclose the structural conflict in their reports. The deficient report, the pile record exclusion, and the eventual ethics finding made visible a gap between what the code assumed about expert witness independence and what the adversarial retention structure actually produced.
The question arose because Engineer B's role as a municipality litigation expert placed him inside an adversarial legal structure that normally limits disclosure obligations to the client and the court, yet the subject of the dispute was a public dock whose pile foundation remained structurally unresolved after a deficient test program. The collision between the bounded faithful agent role and the engineer's independent public safety obligation created genuine uncertainty about whether the litigation context could lawfully contain what was also a public risk disclosure question.
This question emerged because Engineer B occupied two roles whose governing warrants point in opposite directions: the faithful agent role authorizes selective emphasis in service of the client, while the expert witness role prohibits selective emphasis in service of technical truth. The specific data of pile record exclusion, equipment failure non-disclosure, and a deficient report issued in a litigation context forced the question of which warrant controls when the two collide, because Engineer B's actual conduct satisfied one warrant only by violating the other.
Was it ethical for Engineer B to not have included the failed operation of the test equipment in his report?
Did Engineer B's post-report explanation that 'we just did not believe the driving records' constitute an admission that he substituted personal skepticism for objective engineering analysis, and does that admission itself constitute a separate ethical violation distinct from the omissions in the report?
Given that Engineer B gave two contradictory justifications for excluding the pile driving records — first that it was outside his scope of work, and later that he simply disbelieved them — does the inconsistency between these explanations suggest that the scope-of-work limitation was a post-hoc rationalization rather than a genuine professional boundary, and what ethical obligations arise when an engineer's stated justification for an omission is itself demonstrably unreliable?
To what extent does the municipality's role as the retaining client create a structural conflict of interest that Engineer B had an independent obligation to disclose or manage, and should the NSPE code require expert witnesses retained by litigation parties to affirmatively acknowledge that conflict in their reports?
Because the dock is a public structure and the adequacy of its pile foundation bears directly on public safety, did Engineer B have an obligation that transcended his litigation role to flag the unresolved structural questions to a public authority or regulatory body, independent of what his client the municipality wished him to report?
Was it ethical for Engineer B not to communicate with any representatives of Engineer A about the project?
Does the principle of Engineer B Faithful Agent Limits in Litigation conflict with Engineer B Litigation Neutrality Violation — that is, can an engineer serving as a retained litigation expert simultaneously fulfill a duty of zealous service to the retaining client and an independent duty of neutrality and completeness, and when those duties collide, which must yield?
Does Engineer B Scope Limitation Non-Disclosure conflict with Engineer B Investigative Completeness Failure — specifically, if a contractually defined scope of work genuinely excluded review of pile driving records, does that contractual constraint relieve Engineer B of the ethical obligation to gather all material facts before issuing conclusions, or does the ethical duty of investigative completeness override a client-imposed scope limitation when material evidence is knowingly excluded?
Does Engineer B Methodological Consistency Failure conflict with Engineer B Client Service Disservice — that is, by designing a test program that failed to replicate original driving conditions (vibratory hammer use, pre-record hammer drops, equipment failure), did Engineer B simultaneously undermine the methodological integrity his client needed to prevail and violate his independent obligation to produce technically sound results, and does serving the client's litigation interest ever justify methodological shortcuts that compromise the reliability of the engineer's own conclusions?
Does Engineer B Intellectual Honesty in Expert Report conflict with Engineer B Litigation Neutrality Breach when the engineer's retaining party is also a public municipality — meaning that the obligation to produce an honest, complete report for the benefit of the public interest may be even stronger than in purely private litigation, yet the adversarial litigation context creates the greatest pressure toward selective disclosure?
Was it ethical for Engineer B not to communicate with the contractor’s supervisor and workers who were on the job during construction?
From a deontological perspective, did Engineer B fulfill a categorical duty of complete and truthful reporting by omitting the failed dynamic test equipment from his report, regardless of whether that omission ultimately affected the structural conclusions?
From a consequentialist perspective, did the cumulative harm produced by Engineer B's selective omissions — including suppression of wave equation data, equipment failure, and driving records — outweigh any legitimate benefit his report provided to the municipality's litigation position, particularly given the public safety implications of a potentially misevaluated dock foundation?
From a virtue ethics standpoint, did Engineer B demonstrate the professional virtues of intellectual honesty and epistemic humility when he dismissed the pile driving records as 'suspicious' without consulting the contractors, workers, or Engineer A's representatives who could have corroborated or refuted that suspicion?
From a deontological perspective, does the existence of a narrowly defined scope of work ever discharge an engineer's categorical duty to disclose material facts — such as test equipment failure or contradictory driving records — that bear directly on the validity of the conclusions in a professional report submitted in a legal proceeding?
Was it ethical for Engineer B to issue his report without mentioning that the 19 piles questioned had, according to the driving records, met refusal?
If Engineer B had disclosed the dynamic test equipment failure in his report, would the municipality's litigation strategy have been materially undermined, and does the answer to that question illuminate whether Engineer B's omission was a product of client advocacy bias rather than a genuine scope-of-work limitation?
Had Engineer B consulted Engineer A's on-site representatives and the contractor's workers before issuing his report, is it plausible that the suspicion about the pile driving records would have been resolved, and would a revised report incorporating that information have changed the conclusion that 19 piles were structurally deficient?
If Engineer B had replicated the original pile driving conditions — using the same hammer type, driving the test piles to equivalent penetration depth, and not dropping the hammer before commencing blow count records — would the test results have confirmed rather than undermined the adequacy of the original 90-pile foundation, and what does that possibility imply about the ethical weight of methodological consistency in expert testing?
If Engineer B had declined the municipality's retention on the grounds that the adversarial litigation context created an irreconcilable conflict with his obligation to produce an objective expert report, would that refusal have better served the public interest and the integrity of the engineering profession than the biased report he ultimately issued?
Because Engineer B knew the dynamic test equipment had malfunctioned and nonetheless issued a report drawing pile capacity conclusions from that equipment's data without any mention of the failure, the board found that the omission rendered the report incomplete and objectively misleading under P1 and P6, constituting an ethical violation regardless of whether the structural conclusions were ultimately correct.
Because all four violations pointed in the same direction and that direction aligned with the retaining client's litigation interest, the board concluded that the pattern reflects a systemic subordination of objectivity to client advocacy rather than a collection of isolated lapses, and that this pattern exposes a structural tension in the litigation expert role that the code's objectivity requirements must govern with full force regardless of the adversarial context.
Because Engineer B admitted he had reviewed the driving records sufficiently to distrust them, yet took no investigative steps to test that distrust and issued conclusions as if the records were absent, the board found that the post-report admission revealed an independent epistemic violation distinct from the reporting omissions already cited. The admission transformed what might have appeared to be a passive gap in the report into evidence of a deliberate and undisclosed choice to substitute personal skepticism for objective analysis.
Because Engineer B's scope-of-work defense required that he had not examined the records, and his credibility-based defense required that he had examined them closely enough to distrust them, the board found the two explanations could not both be true. The board concluded that the scope-of-work rationale was constructed after the fact to provide a professionally defensible cover for what was actually an advocacy-driven exclusion, and that the failure to correct this false explanation compounded the original omission with a secondary candor violation.
Because the municipality both retained Engineer B and stood to benefit financially from conclusions favorable to its litigation position, the board found that the structural conditions for a conflict of interest under II.3.c were satisfied regardless of whether Engineer B consciously intended to favor his client. The board further found that the combination of undisclosed conflict and selective omissions in the report provided affirmative evidence that the conflict was not merely theoretical but operative in shaping the conclusions Engineer B issued.
Because the dock serves the public and the 19 piles Engineer B flagged as potentially deficient represent a live safety concern, the board found that Engineer B's obligations extended beyond the litigation engagement to include an independent duty to ensure that unresolved structural questions reached a competent authority. The omission of the wave equation data, which showed those same piles had met refusal, compounded this failure by leaving a misleading and incomplete structural record in place after the litigation concluded.
Because Engineer B's report omitted multiple categories of material evidence that each happened to cut against the municipality's litigation position, the board found that the pattern of omissions could not be attributed to coincidence or neutral professional judgment. The board concluded that the duty of expert neutrality must yield to the duty of faithful agency only when the two are genuinely compatible, and that Engineer B's report demonstrated what results when the hierarchy is inverted and client advocacy displaces the obligation to produce a complete and honest technical assessment.
Because Engineer B already possessed the driving records showing refusal when he issued his conclusions about pile deficiency, the board found that the scope-of-work boundary could not excuse the omission. The omission created a false impression of analytical completeness in violation of III.3.a, not because Engineer B was required to perform wave equation analysis, but because he was required to disclose that contradictory data existed.
Because Engineer B knew the test equipment had failed and omitted that fact from a report submitted in a legal proceeding, the board found a categorical violation of II.3.a. The deontological analysis turned on the act of knowing exclusion itself, not on whether the structural conclusions were ultimately correct, because the report audience including the court was denied the ability to independently evaluate the evidentiary weight of the data.
Because three separate bodies of contradictory evidence were all excluded and the affected structure was a public dock, the board found that the consequentialist calculus was decisively negative. The report harmed the public interest, proved vulnerable to technical challenge, and ultimately failed to serve even the client's durable litigation needs, producing net harm across every relevant dimension.
Because Engineer B had direct access to the contractors and workers who created the driving records and chose not to consult them before labeling the records suspicious, the board found a failure of intellectual honesty and epistemic humility rather than a mere procedural lapse. The inconsistency between his two stated justifications further indicated that neither represented a genuine professional boundary, reinforcing the conclusion that the exclusion reflected advocacy bias rather than reasoned judgment.
Because Engineer B issued conclusions about the adequacy of a foundation designed and supervised by Engineer A without making any contact with Engineer A's representatives, the board found that he failed his basic obligation of investigative diligence, since those representatives were available and held information that could have confirmed or refuted the basis for his conclusions.
Because every omitted item pointed toward foundation adequacy and because disclosing the equipment failure would have cost the municipality nothing if it were truly irrelevant, the board found that the scope-of-work justification was a post-hoc rationalization rather than a genuine professional boundary. The systematic alignment of all omissions with the client's litigation interest, taken together with the contradictory post-report explanation, supported the inference that Engineer B structured his report around advocacy rather than objective engineering analysis.
Because Engineer B identified the pile driving records as suspicious and then excluded them without consulting the workers and representatives who were present during construction and available to him, the board found that the omission was not a passive oversight but a choice to act on unverified doubt, and that choice violated the investigative completeness and intellectual honesty obligations that govern expert reporting.
Because the three documented deviations from original driving conditions each pushed measured pile capacity downward and the report disclosed none of them, the board concluded that Engineer B either designed or permitted a test program that was structurally incapable of fairly evaluating the original foundation, and that issuing conclusions from such a program without disclosure violated the methodological consistency and objectivity obligations that define the ethical floor for expert testing.
Because the municipality's dual role as client and litigation party created a structural condition that made genuine objectivity implausible from the outset, and because Engineer B neither restructured the engagement nor declined it, the board found that the threshold judgment to accept the retention without safeguards set the conditions for every subsequent violation, and that the ethical obligation to assess engagement compatibility with professional duties precedes and conditions all other obligations in the engagement.
Because Engineer B collapsed the tension between client loyalty and investigative completeness entirely in favor of the client by omitting the equipment failure, wave equation data, and driving records, the board found that he misunderstood the nature of the faithful agent obligation in litigation, which permits advocacy through legitimate technical means but does not permit suppression of material contradictory evidence, and that the correct resolution of the tension was available to him through a complete report offering a reasoned professional opinion.
Because Engineer B first cited scope of work and then admitted he simply disbelieved the driving records, the board found that the scope limitation was a post-hoc rationalization rather than a genuine professional boundary, and that this sequence compounded the original ethical violation by adding a separate failure of intellectual honesty, because an engineer whose stated justification for a material omission is demonstrably inconsistent with his own later explanation has not merely omitted evidence but has misrepresented the basis for doing so.
Because Engineer B's test program deviated from original conditions in three documented and material respects, and because his report conclusions about the 19 piles depended on comparability to those original conditions, the board concluded that omitting all three deviations simultaneously violated methodological consistency and objective completeness as linked rather than independent duties. The concealment of methodological failures converted them into objective reporting failures, and the ethical weight of that concealment was proportional to how directly each deviation undermined the report's central conclusions.
Because Engineer B admitted after the fact that he simply did not believe the driving records, and because he made no effort to test that belief by consulting any of the available parties with direct knowledge, the board concluded that his exclusion of the records was adversarial data selection rather than professional judgment. The inconsistency between his scope-of-work justification and his later admission of disbelief further indicated that the scope rationale was constructed after the fact, which itself constituted a separate violation of intellectual honesty under III.1.a.
Because the dock was a public structure and Engineer B's conclusions about 19 deficient piles bore directly on public safety, the board concluded that his failure to disclose omitted evidence and methodological deviations represented the deepest ethical failure in the case, the subordination of the public interest obligation to client advocacy at precisely the moment when the public interest obligation was strongest. The adversarial litigation context, rather than reducing Engineer B's disclosure duties, intensified them because the potential harm from a biased expert report on a public structure extended beyond the municipality and the contractor to the public relying on the dock's structural integrity.
Because Engineer B dismissed the pile driving records as suspicious and issued conclusions about pile adequacy without speaking to the contractor's supervisor or workers who had direct knowledge of the original driving, the board found that he failed his investigative completeness obligation, since those sources were available and their accounts were material to the credibility of the records he rejected.
Because the driving records showed that the 19 questioned piles had met refusal, and because Engineer B knew this and chose not to mention it in his report, the board found that the omission violated his obligation to present all material facts bearing on his conclusions, since a reader of the report had no way to know that contradictory evidence existed and had been set aside.
Because Engineer B knew the dynamic test equipment had failed and issued a report drawing pile capacity conclusions from that equipment's data without any mention of the failure, the board found that the omission was not merely incomplete but constituted constructive misrepresentation, since Engineer B's actual knowledge meant the silence was a deliberate choice that allowed readers to rely on conclusions built on a foundation the engineer himself knew was compromised.
Because Engineer B's two stated reasons for excluding the pile driving records cannot both be true at the same time, and because the credibility-based explanation emerged only under challenge, the board concluded that the scope-of-work rationale was a post-hoc rationalization rather than a genuine professional boundary, making the shifting justification itself a violation of the obligation not to distort the facts of one's own conduct.
Because Engineer A's representatives held the most probative available evidence on why the 19 piles reached refusal at shallower depth, and because Engineer B was aware of at least one alternative technical explanation he never tested, the board concluded that the failure to consult was not a procedural lapse but a substantive investigative failure that directly undermined the technical reliability of the report's conclusions.
Because Engineer B's report implicitly advanced a theory about why 19 piles reached refusal early without testing that theory against the accounts of the people who drove them, and because those people were identifiable and accessible, the board concluded that bypassing these sources entirely meant the report's central conclusion rested on an uninvestigated assumption, which is both an ethical failure and a disservice to the client whose litigation position the report was meant to support.
Because Engineer B knew the wave equation analysis contradicted his deficiency conclusion and suppressed it entirely, and because the structure served the public, the board concluded that the omission was not a permissible exercise of professional judgment about which evidence to emphasize but a violation of the obligation to produce objective and complete reports, with the public safety dimension elevating the ethical weight of the disclosure obligation above what it would carry in a purely private context.
property=cause; causal chain's cause text resolved to the case individual(s) by embedding shortlist + LLM select
property=effect; causal chain's effect text resolved to the case individual(s) by embedding shortlist + LLM select
property=responsibleAgent; causal chain's responsibleAgent text resolved to the case individual(s) by embedding shortlist + LLM select
Engineer B (and those under supervision)
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source_field=interpretation; confidence=0.9
The faithful agent duty is a genuine obligation but is subordinate to the engineer's independent professional duties of objectivity, completeness, and intellectual honesty. It does not authorize selective presentation of evidence to favor the retaining party.
source_field=interpretation; confidence=0.88
source_field=interpretation; confidence=0.8
Engineer B's selective use of analytical methods and omission of contradictory evidence indicate that the report was shaped to support the retaining party's litigation position rather than to render an objective technical opinion.
source_field=interpretation; confidence=0.85
Objectivity in an expert engineering role requires that conclusions be based on all available and material evidence, not on a subset selected to support the retaining party's position.
source_field=interpretation; confidence=0.82
The faithful agent duty is a genuine obligation but is subordinate to the engineer's independent professional duties of objectivity, completeness, and intellectual honesty.
Genuine service to the municipality required Engineer B to include all material data and explain his reasoning for any discounting, so that the client could make informed decisions rather than decisions based on an incomplete picture.
property=initiates; happening's initiates state text resolved to the case State(s) by embedding shortlist + LLM multi-select (Event Calculus fluent transition)
Incomplete Expert Report on Record; 19 Piles Formally Declared Deficient Without Full Basis; Engineer A's Reputation at Risk from Incomplete Analysis
Material Test Failure Concealed in Record; Incomplete Technical Report Issued
Technical Adequacy of Piles Formally Contested; Engineer A's Professional Judgment Under Challenge
Test Conditions Non-Representative of Original Driving; Skin Friction Values Undervalued in Test Data
Selective Technical Analysis on Record; Engineer A's Professional Judgment Impugned Without Complete Basis; Municipality Potentially Misdirected on Structural Adequacy
Disputed Pile Adequacy State; Technical Controversy Active
Misleading Report in Record; 19 Piles Formally Flagged as Failed; Engineer B Credibility at Risk
Pile Adequacy Partially Confirmed; Disputed Methodology State
Non-Representative Test Conditions State; Material Facts Available for Disclosure
Test Pile Program Active; Engineer B Engaged as Municipal Expert
property=guidedByPrinciple; action's guidedByPrinciple text resolved to the case Obligation/Principle individual(s) by embedding shortlist + LLM multi-select (obligation-engagement grounding)
Professional Accountability; Objective Technical Analysis
property=violatesObligation; action's violatesObligation text resolved to the case Obligation/Principle individual(s) by embedding shortlist + LLM multi-select (obligation-engagement grounding)
Professional Honesty; Complete and Accurate Technical Reporting; Fact-Gathering Diligence
Inclusion of All Relevant and Pertinent Information; Complete and Accurate Technical Reporting; Professional Honesty; Serving Client's True Interests; Objective Technical Analysis
Objective Technical Analysis; Professional Honesty
Complete and Accurate Technical Reporting; Inclusion of All Relevant and Pertinent Information
property=fulfillsObligation; action's fulfillsObligation text resolved to the case Obligation/Principle individual(s) by embedding shortlist + LLM multi-select (obligation-engagement grounding)
Professional Due Diligence; Protection of Technical Record Integrity
Objective Technical Analysis; Professional Accountability
Client Service; Professional Accountability
Professional Competence; Complete and Accurate Technical Reporting; Fact-Gathering Diligence
Professional Honesty; Objective Technical Analysis
Inclusion of All Relevant and Pertinent Information; Complete and Accurate Technical Reporting; Objective Technical Analysis; Serving Client's True Interests
Objective Technical Analysis; Thorough Engineering Investigation
Fact-Gathering Diligence; Professional Competence; Complete and Accurate Technical Reporting
Objective Technical Analysis; Client Service
property=obligatedParty; component party text resolved to the case Agent(s) by embedding shortlist + LLM select
property=possessedBy; component party text resolved to the case Agent(s) by embedding shortlist + LLM select
property=invokedBy; component party text resolved to the case Agent(s) by embedding shortlist + LLM select
property=constrainedEntity; component party text resolved to the case Agent(s) by embedding shortlist + LLM select
Geotechnical consultant retained by Engineer A
relation_type=has_client; property=hasClient
Engineer A was retained by a municipality to design a dock on a supporting foundation of 90 piles
relation_type=reviewed_by; property=workReviewedBy
the municipality retained Engineer B to supervise the driving of several test piles to see whether the piles would gain sufficient strength to meet the design calculation requirements
the municipality retained Engineer B to supervise the driving of several test piles
relation_type=peer; property=professionalPeerOf
At no time during the development of Engineer B's report did Engineer B talk to any representative of Engineer A
An independent geotechnical consultant was retained by Engineer A to observe the test
relation_type=reviews; property=reviewsWorkOf
The geotechnical consultant testified and showed that dynamic test equipment had failed during the test and that the test piles were not driven to the same depth of penetration
property=availableTo; resource used_by text resolved to the case Agent(s) by embedding shortlist + LLM multi-select
Engineer B omitted from his report the fact that dynamic test equipment failed during the test and that all 19 piles reported as failing were driven to refusal
Engineer B reached conclusions about the adequacy of 19 piles without consulting Engineer A's on-site representatives, reviewing pile driving records, or inquiring of contractors and workers
Engineer B supervised test pile driving that used a vibratory hammer not used in the original driving, did not replicate the required depth of penetration
Engineer B's report failed to disclose that dynamic test equipment failed during the pile driving test, a material methodological limitation
Engineer B's report omitted disclosure that dynamic test equipment had failed during the test, that pile driving records were not reviewed
Engineer B, retained by the municipality in litigation against Engineer A, produced a report that relied exclusively on depth-of-penetration analysis to conclude 19 piles were deficient while omitting wave equation analysis
Engineer B failed to communicate with Engineer A's on-site representative and failed to inquire from the contractor, workers, or others on the job
Engineer B, retained by the municipality in an adversarial proceeding, shaped his findings report to support the municipality's legal position by selectively omitting facts favorable to Engineer A
Engineer B's duty as the municipality's retained expert did not extend to omitting material technical evidence from the report or declining to consult available witnesses
By excluding pile driving records from his report, Engineer B forfeited the opportunity to present a reasoned basis for discounting their value, thereby potentially misdirecting the municipality's conclusions
Engineer B's report presented conclusions about pile inadequacy without acknowledging the existence of wave equation analysis that contradicted those conclusions
Engineer B's report to the municipality omitted the wave equation analysis showing the 19 piles had driven to essential refusal and would have met strength requirements
Engineer B failed to maintain objectivity in the expert investigation by selectively applying analytical methods, disregarding pile driving records, and declining to consult available witnesses
Engineer B structured his report language to foreclose any interpretation that the 90 piles met the safety factor requirement, selectively deploying technical data to support the municipality's adversarial position
Engineer A's geotechnical consultant identified procedural irregularities in the test pile driving, including equipment failure and methodological deviations, and disclosed these findings through testimony
Engineer B's report failed to disclose that dynamic test equipment failed during the pile driving test, a material methodological limitation that affected the reliability of the test results
Engineer B failed to communicate with Engineer A's on-site representative and failed to inquire from the contractor, workers, or others on the job, constituting a failure of fact-gathering diligence
Engineer B's duty as the municipality's retained expert did not extend to omitting material technical evidence from the report
Engineer B was obligated to present findings objectively, apply analytical methods consistently, and not omit material evidence contradicting the municipality's litigation position.
Engineer B structured his report language to foreclose any interpretation that the 90 piles met the safety factor requirement, selectively deploying technical data
Engineer B was obligated to disclose in his findings report that dynamic test equipment failed during the test pile driving program, a material limitation that affected the validity and completeness of the results.
Engineer B was obligated to replicate original pile driving conditions as closely as practicable in the test pile program, and to disclose any deviations that could affect the comparability of results.
The geotechnical consultant retained by Engineer A was obligated to document and report all procedural irregularities observed during the test pile driving, including equipment failure and methodological deviations
Engineer B was obligated to disclose in the report that dynamic test equipment had failed during the test, that pile driving records were not reviewed, and that the scope of work excluded certain data sources material to the conclusions.
Engineer B was obligated to refrain from selectively using technical data to defend the municipality's position and was required to present findings based on all available evidence, including pile driving records and wave equation analysis
Engineer B was obligated to consult available witnesses, review pile driving records, and pursue all reasonable lines of inquiry before reaching conclusions about the adequacy of the 19 piles.
Engineer B was obligated to serve the municipality's legitimate interests while refusing to omit material technical evidence from the report, even though including that evidence would have undermined the municipality's litigation position.
Engineer B was obligated to acknowledge in the report the wave equation analysis showing the 19 piles had driven to essential refusal and would have met load requirements, as this evidence materially contradicted the report's conclusions.
Engineer B was obligated to inquire of the contractor, on-site workers, and Engineer A's on-site representative to gather all available facts about the original pile driving before reaching conclusions about pile adequacy.
Engineer B was obligated to include in his findings report all material technical facts, including the failure of dynamic test equipment and the fact that all 19 piles reported as failing were driven to refusal
property=affects; state affectedParties text resolved to the case Agent(s) by embedding shortlist + LLM multi-select
Municipality; Public users of the dock; Engineer A; Engineer B
Engineer A; Municipality; Contractor; Public users of the dock
Engineer B; Engineer A; Municipality; Contractor
Engineer B; Engineer A; Municipality; Contractor workers
Engineer B; Municipality; Engineer A; Contractor and workers on site
Engineer B; Engineer A; Municipality; Contractor; Public users of the dock
Engineer B; Engineer A; Municipality; Geotechnical consultant for Engineer A
property=activatedByEvent; description resolved to the endpoint by embedding shortlist + LLM select
Expert testimony and Engineer B's report raised questions about whether 19 of 90 piles met the safety factor required by design calculations
property=activatesObligation; description resolved to the endpoint by embedding shortlist + LLM select
property=terminatedByEvent; description resolved to the endpoint by embedding shortlist + LLM select
Report is supplemented with findings from those sources
Construction or installation records exist
Professional conclusions depend on acceptance or rejection of the records
Pile driving records showed many piles did not meet initial driving resistance requirements, creating an unresolved question about long-term load capacity
Duty to disclose that records are disputed when relying on or dismissing them
Test pile program confirmed set-up strength gain, though dispute about 19 piles remained
Professional's findings are intended to serve as evidence or support in a legal or quasi-legal proceeding
Duty to resist selective use of data to serve client's adversarial interest
Not terminated within the case facts; engagement concluded with submission of the incomplete report
Duty to correct the incomplete or biased report
Professional revises report to include all material facts
Expert or reviewing professional submits a report
Duty to disclose equipment failures or test anomalies
Duty to present complete and objective findings
Supplemental report issued correcting omissions
Issuance of Engineer B's concluding report
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Professional must not use scope limitation as a shield against reporting known material findings
Duty to assess whether scope limitations prevent fulfillment of independent professional obligations
Duty to report contradictory data that bears on conclusions
Equipment fails or procedural deviations occur during testing
Professional must not omit equipment failures from reports that rely on data from those tests
Duty to disclose equipment failures and procedural deviations in the report
Report is amended to disclose deficiencies and qualify conclusions accordingly
property=toEntity; temporal relation's toEntity text resolved to the case Action/Event individual by embedding shortlist + LLM select
the test piles were driven and after a 30 day set, the increase in set up strength with time was confirmed.
property=fromEntity; temporal relation's fromEntity text resolved to the case Action/Event individual by embedding shortlist + LLM select
At no time during the development of Engineer B's report did Engineer B talk to any representative of Engineer A... When queried by Engineer A after the report was issued by Engineer B...
When queried by Engineer A after the report was issued by Engineer B, Engineer B said: 'We just did not believe the driving records...'
Previously, Engineer B had said, 'We didn't look at the pile driving records because it was not in our scope of work.' [contrasted with later statement] 'We just did not believe the driving records and there was also the issue of whether the pile was vented...'
The claim was settled by mediation. Engineer A and the municipality shared the cost of the settlement with the contractor for $300,000.
The geotechnical consultant testified and showed that dynamic test equipment had failed during the test.
During the mediation, the municipality brought in expert witnesses to support their case. One expert testified that the pile driving records indicated that many of the piles did not, at the time of initial driving, meet driving resistance sufficient to satisfy the load carrying requirements.
after the 30 day set up, the driving hammer was dropped several times to start the hammer before the record of blow counts commenced.
An independent geotechnical consultant was retained by Engineer A to observe the test. The geotechnical consultant testified and showed that dynamic test equipment had failed during the test.
During the mediation, the municipality brought in expert witnesses... To test this, the municipality retained Engineer B to supervise the driving of several test piles.
Engineer A testified that the geotechnical firm's report expected that the piles would gain sufficient additional strength within 30 days to meet driving resistance requirements.
Following construction, there was a contractor's extra claim and Engineer A and the municipality were both sued by the contractor.
At the conclusion of the program Engineer B reports that 19 piles do not meet the required factor of safety.
30-day set period before strength gain confirmation
Mediation Settlement Reached → Expert Testimony Given
During the mediation, the municipality brought in expert witnesses to support their case.
Mediation Settlement Reached -- Mediation process underway to allocate costs
Expert Witness Retention -- Municipality retains experts to support its case
Expert Testimony Given -- Expert testifies many piles failed to meet initial driving resistance
Without the mediation/adversarial setting, the municipality would have had no occasion to introduce expert testimony.
Municipality's need to support its position on cost sharing
Mediation context plus municipality's strategic decision to introduce experts
Engineer B's professional credibility was further undermined; the record now contained inconsistent justifications for the report's omissions, strengthening the basis for an ethics finding against Engineer B.
After Engineer A queried Engineer B about the exclusion of pile driving records, Engineer B offered contradictory explanations, revealing an inability to provide a consistent technical justification for the omissions.
Engineer A Municipal Infrastructure Designer
Retained by the municipality to design a dock on a 90-pile foundation. Became a defendant in litigation over the contractor's extra claim and defended the adequacy of the pile design using geotechnical set-up strength arguments.
Municipal Infrastructure Design Engineer
Engineer A and the municipality shared the cost of the settlement with the contractor for $300,000
Engineer A testified that the geotechnical firm's report expected that the piles would gain sufficient additional strength within 30 days
Engineer B Adversarial Pressure Resistance
Adversarial Pressure Resistance Capability
Engineer B lacked or failed to exercise the capability to resist adversarial pressure and instead selectively used technical data in a manner that served the municipality's litigation position rather than presenting complete and objective findings.
Engineer B was retained by the municipality to supervise test pile driving and produce a findings report in the context of litigation over whether the original 90 piles met design safety factors.
Omission of material facts including dynamic test equipment failure and pile refusal data from the findings report, producing a document that served to impugn Engineer A rather than provide balanced technical analysis.
As evidence, the report appears to serve no purpose except to impugn Engineer A, or to support the original testimony of the municipality's expert witness.
Engineer B appears to have assumed a responsibility to defend the client municipality by the selective use of data. This is an egregious denial of the duties and responsibilities of a professional engineer in any setting, legal, quasi-legal or non-legal.
Engineer B failed to exercise client boundary judgment capability by omitting material technical evidence from the report in a manner that served the municipality's litigation position at the expense of professional integrity.
Engineer B was retained by the municipality as a litigation expert and produced a report that omitted evidence contradicting the municipality's position, without disclosing the omission or its basis.
Omission of wave equation analysis results and pile driving record data from the report, combined with the post-report statement that the records were simply not believed.
Engineer B said: 'We just did not believe the driving records and there was also the issue of whether the pile was vented to allow air to escape from below a closure plate that was included in the pile to separate the concrete fill in the pile from the clay. The driving records look suspicious.'
Engineer B was retained by the municipality to supervise a test pile driving program in an adversarial dispute with Engineer A. Engineer B's report concluded that 19 piles failed the required factor of safety but omitted the equipment failure and the driven-to-refusal status of all 19 piles, both of which were material to any interpretation of the results.
Contradictory Evidence Omission Constraint
Engineer B was prohibited from preparing a findings report that omitted the material facts that dynamic test equipment had failed during the test and that all 19 piles reported as failing had been driven to refusal, both of which contradicted or materially qualified the report's conclusions.
NSPE Code of Ethics requirement to include all relevant and pertinent information in reports, statements, and testimony
At the time of preparing and submitting the pile foundation test report
Material facts, however, were not addressed in Engineer B's report. Among them, that dynamic test equipment failed during the test, and that all 19 test piles reported as failing the test were driven to refusal.
the Code of Ethics which requires that engineers 'shall include all relevant and pertinent information in such report, statements or testimony'
Engineer B Contradictory Evidence Recognition
Contradictory Evidence Recognition Capability
Engineer B failed to exercise contradictory evidence recognition capability by not applying wave equation analysis to the pile driving records and not acknowledging that those records showed the 19 piles had reached essential refusal.
Engineer B's report on pile adequacy omitted the wave equation analysis result that would have shown the 19 piles had capacity well above design requirements.
The report relied solely on depth-based skin friction calculations while ignoring pile driving records and wave equation analysis that pointed to the opposite conclusion.
Engineer B did not state anywhere in the report that these 19 piles, according to the pile driving records, had been driven to essential refusal and that, applying accepted wave equation calculations, the piles would have indicated a strength several multiples over the calculated load requirements.
Engineer B Contradictory Wave Equation Disclosure
Accepted wave equation calculations applied to the pile driving records indicated that the 19 disputed piles had achieved strength several multiples of the required factor of safety. Engineer B's report concluded these piles failed the factor of safety requirement without addressing this contradictory analytical result.
Engineer B was prohibited from omitting from the report the wave equation analysis showing that the 19 disputed piles had been driven to essential refusal and would have met the required factor of safety, as this analysis directly contradicted the report's conclusions.
NSPE Code of Ethics requirement to include all relevant and pertinent information in reports
At the time of preparing the pile foundation test report
all 19 test piles reported as failing the test were driven to refusal
the select language of the report precludes any interpretation that any or all 90 piles met the factor of safety requirement. The opportunity for expert engineering review and interpretation of the pile driving test was effectively denied by Engineer B's report
Engineer B Equipment Failure Non-Disclosure
Dynamic test equipment failed during the test pile driving program supervised by Engineer B. This failure was observed and later testified to by Engineer A's geotechnical consultant, but was not disclosed in Engineer B's report.
Engineer B was required to disclose in the test report that dynamic test equipment had failed during the test pile program, as this failure directly affected the validity of the data underlying the report's conclusions.
NSPE Code of Ethics, professional engineering standards for technical reporting
At the time of preparing and issuing the test pile program report
Additionally, Engineer B did not report that the dynamic test equipment had failed.
Engineer B was retained by the municipality to supervise a test pile driving program intended to test the criteria and professional judgment underlying Engineer A's conclusions. The report served to support the municipality's position in the adversarial dispute rather than to present an objective technical evaluation.
Engineer B was prohibited from orienting his technical findings toward the municipality's litigation position and was required to present all material evidence objectively, including evidence that the 19 disputed piles had been driven to refusal.
NSPE Code of Ethics obligations of an engineer retained as a technical investigator in a dispute context
Throughout the test pile driving program and report preparation
Engineer B appears to have assumed a responsibility to defend the client municipality by the selective use of data
the report appears to serve no purpose except to impugn Engineer A, or to support the original testimony of the municipality's expert witness
Engineer B was retained by the municipality as an expert in litigation against Engineer A. The concluding report applied a skin friction depth analysis to conclude 19 piles were inadequate while omitting wave equation analysis of the same piles that showed adequacy by a substantial margin.
Engineer B was prohibited from presenting findings in a manner that selectively applied analytical methods and omitted contrary evidence in order to support the retaining client's litigation position.
NSPE Code of Ethics Section II.3, professional standards for expert witness conduct
Throughout the preparation and issuance of the expert report
Engineer B's concluding report stated that approximately 19 of the 90 piles did not meet the safety factor required by the design calculations.
Engineer B failed to inquire of the contractor, workers, or others on the job and did not review the pile driving records for the 90-pile foundation. The case analysis characterized this as a failure of fact gathering diligence and noted that by excluding the pile driving records Engineer B denied himself the opportunity to present a rationale for discounting their value.
Engineer B was required to consult available witnesses, including the contractor, on-site workers, and Engineer A's on-site representative, and to review pile driving records before reaching conclusions, and was required to disclose any failure to do so.
Professional engineering standards for investigative diligence and fact gathering
During the investigation and test pile driving program
Engineer B's failure to inquire from the contractor, workers or others on the job is a failure of fact gathering diligence.
by excluding the pile driving records, Engineer B has denied himself the opportunity to present a rational for discounting their value, and thereby to serve his client
Engineer B possessed geotechnical analysis capability sufficient to apply skin friction calculations but did not apply wave equation analysis to the pile driving records, leaving a material gap in the technical assessment.
Engineer B conducted a geotechnical assessment of pile adequacy using depth-based skin friction methods while omitting wave equation analysis that is an accepted method for interpreting pile driving records.
Application of skin friction resistance calculations to pile penetration depth, but absence of wave equation analysis that would have cross-checked those results against driving record data.
Applying accepted wave equation calculations, the piles would have indicated a strength several multiples over the calculated load requirements.
Engineer B's concluding report stated that approximately 19 of the 90 piles did not meet the safety factor required by the design calculations. This opinion was based upon the fact that the nineteen piles did not reach sufficient depth to develop the full strength when applying skin friction resistance value to the square footage of pile penetration.
Engineer B lacked or failed to exercise the investigative inquiry capability required to consult available witnesses and review pile driving records before reaching conclusions about the 19 piles.
Engineer B was retained by the municipality to supervise test pile driving and produce a findings report on whether the original 90 piles met design safety factors. Engineer B did not contact Engineer A's representatives or other on-site personnel.
Absence of witness consultation and failure to review pile driving records, as acknowledged by Engineer B's own statements after the report was issued.
At no time during the development of Engineer B's report did Engineer B talk to any representative of Engineer A, even though Engineer A's on-site representatives were available to testify as to the accuracy of the pile driving records.
No effort was made by Engineer B to inquire from contractors, workers, or others on the job to verify or refute his theories about why the 19 piles met driving refusal prior to predicted depth.
The municipality retained Engineer B to supervise a test pile driving program designed to test the basis for Engineer A's conclusions about the 90-pile dock foundation. Dynamic test equipment failed during the program, a material deviation that Engineer B did not disclose in the report.
Engineer B was required to replicate original pile driving conditions as closely as practicable in the test pile program and to disclose any deviations, including the failure of dynamic test equipment, that could affect the validity of comparisons between the test results and the original work.
Professional engineering standards for investigative testing intended to replicate prior work
During the test pile driving program supervised by Engineer B
Material facts, however, were not addressed in Engineer B's report. Among them, that dynamic test equipment failed during the test
the municipality arranged for a test pile driving program and retained Engineer B to supervise the program
Engineer B Municipality Advocacy Boundary
Engineer B was retained by the municipality in an adversarial dispute with Engineer A. The report omitted wave equation analysis, equipment failure data, and methodological deviations, all of which would have supported Engineer A's position, suggesting the report was oriented toward the municipality's litigation interests.
Engineer B was prohibited from orienting the pile foundation report toward defending the municipality's litigation position to the point of omitting material technical evidence, regardless of the adversarial context of the retention.
NSPE Code of Ethics, professional engineering standards for expert conduct
Throughout the retention and report preparation
Engineer B did not state anywhere in the report that these 19 piles, according to the pile driving records, had been driven to essential refusal.
We just did not believe the driving records and there was also the issue of whether the pile was vented to allow air to escape from below a closure plate.
Engineer B demonstrated insufficient norm awareness capability by failing to recognize that the duties of completeness, neutrality, and disclosure applied to the expert witness engagement regardless of the defined scope of work.
Engineer B treated the engagement as a bounded technical task rather than recognizing the professional ethical obligations that attach to an expert witness role in litigation.
Statements that pile driving records were outside the scope of work, and failure to recognize that omitting contradictory evidence violated expert witness neutrality obligations.
Engineer B said: 'We just did not believe the driving records and there was also the issue of whether the pile was vented to allow air to escape.'
Previously, Engineer B had said, 'We didn't look at the pile driving records because it was not in our scope of work.'
Engineer B failed to exercise objective reporting capability by omitting wave equation analysis results and pile driving record data that contradicted the report's primary conclusion.
Engineer B was retained as a litigation expert by the municipality and produced a report that selectively omitted contradictory evidence favorable to Engineer A's position.
The report concluded 19 piles were deficient without disclosing that wave equation analysis of driving records showed those piles had reached essential refusal with capacity several multiples above design requirements.
Engineer B Report on Test Pile Driving and Pile Capacity Evaluation
Engineer B did not state anywhere in the report that these 19 piles, according to the pile driving records, had been driven to essential refusal
Engineer B's report was the primary technical artifact at issue in the dispute, concluding that 19 of 90 piles did not meet the required safety factor. The report omitted findings about driving to essential refusal and the failure of dynamic test equipment, raising questions about completeness and objectivity.
Engineer B report on test pile driving program results
As an engineering document the report is incomplete and does a disservice to Engineer B's client municipality by potentially misdirecting a conclusion.
At the conclusion of the program Engineer B reports that 19 piles do not meet the required factor of safety for the reason that the piles were not driven to a sufficient depth that pile friction resistance would support the load.
Submitted as technical evidence in the adversarial dispute between the municipality and Engineer A regarding pile adequacy and settlement cost sharing. The report concluded 19 piles did not meet the required factor of safety but omitted material facts including dynamic test equipment failure and the driven-to-refusal status of all 19 flagged piles.
Single report issued at conclusion of test program
Engineer B Procedural Irregularity Reporting
Engineer B supervised the test pile driving program on behalf of the municipality. Dynamic test equipment failed during the program, a procedural irregularity that was not reported in Engineer B's findings report despite its material effect on the validity of the test.
Procedural Irregularity Reporting Constraint
Engineer B, retained to supervise the test pile driving program, was required to document and report all procedural irregularities observed during the program, including the equipment failure, regardless of whether those irregularities favored or disfavored the municipality.
Professional engineering standards for observers and supervisors of testing programs
During and after the test pile driving program
Engineer B failed to exercise scope limitation disclosure capability by omitting from the report the equipment failure and the non-review of pile driving records.
Engineer B's report on the test pile program omitted material limitations including equipment failure and the deliberate exclusion of pile driving records from the scope of analysis.
The report did not mention that dynamic test equipment had failed or that pile driving records were excluded from the analysis.
Engineer B did not report that the dynamic test equipment had failed.
Engineer B was retained by the municipality in an adversarial dispute with Engineer A. The case analysis found that Engineer B appeared to have assumed a responsibility to defend the municipality through selective use of data, which was characterized as an egregious denial of professional duties regardless of whether the adversarial context inspired the conduct.
Engineer B was prohibited from crossing from legitimate service to the municipality into selective use of technical data to defend the municipality's litigation position, a boundary that applies in legal, quasi-legal, and non-legal settings alike.
NSPE Code of Ethics professional duties and responsibilities of a professional engineer
Throughout the test pile driving program supervision and report preparation
It is not evident from the facts of the case that Engineer B's selective use of technical fact was inspired by the adversarial circumstance, nor does it matter.
Engineer B failed to exercise the capability to obtain and review available pile driving records, which were material to the investigation and whose exclusion undermined the completeness and credibility of the findings report.
Engineer B supervised a test pile driving program and produced a findings report without reviewing pile driving records that showed all 19 test piles had been driven to refusal.
Exclusion of pile driving records from the findings report, denying the opportunity to either incorporate or rationally discount their evidentiary value.
Further, by excluding the pile driving records, Engineer B has denied himself the opportunity to present a rational for discounting their value, and thereby to serve his client.
Engineer B failed to adequately exercise test condition replication capability, allowing the test pile program to deviate from original driving conditions in multiple respects without disclosure.
Engineer B supervised the test pile program intended to replicate original pile driving conditions to assess whether the original 90 piles would have achieved adequate set-up strength.
Use of a vibratory hammer not used in original driving, failure to achieve the same penetration depth, and pre-record hammer drops that broke pile bond before blow counts were recorded.
After the 30 day set up, the driving hammer was dropped several times to start the hammer before the record of blow counts commenced.
Driving conditions were not duplicated in driving the test piles in that a vibratory hammer was used for the test piles and not used in the original driving.
The test piles were not driven to the same depth of penetration that apparently was required for the plug to form in the original piles.
The test pile program used a vibratory hammer not used in the original driving, did not achieve the same penetration depth required for plug formation, and involved pre-record hammer drops that may have broken pile bond and undervalued skin friction. None of these deviations were disclosed in Engineer B's report.
Engineer B was required to replicate original pile driving conditions in the test program, including hammer type and penetration depth, and to disclose deviations that could affect the validity of comparisons between test results and the original 90-pile installation.
Professional engineering standards for comparative testing programs
During design and execution of the test pile driving program
Engineer B's report concluded that 19 of 90 piles did not meet the required safety factor, but omitted accepted wave equation calculations applied to the pile driving records that showed those same piles had achieved strength several multiples over the calculated load requirements.
Engineer B was prohibited from issuing a concluding report that omitted the wave equation analysis showing the 19 disputed piles had driven to essential refusal and would have met load requirements by a substantial margin.
NSPE Code of Ethics, professional engineering standards for expert reporting
At the time of preparing and issuing the concluding pile foundation report
Engineer B reached conclusions about the adequacy of 19 piles without consulting any representative of Engineer A, despite their availability, and without inquiring of contractors or workers who could have verified or refuted theories about the pile driving records.
Engineer B was required to consult available witnesses, including Engineer A's on-site representatives, contractors, and workers, before reaching conclusions about why the 19 piles met driving refusal prior to predicted depth.
NSPE Code of Ethics, professional engineering standards for investigative completeness
During the investigation and report preparation phase
Engineer B report development before Engineer B's query response to Engineer A
Engineer B's query response to Engineer A
Engineer B's concluding report before Engineer A's query to Engineer B
Engineer B's earlier statement about scope of work before Engineer B's post-report contradictory explanation
Engineer B's earlier statement about scope of work
Engineer B's post-report contradictory explanation
Geotechnical Consultant Geotechnical Analysis
The geotechnical consultant demonstrated expert geotechnical analysis capability by applying wave equation analysis to pile driving records and assessing the effect of pre-record hammer drops on skin friction measurements.
The geotechnical consultant retained by Engineer A provided technical analysis that identified both procedural irregularities in the test program and the contradictory evidence in the pile driving records.
Expert testimony applying wave equation calculations to show the 19 piles had reached essential refusal, and analysis showing that pre-record hammer drops would have broken pile bond and undervalued skin friction.
In the opinion of Engineer A's geotechnical consultant, this would have broken the pile bond and undervalued the skin friction value reported by Engineer B's tests.
Geotechnical Consultant Irregularity Reporting
The geotechnical consultant observed and later testified to multiple irregularities in the test pile program, including dynamic equipment failure, use of a vibratory hammer not used originally, insufficient penetration depth, and pre-record hammer drops that may have broken pile bond.
The geotechnical consultant retained by Engineer A to observe the test pile program was required to document and report all procedural irregularities observed, including equipment failures, deviations from original driving conditions, and pre-record hammer drops.
Professional engineering standards for observer roles in testing programs
During observation of the test pile driving program and preparation of the observer report
An independent geotechnical consultant was retained by Engineer A to observe the test.
The geotechnical consultant testified and showed that dynamic test equipment had failed during the test and that the test piles were not driven to the same depth of penetration.
Geotechnical Consultant Procedural Irregularity Reporting
Procedural Irregularity Reporting Capability
The geotechnical consultant retained by Engineer A demonstrated procedural irregularity reporting capability by observing, documenting, and testifying about equipment failures and methodological deviations during the test pile program.
The geotechnical consultant was retained by Engineer A to observe the test pile driving supervised by Engineer B and reported multiple procedural irregularities that affected the validity of Engineer B's results.
Testimony identifying dynamic test equipment failure, insufficient penetration depth, use of a vibratory hammer not used originally, and pre-record hammer drops that broke pile bond.
After the 30 day set up, the driving hammer was dropped several times to start the hammer before the record of blow counts commenced. In the opinion of Engineer A's geotechnical consultant, this would have broken the pile bond and undervalued the skin friction value reported by Engineer B's tests.
The geotechnical consultant testified and showed that dynamic test equipment had failed during the test and that the test piles were not driven to the same depth of penetration that apparently was required for the plug to form in the original piles.
Geotechnical Firm Original Design Report
Geotechnical firm retained by Engineer A
Geotechnical Firm Report on Pile Design and Expected Strength Gain
Geotechnical Investigation Report Resource
The original geotechnical firm's report provided the design basis for expected pile set-up strength, predicting that piles would gain sufficient resistance within 30 days of initial driving to meet load-carrying requirements.
Commissioned Engineer A to design the dock and pile foundation. Later became a co-defendant in litigation with Engineer A, retained Engineer B to conduct test pile investigations, and shared the mediation settlement cost.
Engineer A and the municipality were both sued by the contractor
Engineer A was retained by a municipality to design a dock
Individual typed as existing ontology class 'Municipal Client'
On-site construction personnel and Engineer A's representatives
Pile Driving Records for 90-Pile Dock Foundation
One expert testified that the pile driving records indicated that many of the piles did not, at the time of initial driving, meet driving resistance sufficient to satisfy the load carrying requirements
We didn't look at the pile driving records because it was not in our scope of work.
We just did not believe the driving records
The pile driving records documented blow counts and penetration depths for all 90 piles. They were central to the dispute: Engineer A's representatives and geotechnical consultant relied on them to argue that 19 piles had been driven to essential refusal, while Engineer B declined to consult them, citing scope limitations and credibility concerns.
Field personnel during test pile driving program
Pile driving records from the municipality-arranged test pile driving program
Excluded from Engineer B's report despite being primary technical evidence of driven-to-refusal status for the 19 piles flagged as failing. Their omission prevented rational interpretation of pile capacity and denied Engineer B the opportunity to present a rationale for discounting their value.
Wave Equation Pile Capacity Calculations
Wave Equation Analysis of Pile Driving Records
applying accepted wave equation calculations, the piles would have indicated a strength several multiples over the calculated load requirements
Accepted wave equation calculations applied to the pile driving records indicated that the 19 disputed piles had achieved strength several multiples over the calculated load requirements, contradicting Engineer B's depth-based capacity assessment.
original pile driving (construction) before 30-day anticipated strength gain period
original pile driving (construction) before contractor extra claim and lawsuit
test pile driving before 30-day set period
After design phase, before contractor claim
Post-report issuance, following query from Engineer A
Report issuance, following completion of test pile program
During report preparation, following test pile program completion
Discussion section, after all facts established
Initial design phase, prior to construction
Concurrent with test pile program commissioning
Post-construction dispute resolution phase
During mediation phase, before test pile program
Discovered during mediation, underlying condition present at construction
After 30-day set period and strength confirmation
Post-mediation, following expert witness testimony about pile resistance
contractor extra claim and lawsuit before mediation settlement
dynamic test equipment failure during test pile driving program
Entity1 occurs entirely within the duration of Entity2
expert witness testimony about pile driving records during mediation
expert witness testimony about pile driving records
hammer dropped several times before blow count records before record of blow counts commenced
hammer dropped several times before blow count records
independent geotechnical consultant observation during test pile driving program
independent geotechnical consultant observation
mediation before test pile driving program
strength gain confirmation before Engineer B's concluding report
Stakeholder Consultation Omission → Deficient Report Issuance
Stakeholder Consultation Omission -- Engineer B fails to contact representatives, contractors, workers
Deficient Report Issuance -- Report relies on unverified theories about pile refusal
Had Engineer B consulted available stakeholders, his theories could have been verified or refuted, improving the report's completeness.
Availability of those witnesses who were ignored
Failure to consult Engineer A's on-site representatives
Failure to inquire from contractors, workers, or others
Omission of available fact sources plus issuance of conclusions based on unverified theories
Expert Testimony Given → Test Pile Program Commissioning
To test this, the municipality retained Engineer B to supervise the driving of several test piles to see whether the piles would gain sufficient strength to meet the design calculation requirements.
Expert Testimony Given -- Municipal expert disputes pile resistance adequacy
Test Pile Program Commissioning -- Municipality retains Engineer B to run a test pile program
Without the conflicting expert and Engineer A testimony, there would have been no impetus to commission a test pile program.
Conflicting testimony about pile strength gain
Municipality's desire to empirically test Engineer A's strength-gain claim
Disputed testimony plus municipality's decision to verify through testing
Non-Representative Test Execution → Test Irregularities Observed
Non-Representative Test Execution -- Vibratory hammer used and hammer dropped before blow count
Test Irregularities Observed -- Consultant documents broken pile bond and undervalued skin friction
Had original driving conditions been duplicated, these procedural irregularities would not have arisen.
Hammer dropped several times before blow counts commenced
Presence of the independent observer to document irregularities
Use of vibratory hammer not used in original driving
Non-duplicated driving conditions plus observation by Engineer A's consultant
Construction Completion → Contractor Claim Filed
Foundation Design Decision -- Engineer A designs dock on 90 piles incorporating geotechnical expectations
Construction Completion -- Dock built per design, physical work completed
Contractor Claim Filed -- Contractor files extra claim and sues Engineer A and municipality
Without the completed construction generating disputed conditions, the contractor would have had no basis for an extra claim and subsequent suit.
Completion of the dock construction on 90 piles
Contractor's perception of additional compensable work or conditions
Completion of construction plus contractor's grievance grounds for an extra claim
Deficient Report Issuance → Contradictory Explanation Given
When queried by Engineer A after the report was issued by Engineer B, Engineer B said: "We just did not believe the driving records..."
Deficient Report Issuance -- Engineer B issues report excluding pile records
Contradictory Post-Report Explanation -- Engineer B offers two inconsistent justifications when queried
Contradictory Explanation Given -- Contradictory rationales documented after Engineer A's query
Without the report's issuance and the query, Engineer B would not have offered contradictory explanations.
Engineer A's query about the exclusion of pile driving records
Issued report plus Engineer A's challenge prompting Engineer B's justification
Test Pile Program Commissioning → Independent Observer Retention
Test Pile Program Commissioning -- Municipality commissions Engineer B's test program
Independent Observer Retention -- Engineer A retains geotechnical consultant to observe
Without the test program being commissioned, Engineer A would have had no test to observe.
Engineer A's interest in monitoring the test's validity
Existence of the municipality's test program
Test program plus Engineer A's adversarial interest in verifying procedures
Pile Record Exclusion → Deficient Report Issuance
Pile Record Exclusion -- Engineer B excludes pile driving records and wave equation calculations
Equipment Failure Non-Disclosure -- Engineer B omits the dynamic test equipment failure
Deficient Report Issuance -- Report concludes 19 of 90 piles fail without material facts
Had the records and wave equation analysis been included, the report would not have been deficient or misleading.
Exclusion of pile driving records and wave equation calculations
Issuance of a formal report drawing failure conclusions
Omission of equipment failure disclosure
Selective exclusion of material facts plus issuance of conclusive report
Deficient Report Issuance → Ethics Violation Found
Neither interpretation is tolerated by the Code of Ethics which requires that engineers "shall include all relevant and pertinent information in such report, statements or testimony."
Deficient Report Issuance -- Engineer B issues incomplete report omitting material facts
Report Issued -- Formal report concludes 19 of 90 piles fail safety factor
Ethics Violation Found -- Analysis concludes Engineer B violated professional obligations
Had the report included all relevant and pertinent information, no ethics violation would have been found.
Existence of a Code of Ethics requiring inclusion of all pertinent information
Issuance of a report omitting material relevant facts
Selective use of data serving to impugn Engineer A
Incomplete report plus Code requirement of completeness equals ethics violation
Equipment Failure Non-Disclosure → Ethics Violation Found
Ethics Violation Found -- Selective presentation of data found to violate professional obligations
Had Engineer B disclosed the equipment failure, the report would have been more complete and less subject to ethics criticism.
Code requirement to include all relevant information
Failure of dynamic test equipment during testing
Omission of that failure from the report
Material omission of equipment failure plus completeness duty equals violation
Dynamic test equipment failed during the test pile driving program supervised by Engineer B. This failure was a material fact bearing on the validity of the test results and the conclusions drawn from them, but Engineer B did not disclose it in the report.
Engineer B was required to disclose in the pile foundation test report that dynamic test equipment had failed during the test pile driving program, as this failure materially affected the validity and interpretation of the reported results.
Professional engineering reporting standards and NSPE Code of Ethics requirement to include all relevant and pertinent information
Engineer B was retained by the municipality to supervise a test pile program and prepare a concluding report on the adequacy of 90 piles. Engineer B declined to review pile driving records, citing scope of work, and later admitted disbelief in those records as an additional reason.
Engineer B's contractually defined scope of work was invoked to justify not reviewing pile driving records, but that scope limitation did not excuse omission of material evidence from the concluding report.
Contractual scope of work between Engineer B and the municipality
Duration of the pile foundation investigation and report preparation
Retained by Engineer A to observe the test pile driving supervised by Engineer B. Identified procedural irregularities including equipment failure, inconsistent hammer type, and pre-record drops that would have broken pile bond, and testified on these findings to challenge the validity of Engineer B's test results.
Professional Engineer or Geotechnical Specialist
In the opinion of Engineer A's geotechnical consultant, this would have broken the pile bond and undervalued the skin friction value reported by Engineer B's tests
The geotechnical consultant testified and showed that dynamic test equipment had failed during the test
Geotechnical Observer Irregularity Reporting
Engineer A's geotechnical consultant was retained to observe the test pile driving supervised by Engineer B and identified procedural irregularities including equipment failure and use of a non-original hammer type.
Observer Irregularity Reporting Obligation
Engineer A's geotechnical consultant was obligated to document and report the procedural irregularities observed during the test pile driving, including equipment failure and methodological deviations, and to communicate these findings promptly.
During and immediately following the test pile driving program.
Engineer A's geotechnical consultant identified procedural irregularities in the test pile driving, including equipment failure and methodological deviations, and communicated these to Engineer A.
Test Pile Program Commissioning → Strength Gain Confirmed
However, the test piles were driven and after a 30 day set, the increase in set up strength with time was confirmed.
Test Pile Program Commissioning -- Municipality commissions test program supervised by Engineer B
Strength Gain Confirmed -- After 30-day set, increase in set-up strength confirmed
Without the test program, the strength gain over time would not have been empirically confirmed.
30-day set period for strength development
Execution of the test pile driving program
Test piles driven plus 30-day set period confirming strength gain
Contractor Claim Filed → Mediation Settlement Reached
Contractor Claim Filed -- Contractor initiates litigation against both parties
Mediation Settlement Agreement -- Engineer A and municipality choose mediation
Mediation Settlement Reached -- $300,000 settlement shared between parties
Without the filed claim there would have been no dispute to settle through mediation.
Filed claim plus parties' decision to resolve through mediation
Engineer B Scope Limitation Non-Disclosure
Engineer B's report on the test pile driving program omitted the fact that dynamic test equipment failed during the test, which was a material constraint on the reliability of the findings.
At the time of preparing and issuing the findings report.
Material facts, however, were not addressed in Engineer B's report. Among them, that dynamic test equipment failed during the test.
the report appears to serve no purpose except to impugn Engineer A, or to support the original testimony of the municipality's expert witness.
Engineer B omitted from his report the fact that dynamic test equipment failed during the test and that all 19 piles reported as failing were driven to refusal, thereby precluding independent expert interpretation of the pile driving test results.
Complete reporting required Engineer B to include the equipment failure and the refusal data as material facts, even though those facts complicated the conclusion that 19 piles failed the safety factor requirement.
The Code of Ethics admits no exception to complete reporting on grounds of adversarial context; the obligation to include all relevant and pertinent information overrides any interest in presenting a one-sided finding.
the Code of Ethics which requires that engineers 'shall include all relevant and pertinent information in such report, statements or testimony.'
Engineer B Failure to Consult Available Sources
Throughout Engineer B's investigation and report preparation
Transforms the general duty of objectivity and thoroughness into a specific obligation to actively seek out and consider available material information before issuing professional conclusions.
Failure to Consult Available Sources State
Engineer B's investigation process for the pile foundation report
Not resolved within the case facts presented
Engineer B conducted investigation without consulting Engineer A's representatives, contractors, or workers who were available and had material knowledge
During and after the pile driving test program, prior to report submission
Engineer B's investigative process during the pile driving test program
Engineer B's failure to communicate with Engineer A's on-site representative
Engineer B's failure to inquire from the contractor, workers or others on the job is a failure of fact gathering diligence
Engineer B declining to inquire from the contractor, workers, or Engineer A's on-site representative
Engineer B Investigative Completeness Failure
Test pile investigation report on adequacy of 90-pile foundation
Contractual scope of work as defined by the municipality
Engineer B reached conclusions about the adequacy of 19 piles without consulting Engineer A's on-site representatives, reviewing pile driving records, or inquiring of contractors and workers who could have verified or refuted the theories underlying those conclusions.
The principle was violated: Engineer B's investigation was incomplete because available and material evidence sources were not consulted before conclusions were finalized and reported.
Engineer B's post-hoc explanation that reviewing pile driving records was not in the scope of work does not discharge the professional obligation to pursue available evidence material to the conclusions being drawn.
Municipality versus Engineer A mediation
Engineer B, retained by the municipality in an adversarial proceeding, shaped his findings report to support the municipality's legal position by selectively omitting facts favorable to Engineer A, rather than rendering an objective technical assessment.
Litigation neutrality required Engineer B to present technical findings without regard to their effect on the municipality's legal position, treating the adversarial context as irrelevant to the technical content of his report.
The case text finds that selective use of data to defend the client in litigation is an egregious denial of professional duties, with no mitigation available from the adversarial context of the engagement.
Engineer B Methodological Consistency Failure
Test pile driving program designed to assess original 90-pile foundation adequacy
Practical constraints on replicating original site conditions
Engineer B supervised test pile driving that used a vibratory hammer not used in the original driving, did not replicate the required depth of penetration, and allowed pre-record hammer drops that broke the pile bond, then drew conclusions about original pile adequacy without disclosing or accounting for these deviations.
The test conditions deviated materially from the original pile driving conditions in multiple respects, undermining the validity of comparisons between test results and original pile performance. The principle required disclosure of these deviations and qualification of conclusions accordingly.
Where original conditions cannot be fully replicated, the engineer must disclose the deviations and qualify the conclusions, not present results as if the test were a valid replication.
Engineer B Methodological Disclosure Failure
Engineer B's report failed to disclose that dynamic test equipment failed during the pile driving test, a material methodological limitation that affected the reliability of the test results and the conclusions drawn from them.
Scope limitation disclosure required Engineer B to identify the equipment failure as a material constraint on the test and to qualify his conclusions accordingly, rather than reporting results as if the test had proceeded without incident.
Both the scope limitation disclosure obligation and the complete reporting obligation point in the same direction here: the equipment failure was a material fact that had to be disclosed and addressed in the report.
Engineer B Scope Limitation Justification
Transforms the contractual faithful-agent duty into a bounded obligation that cannot override the independent professional duty of objectivity and completeness when material findings are at stake.
Engineer B's refusal to review pile driving records based on scope of work
Engineer B declined to review pile driving records, citing scope of work limitations
Concluding report on test pile driving results
Municipality Client's litigation interest in an unqualified adverse finding against Engineer A
Engineer B's report omitted disclosure that dynamic test equipment had failed during the test, that pile driving records were not reviewed, and that wave equation analysis of the driving records would have indicated the 19 piles met strength requirements by a substantial margin.
The principle was violated: Engineer B's report presented conclusions about pile adequacy without disclosing the equipment failure, the methodological deviations, or the existence of contradictory evidence in the driving records.
The retaining party's litigation interest does not justify omitting material limitations and contradictory evidence from a professional engineering report.
Engineer B did not state anywhere in the report that these 19 piles, according to the pile driving records, had been driven to essential refusal and that, applying accepted wave equation calculations, the piles would have indicated a strength several multiples over the calculated load requirements. Additionally, Engineer B did not report that the dynamic test equipment had failed.
Engineer B's conduct was formally characterized as an ethics violation, establishing a reputational and professional consequence and providing a basis for disciplinary or licensing action.
The analysis concluded that Engineer B violated professional obligations by selectively presenting data in an adversarial context, producing a report that misrepresented the technical findings of the test pile program.
Escalation of technical dispute requiring further testing
Potential misrepresentation of pile performance if expert testimony was selective
Engineer A's Professional Judgment Under Challenge
Technical Adequacy of Piles Formally Contested
Shift cost-sharing responsibility toward Engineer A by undermining the technical basis of the pile design and driving adequacy
Procurement of qualified expert witnesses
The municipality decided to introduce expert witness testimony during mediation challenging the adequacy of the pile driving records and asserting that many piles did not meet driving resistance requirements at the time of initial driving.
Geotechnical Observer Proactive Risk Disclosure
Test pile driving program and Engineer B's resulting report
Engineer A's geotechnical consultant identified procedural irregularities in the test pile driving, including equipment failure and methodological deviations, and disclosed these findings through testimony, enabling the parties to assess the reliability of Engineer B's conclusions.
The geotechnical consultant fulfilled the proactive disclosure obligation by identifying and reporting known risks to the reliability of the test results as soon as they were observed.
The obligation to disclose known risks to the reliability of technical findings was fulfilled through testimony, consistent with the consultant's role as an independent observer.
Individual typed as existing ontology class 'Proactive Risk Disclosure Principle'
From the time Engineer B's report identified 19 potentially non-conforming piles through resolution of the dispute
Structural adequacy of the 90-pile dock foundation
Individual typed as existing ontology class 'Public Safety at Risk'
Engineer B Litigation Neutrality Violation
Expert investigation and report in contractor and municipality litigation
Engineer B, retained by the municipality in litigation against Engineer A, produced a report that relied exclusively on depth-of-penetration analysis to conclude 19 piles were deficient while omitting wave equation analysis of driving records that would have supported Engineer A's position, and without consulting Engineer A's available representatives.
An engineer's duty to provide technically honest expert analysis in litigation overrides the duty of loyalty to the retaining party when those duties conflict.
Geotechnical Consultant Observer Irregularity Reporting
Engineer A's geotechnical consultant observed the test pile driving supervised by Engineer B and identified equipment failure, use of a non-original hammer type, insufficient depth of penetration, and pre-record hammer drops that likely compromised the test results.
The geotechnical consultant retained by Engineer A was obligated to document and report all procedural irregularities observed during the test pile driving, including equipment failure and methodological deviations, and to communicate these findings to Engineer A.
During and after observation of the test pile driving program
A documented gap existed between as-built pile performance and specified resistance requirements, creating a factual basis for the contractor's claim and subsequent technical dispute.
Pile driving records revealed that many of the 90 piles did not meet the initial driving resistance requirements specified for the project, as testified by the municipal expert witness during mediation.
Engineer B Investigative Diligence Failure
Pile driving records and field personnel
Engineer B failed to communicate with Engineer A's on-site representative and failed to inquire from the contractor, workers, or others on the job, constituting a failure of fact-gathering diligence in the pile driving investigation.
Investigative completeness required Engineer B to pursue available sources of evidence including on-site personnel, the contractor, and workers before reaching and reporting conclusions about whether the piles met the safety factor requirement.
The case text holds that Engineer B's failure to inquire from available on-site sources is a failure of fact-gathering diligence, independent of any contractual scope limitation.
It is clear that Engineer B may be criticized for his failure to communicate with Engineer A's on-site representative.
Potential ambiguity about whether piles met resistance requirements at time of initial driving, before strength gain occurred
Reliance on Geotechnical Expert Recommendation
Design Basis Established on 30-Day Strength Gain
Produce a structurally adequate dock foundation that meets load-carrying requirements by relying on time-dependent pile strength gain as anticipated by the geotechnical report
Engineer A designed the dock foundation using 90 piles, incorporating the geotechnical firm's expectation that piles would gain sufficient driving resistance strength within 30 days of initial driving.
Potential adversarial friction with Engineer B if test irregularities were identified and reported
Protection of Technical Record Integrity
Independent Technical Observation Active
Test Irregularities Subject to Third-Party Documentation
Ensure independent oversight of the test program to identify procedural irregularities and protect the integrity of the technical record
Procurement of qualified geotechnical expertise
Engineer A retained an independent geotechnical consultant to observe the municipality's test pile driving program and provide an objective technical assessment of the test conditions and results.
From initial pile driving through mediation and test pile program
Transforms general objectivity principles into specific obligations to disclose record disputes and seek verification before issuing conclusions that depend on the acceptance or rejection of contested records.
Engineer A's awareness of potential pile adequacy concerns prior to and during litigation
One expert testified that the pile driving records indicated that many of the piles did not, at the time of initial driving, meet driving resistance sufficient to satisfy the load carrying requirements of the design calculations.
Individual typed as existing ontology class 'Unquantified Risk Awareness State'
By excluding pile driving records from his report, Engineer B forfeited the opportunity to present a reasoned basis for discounting their value, thereby potentially misdirecting the municipality's conclusions and failing to serve the client's genuine interests.
The case text finds that incomplete reporting disserves the client by misdirecting conclusions, so the apparent conflict between client advocacy and complete reporting is resolved in favor of completeness as the true form of client service.
by excluding the pile driving records, Engineer B has denied himself the opportunity to present a rational for discounting their value, and thereby to serve his client.
Engineer B supervised test pile driving using a vibratory hammer not used in the original driving, did not replicate the required depth of penetration, and allowed pre-record hammer drops that likely broke the pile bond, undermining the validity of the test results.
Engineer B's report to the municipality omitted disclosure of equipment failure and the exclusion of pile driving records from the analysis, even though these limitations materially affected the reliability of the conclusions.
At the time of issuing the findings report
Dock structure existed in the physical world; contractor performance obligations were discharged; basis for claims and disputes became available.
The dock supported by 90 piles was constructed according to Engineer A's design, completing the physical work that later became the subject of dispute.
From Engineer B's retention by the municipality through submission of the pile driving test report
Transforms the general duty of objectivity into a heightened obligation to resist adversarial distortion of technical findings, and activates the duty to include all relevant and pertinent information in professional reports.
Engineer B's retention by the municipality to supervise the test pile driving program
an adversarial relationship is established between the municipality and Engineer A to resolve the sharing of a settlement cost
Municipality retaining Engineer B to test the criteria and professional judgment underlying Engineer A's conclusions in the context of a cost-sharing dispute
From preparation through submission of Engineer B's report
Transforms the general duty of honesty and objectivity into a specific prohibition on advocacy-driven omission of technical facts, and activates obligations of completeness and truthfulness in professional reports.
Engineer B's orientation in preparing the pile driving test report
This is an egregious denial of the duties and responsibilities of a professional engineer in any setting, legal, quasi-legal or non-legal
Engineer B structuring the report to support the municipality's position and impugn Engineer A rather than to provide a complete and objective technical analysis
Engineer B Faithful Agent Limits in Litigation
Municipality Client's litigation interests versus Engineer B's professional obligations
Objective Completeness in Public Reports Principle
Engineer B's duty as the municipality's retained expert did not extend to omitting material technical evidence from the report or declining to consult available witnesses whose testimony might have contradicted the municipality's litigation position.
The faithful agent duty was overridden by the competing obligations of objectivity and report completeness. Engineer B was not entitled to shape technical findings to serve the municipality's litigation interests.
Individual typed as existing ontology class 'Faithful Agent Duty Principle'
The test pile program was rendered non-representative of original construction conditions, and material facts existed that any complete report of the test would need to address.
Non-Representative Test Conditions State
During the test pile program, equipment failures, non-duplicated driving conditions, and procedural irregularities were observed, including use of a vibratory hammer and a hammer drop before blow count records commenced.
Engineer A and municipality became defendants in active litigation; financial and reputational risk materialized for both parties.
After construction, the contractor filed an extra claim and initiated litigation against both Engineer A and the municipality, alleging deficiencies related to pile driving requirements.
Engineer B, retained by the municipality in litigation against Engineer A, structured his report language to foreclose any interpretation favorable to Engineer A and excluded pile driving records and wave equation analysis from his findings.
Adversarial Data Selection Prohibition Obligation
Engineer B was obligated to refrain from selectively using technical data to defend the municipality's position and was required to present findings based on all available evidence, including pile driving records and wave equation analysis results.
Throughout the investigation and in the preparation of the findings report.
Facts are not adversarial, even if they may be conflicting.
the select language of the report precludes any interpretation that any or all 90 piles met the factor of safety requirement. The opportunity for expert engineering review and interpretation of the pile driving test was effectively denied by Engineer B's report.
Engineer B, retained by the municipality in litigation against Engineer A, produced a report relying exclusively on depth-of-penetration analysis while omitting wave equation results showing the 19 piles had driven to essential refusal and would have met load requirements.
Throughout the investigation and report preparation
Engineer B, retained by the municipality in litigation against Engineer A, produced a report that relied exclusively on depth-of-penetration analysis.
Denial of opportunity for independent expert review of test validity
Misleading the municipality and any reviewing parties about the reliability of the test data
Material Test Failure Concealed in Record
Issue a report supporting the municipality's position without drawing attention to test validity problems that would undermine the conclusions
Professional judgment on materiality of test anomalies
Complete and Accurate Technical Reporting
Inclusion of All Relevant and Pertinent Information
Engineer B decided not to disclose prominently in the final report that dynamic test equipment had failed during the test pile program, omitting this material fact from the concluding analysis.
Failure to verify or refute theories about why 19 piles met driving refusal before predicted depth
Loss of material factual context about original pile driving conditions
Complete the report within the defined scope of work without engaging sources that might complicate or contradict the intended conclusions
Engineer B decided not to contact Engineer A's on-site representatives, contractors, workers, or others with direct knowledge of the original pile driving before or during preparation of the report, despite their availability and relevance to verifying or refuting theories about pile behavior.
Engineer B Litigation Expert Relationship
From Engineer B's retention by the municipality through issuance of the concluding report
Engineer B's retention by the municipality as expert
The municipality retained Engineer B to supervise the driving of several test piles to see whether the piles would gain sufficient strength to meet the design calculation requirements.
Municipality retained Engineer B to supervise test pile driving and issue a report on pile adequacy in the context of litigation
Individual typed as existing ontology class 'Client Relationship Established'
Active litigation was resolved; financial liability of $300,000 was allocated between Engineer A and the municipality; the contractor's claim was discharged.
The contractor's lawsuit was resolved through mediation, resulting in a $300,000 settlement shared between Engineer A and the municipality.
Piles demonstrated adequate strength after the set period, providing empirical support for Engineer A's geotechnical argument and undermining the sufficiency of initial resistance as the sole adequacy criterion.
After the 30-day set period following the test pile program, testing confirmed that the piles had gained sufficient strength, supporting Engineer A's position that the geotechnical firm's report had anticipated this outcome.
Exposure of inconsistency in professional reasoning
Further erosion of the report's credibility as an objective technical document
Engineer B's Analytical Rationale Publicly Inconsistent
Defend the report's exclusion of pile driving records without conceding a professional obligation to have reviewed them
Transparent explanation of analytical choices
When queried by Engineer A after the report was issued, Engineer B offered two contradictory explanations for excluding the pile driving records: first claiming it was not in the scope of work, then claiming the records looked suspicious.
Engineer B was retained by the municipality to supervise test pile driving and produce a findings report on whether the original 90 piles met design safety factors. Engineer B reached conclusions without consulting Engineer A's on-site representatives or reviewing pile driving records.
During preparation of the investigative report, prior to issuing conclusions
Ongoing dispute between Engineer A and municipality over cost allocation
Shared financial liability without full adjudication of technical responsibility
Responsible Resolution of Professional Disputes
Engineer A (design engineer) and municipality (client)
Adversarial Relationship Between Engineer A and Municipality
Cost-Sharing Dispute Between Engineer A and Municipality
Resolve the contractor dispute efficiently and avoid the costs and uncertainties of litigation
Professional judgment on dispute resolution
Engineer A and the municipality jointly chose to resolve the contractor's extra claim through mediation rather than litigation, agreeing to share a $300,000 settlement payment to the contractor.
Engineer B Intellectual Honesty in Expert Report
Concluding report on test pile driving and original pile adequacy
Engineer B's report presented conclusions about pile inadequacy without acknowledging the existence of wave equation analysis that contradicted those conclusions, without disclosing that driving records were not reviewed, and without disclosing the equipment failure, representing a failure of intellectual honesty in the presentation of technical findings.
Intellectual honesty requires engineers to acknowledge evidence that contradicts their conclusions and to disclose the limitations of their analysis, even when doing so is inconvenient to the retaining party.
The duty of intellectual honesty in professional reports is not overridden by the retaining party's interest in a favorable expert opinion.
Individual typed as existing ontology class 'Intellectual Honesty'
The pile resistance shortfall became a formally asserted factual claim in the mediation record, increasing pressure on Engineer A to rebut or confirm the finding.
During mediation, the municipal expert witness testified that pile driving records showed many piles did not meet initial driving resistance requirements, forming a central factual assertion in the dispute.
Compromised comparability of test results to original pile driving conditions
Undervaluation of skin friction resistance in test results
Skin Friction Values Undervalued in Test Data
Test Conditions Non-Representative of Original Driving
Complete the test pile driving program within the defined scope of work
Replication of original driving conditions
Understanding of hammer type effects on pile resistance measurements
Engineer B or those under his supervision decided to use a vibratory hammer for the test piles rather than replicating the original driving conditions, and allowed the hammer to be dropped several times before commencing blow count records, which broke the pile bond and undervalued skin friction values.
Engineer B Selective Analysis Disclosure
From issuance of Engineer B's report through the period of dispute
Transforms general honesty and objectivity principles into specific obligations to disclose all material technical findings, including those that undercut the professional's own conclusions.
Engineer B's report conclusions regarding the 19 piles
Engineer B presented a conclusion based solely on depth-of-penetration skin friction analysis while omitting the wave equation analysis showing the same piles had been driven to essential refusal with strength several multiples over design requirements
Individual typed as existing ontology class 'Partial Analysis Disclosure State'
Engineer B was retained by the municipality as an expert in litigation against Engineer A. The duty to serve the client did not extend to omitting wave equation results, pile driving records, or equipment failure disclosures that contradicted the report's conclusions.
Throughout the engagement as retained expert
At no time during the development of Engineer B's report did Engineer B talk to any representative of Engineer A.
From issuance of Engineer B's concluding report through the period of dispute
Engineer B's concluding report on the 90 pile foundation
Engineer B did not report that the dynamic test equipment had failed
Engineer B issued a report concluding that 19 piles did not meet the required safety factor without disclosing the pile driving refusal data or the equipment failure
Individual typed as existing ontology class 'Incomplete Professional Report State'
Engineer B Objective Completeness Violation
Concluding report submitted to municipality on pile foundation adequacy
Engineer B's report to the municipality omitted the wave equation analysis showing the 19 piles had driven to essential refusal and would have met strength requirements by a substantial margin, and omitted the equipment failure during testing, presenting a one-sided technical picture.
The principle required Engineer B to include all relevant and pertinent information in the report, including evidence that contradicted the conclusions being drawn. Selective omission of material technical data violates this principle regardless of whether the client requested its inclusion.
The duty of loyalty to the retaining municipality does not override the obligation to include all pertinent technical information in a professional report.
Individual typed as existing ontology class 'Objective Completeness in Public Reports Principle'
Engineer B Objectivity Failure in Expert Role
Technical investigation and report on pile foundation adequacy
Engineer B failed to maintain objectivity in the expert investigation by selectively applying analytical methods, disregarding pile driving records, and declining to consult available witnesses, producing a report that reflected the retaining party's preferred outcome rather than an impartial technical assessment.
Objectivity is not suspended by the adversarial context of litigation. The engineer's professional duty to render an objective opinion is independent of the retaining party's interests.
We just did not believe the driving records and there was also the issue of whether the pile was vented to allow air to escape from below a closure plate that was included in the pile to separate the concrete fill in the pile from the clay. The driving records look suspicious.
Individual typed as existing ontology class 'Objectivity'
From the time of test pile driving through issuance of Engineer B's report
Transforms the general duty of truthfulness and objectivity into a specific obligation to disclose known test deficiencies and qualify any conclusions that depend on data generated under those deficient conditions.
Test pile driving program supervised by Engineer B
Not resolved within the case facts presented; Engineer B's report did not disclose the equipment failure
After the 30 day set up, the driving hammer was dropped several times to start the hammer before the record of blow counts commenced
Driving conditions were not duplicated in driving the test piles in that a vibratory hammer was used for the test piles and not used in the original driving
Dynamic test equipment failed during the test pile program and procedural deviations occurred, including use of a vibratory hammer not used in original driving and pre-record hammer drops that would have broken pile bond
Denial of opportunity for expert review and interpretation of all relevant pile data
Misdirection of the municipality's own understanding of actual structural adequacy
Selective presentation that impugns Engineer A without complete technical basis
Engineer A's Professional Judgment Impugned Without Complete Basis
Municipality Potentially Misdirected on Structural Adequacy
Support the municipality's position by presenting an analysis that identifies pile deficiencies without engaging data that would indicate the 19 piles had been driven to essential refusal and met load requirements under accepted wave equation calculations
Engineering judgment on analytical method selection
Complete Technical Record Under Consideration
Engineer B decided to exclude the pile driving records and wave equation calculations from the report analysis, focusing solely on penetration depth and skin friction as the basis for concluding that 19 piles failed the required safety factor.
Engineer B Contradictory Evidence Disclosure
Engineer B's report concluded that 19 piles were inadequate based on depth-of-penetration analysis, without acknowledging that wave equation calculations applied to the pile driving records would have shown those same piles meeting load requirements by a substantial margin.
Contradictory Evidence Disclosure Obligation
At the time of preparing and issuing the findings report
Engineer B supervised test pile driving and produced a findings report without consulting Engineer A's on-site representative or inquiring of the contractor or workers who had direct knowledge of the original pile driving.
During the investigation and prior to issuing the findings report.
From the time Engineer B expressed disbelief in the driving records through the period of dispute
Pile driving records for the 90-pile dock foundation
Engineer A's on-site representatives were available to testify as to the accuracy of the pile driving records
Engineer B stated disbelief in the pile driving records and declined to rely on them without independent verification or stated technical justification
Engineer B Technical Objectivity Violation
Engineer B structured his report language to foreclose any interpretation that the 90 piles met the safety factor requirement, selectively deploying technical data to support the municipality's adversarial position rather than presenting an objective technical assessment.
Technical objectivity required Engineer B to present findings in a manner that enabled alternative expert interpretations, regardless of which party those interpretations might favor.
The case text holds that selective use of technical fact is professionally impermissible in any setting, legal or otherwise, and that the adversarial context provides no justification.
Facts are not adversarial, even if they may be conflicting. Adversarial interests, however, are polarizing to the effect that some facts may be preferred by one interest over the other.
Engineer B was retained by the municipality to supervise test pile driving and produce a findings report on whether the original 90 piles met design safety factor requirements. His report omitted the equipment failure and the refusal data.
Engineer B was obligated to include in his findings report all material technical facts, including the failure of dynamic test equipment and the fact that all 19 piles reported as failing were driven to refusal, so that the report could support informed engineering review.
At the time of preparing and issuing the findings report following the test pile driving program.
Denial of fair expert review opportunity to Engineer A
Misleading the municipality and any decision-makers about the actual structural adequacy of the dock foundation
Potential professional and legal consequences for Engineer A based on incomplete analysis
19 Piles Formally Declared Deficient Without Full Basis
Engineer A's Reputation at Risk from Incomplete Analysis
Provide the municipality with a report supporting their cost-sharing dispute against Engineer A by concluding that a significant number of piles were deficient
Professional judgment on completeness of engineering conclusions
Engineer B issued the concluding report stating that 19 of 90 piles failed the required safety factor based solely on insufficient penetration depth, without disclosing the equipment failure, the fact that all 19 piles had been driven to essential refusal, or the results of wave equation calculations that would indicate adequate pile strength.
Retained by the municipality to supervise test pile driving and produce a findings report on whether the original 90 piles met design safety factor requirements. Concluded that 19 piles were deficient but omitted material facts including pile refusal data, wave equation results, and equipment failure from the report. Did not consult Engineer A's representatives or field personnel.
Engineer B's concluding report stated that approximately 19 of the 90 piles did not meet the safety factor required by the design calculations
Risk that test conditions might not replicate original driving conditions, compromising validity of results
Generate independent technical evidence to evaluate the validity of Engineer A's 30-day strength gain claim and support the municipality's cost-sharing position
Procurement of qualified engineering supervision
The municipality retained Engineer B to supervise a test pile driving program designed to evaluate whether piles could gain sufficient strength over a 30-day period to meet design calculation requirements.
A formal engineering document existed asserting 19 pile failures, with this conclusion available for use in litigation or further proceedings, while critical contradicting data was absent from the record the report created.
Engineer B issued a formal report concluding that 19 of 90 piles failed the required safety factor, basing this conclusion solely on insufficient penetration depth while omitting equipment failure data, refusal data, and wave equation calculations.