Some time passed and Castle, unhappy with the result of the adjudication, commenced litigation against BP. Castle again sought to instruct a delay expert but the previous expert was now unavailable. They instead instructed Mr B, who began to familiarise himself with the documents. Mr B had been instructed late in the day and thus rushed to produce his report. After spending 41.5 hours reviewing the case he was made aware of a draft of the report produced by the previous expert in the adjudication. This led to Mr B including the following introductory paragraph in his final report: “I have considered [the previous expert’s] report, the document he has referred to, the methodology he has adopted and the conclusions he has reached. I agree with [the previous expert’s] approach and have independently reached the same conclusions in respect of cause(s) of delay to the Building Programme and the extent of such delays. Severe limitations of time, the requirement for me to submit my report by Friday 23 June [2017] and as a proportionate response I have adopted the findings of [the previous expert] ...”. What Mr B then did was reproduce the previous expert’s report in its entirety without any material amendment. He simply copied and pasted the report with no attempt to hide what he had done. Counsel for Castle objected to that approach as a matter of principle, but the judge, Mrs Justice Jefford, disagreed. There was nothing wrong in principle with adopting another expert’s report. This was most commonly observed, she said, in doctors agreeing as to a diagnosis or prognosis. However, where there was pressure of time the court would adopt a healthy scepticism and call into question the extent of the expert’s investigations and the care taken in forming their opinions. The second expert would have to be as familiar with the relevant material as the first, otherwise how could he purport to have reached the same conclusions? It was in this area that Mr B’s evidence was seriously deficient. It became apparent in cross-examination that Mr B could not explain many of the assumptions in his own report, in part because he had not seen much of the relevant material the previous expert had. One can almost hear the disbelief in the judge’s voice as she describes just how incredible it was for Mr B to claim this report as his own: “In fact, in this case, it seemed to me that [Mr B] had formed no independent view at all. I am frankly at a loss to understand on what basis he could possibly have formed such a view. Quite extraordinarily, [Mr B] had not even seen, and had apparently not thought it relevant to see, the parties’ pleaded cases or any disclosure. He had, therefore, paid scant regard to BP’s case – indeed he did not have BP’s pleaded case or evidence before him. He had however been provided with (and to some extent relied upon) [Castle’s] witness statements in the adjudication – or at least [the previous expert] had – even though no statements from these witnesses had been served in the litigation and their evidence was not before me. I fail to see how, in those circumstances, [Mr B] can have thought that he was providing the court with an independent view.” Naturally Jefford J. found that she could place no reliance on Mr B’s report. The adjudicator’s award was largely upheld. Cala Homes Finally, while doing research for this article I came across many cases with many bad experts. But my favourite, containing perhaps the worst expert and the most excoriating remarks from a judge, is Cala Homes (South) Ltd v Alfred McAlpine Homes East Ltd [1995] EWHC 7 (Ch). The case involved an action for copyright infringement. The claimant (“Cala”) and the defendant (“McAlpine”) were both companies that designed and built houses. Cala alleged that a number of McAlpine’s design drawings for their range of houses were substantially reproduced from Cala’s own drawings. McAlpine denied this. Each side adduced expert evidence from an architect to explain the extent of the similarities between the drawings. McAlpine’s expert was Mr G. At some point in their preparations for the trial Cala’s lawyers struck gold in the form of an article written by Mr G in the Journal of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators. The article had been written in 1990, only a few years previously, and was titled “The Expert Witness: Partisan with a Conscience.” Presumably McAlpine’s lawyers had missed this article when doing their due diligence.