Construction Defects and Repairs

Clients retain MEC on a variety of defect claims and disputes. Our clients have included plaintiff Home Owners Associations, plaintiff contractors, defendant contractors and design professionals, and third-party contractors, and fourth-party contractors.

We often perform on-site investigations to determine the cause(s) of various distresses and non-performances of building materials, products, assemblies, systems and components, along with the causes(s) of the construction defects. Additionally, MEC is often requested to provide general construction defect repair and building remediation recommendations to correct identified defects and deficiencies, and to establish the probable costs associated with the construction defect repairs.

Although in a large number of cases especially (moisture and humidity problems) we simply undertook to investigate the causes and provide clients with the appropriate solution more than often, MEC is retained as the construction defect causation expert and/or as the cost of repair expert in building disputes to allocate cost of repair damages between the parties. The process of allocating cost of repair damages can be described in several steps:

Identifying the parties potentially responsible for designing, installing, supervising, inspecting, approving and maintaining the work

Identifying the parties actually responsible for designing, installing, supervising, inspecting, approving and maintaining the work

Establishing the percentage of responsibility that each party bears

Establishing the amount of repair cost that each party bears, e.g., repair cost allocation.

The cost of repair allocation analyses is similar in many ways to the causation analyses we perform on other types of claims and disputes.

A significant portion of our defect consulting and expert witness services been associated with determinations of whether the building defect and damage claims resulted directly from the insured’s defective workmanship or from consequential causes. Predictably, a large segment of our consulting and expert witness work involves water intrusion, settlement and cracks and other architectural and structural issues.