Gordon Hunt
CEng MIStructE MICE
Chartered Engineer
Mr Hunt’s Expert Witness track record is based on many years of exposure to a wide range of design, construction, project management and engineering-related disputes. These variously related to failures and breaches in on-going contracts, torts, and pre-action forensic, evidence gathering and research activities. He has worked on the pursuit of claims and their defence, and the finding of technically-based resolutions to settle pre-action or to foreshorten matters.
Illustrative examples of Mr Hunt’s engineering assessments, and consequent formal reporting work, include;
- forensic physical assessment of failed and damaged structures, and evaluation of incipient damage and risks of progress,
- research, modelling, calculations and computational analysis in support of physical assessments,
- assessing the physical impacts of materials issues such alkali aggregate reactivity and carbonation, timber deterioration, creep and deformation
- understanding failure modes of concealed elements such as façade fixings and leaking drainage as part of planning intrusive evidence gathering investigations,
- determining responsibilities for aspects of ground investigation interpretation and related designs, particularly at interfaces, on multi design party projects.
Where these or other instances progressed to formal claims or disputes Mr Hunt’s reports anticipated their use as key elements of evidence in hearings. In certain cases, following resolution or settlement Mr Hunt led teams on specifying of remedial work, optioneering, and reporting on third-party costing recommendations.
Mr Hunt has acted on many occasions as an expert in buildings and fire insurance claims, being engaged both by Loss Adjusters and by claimants. Typically his reporting successfully served as an important element of determining, through some combination of physical investigation, contractual review, technical research, and the taking of verbal evidence, the causes of, and responsibility for, damage and loss.
Mr Hunt’s forty-five year career has combined engineering with infrastructure financing roles. He added a wider perspective to his engineering expertise whilst working as a principal in equity investor and debt provider roles. In these roles Mr Hunt appeared as a lead witness on technical aspects of financial disputes, including concerning the drivers of asset valuations. For example he appeared for the respondent in an asset valuation mediation turning on a gas network’s expansion potential, and for the claimant in a shareholder-control arbitration which turned on the respondent party’s engineering project management capabilities. His evidence in writing and in person was also instrumental in resolving a remuneration dispute related to the claimant’s use of technical skill and judgement, and in a dispute concerning the engineering intellectual property provisions of a joint venture agreement.
Mr Hunt’s has a diverse range of report writing experience, mainly as guided by the UK CPR Part 35, but also in arbitration matters, including in Singapore. All of this work had in common rapid assimilation of large volumes of raw data, distillation of issues, assessment of materiality and risk, and justification of opinions and recommendations.
Earlier, in building his engineering career, an initial four years in a design office and on site led rapidly to qualification as a professional engineer. A further fifteen years included a wide variety of engineering and project management roles. In total five of these post-chartership years were spent in the Middle East, in Oman, Qatar and Kuwait. Post MBA graduation ten years of diverse experience was gained with US Management Contractor Bechtel. Within Bechtel Mr Hunt progressed rapidly and consistently from project engineering to project management, and thereafter to project finance. He also worked in support of senior executives, in press relations, and preparing presentational materials.
In aggregate Mr Hunt has gained design, construction, engineering and project management experience across a notably wide diversity of civil and structural-related sub sectors. These include commercial and domestic buildings, masts and towers, roads/short-span bridges, marine facilities (including berthing/mooring structures; onshore gas field development; marine export facility rehabilitation following bomb-damage, rehabilitation of export loading arms, offshore single-point-moorings). They also include wastewater treatment (including sewer networks, network storage, pipelines and outfalls) nuclear station-located steelwork, temporary works, retaining structures and various forms of piled foundations.
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