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ARTICLE ID 24903
Homeowner brings action against engineer who performed prepurchase home inspection and deemed house structurally sound - Plaintiff claims defendant failed to detect problems with house's foundation which became apparent five years after purchase.
Suffolk County
In ________, the plaintiff purchased a house which at the time was
between twenty and twenty five years old. Prior to its purchase,
the plaintiff had engaged the services of the defendant, an
engineer, to conduct a prepurchase inspection. The defendant’s
report concluded that the house was structurally sound, but did
have settling cracks in the foundation. The plaintiff alleged
that five years after purchasing the house, its foundation began
to shift because of subsurface soil problems. The plaintiff
claimed that the cracking in the foundation had progressed to
major foundation defects. The defendant argued that the problems
with the foundation could be caused by problems which were not
visible to him at the time of his inspection.
The plaintiff called an expert engineer who opined that settling
of the subsoil caused the walls of the house to deflect inward at
a regular rate and that these problems should have been foreseen
by the defendant engineer at the time of his inspection. The
plaintiff’s expert engineer further claimed that the deflection
would worsen and cause instability to the foundation. He felt
that the foundation should be replaced at a cost of $________.
The defendant’s expert engineer opined that the soil problems
might have been caused by the movement of buried debris would
cause the subsoil to collapse inward and affect the stability of
the house’s foundation. He maintained that this debris and its
affects on the foundation would not and could not have been
visible to the defendant at the time of his inspection.
The plaintiff had demanded an award of $________ which was the
amount the plaintiff’s expert engineer felt it would cost to
replace the home’s foundation.
After a trial of three days and after deliberating for three
hours, the jury returned a defendant’s verdict.
5 ways to win with JVRA
JVRA gives you jurisdiction-specific, year-round insight into the strategies, arguments and tactics that win. Successful attorneys come to the table prepared and use JVRA to:
- Determine if a case is winnable and recovery amounts.
- Determine reasonable demand for a case early on.
- Support a settlement demand by establishing precedent.
- Research trial strategies, tactics and arguments.
- Defeat or support post-trial motions through past case histories.
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