A construction defect expert witness who came from the contracting side brings something no credential can replicate: direct knowledge of how the work actually gets done in the field. That knowledge changes what they find in investigations, what they can challenge in opposing testimony, and how credibly they hold up when it counts.
Here is something that happens on job sites all over the country, more often than anyone in the construction industry likes to admit.
A contractor installs a roofing system the wrong way. Not a complicated system. A shingle roof. Simple. The step flashing is done incorrectly, not per manufacturers’ requirements, not per industry standards. When the expert shows up on site and points this out, the contractor’s response is immediate and confident: “I’ve been doing it this way for 25 years.”
That phrase, “I’ve been doing it this way for 25 years,” is one of the most common things construction defect experts hear in the field. It gets said with genuine conviction. The contractor is not lying about how long he has been doing it wrong. He has been doing it wrong for his entire career and has never been challenged on it.
So Jeff Martin asks the obvious question: where would you find the installation instructions for this system?
The contractor says he has never seen them.
Jeff walks over to a bundle of shingles sitting on the roof, still wrapped. He pulls the wrapper off. Right there, printed in plain view, is everything the contractor needed to know. The instructions described exactly how the step flashing should have been installed. Visible to anyone who looked at the bundle. Available every single day of the contractor’s working life.
“It was in Spanish, too,” Jeff adds. There was no excuse.
That story is not exceptional. It is typical. And understanding why it is typical is the key to understanding why the right construction defect expert witness for most building envelope cases is not a professor or a licensed engineer who learned about roofing from specifications. It is someone who spent years standing on rooftops, holding the tools, and watching exactly this kind of thing happen.
What “Field Experience” Actually Means in a Construction Defect Case
When attorneys talk about wanting an expert with field experience, they sometimes mean general familiarity with the construction industry. That is not what we are talking about here.
Real field experience in building envelope work means you have personally installed roofing systems. You have fabricated sheet metal. You have done waterproofing. You have managed crews. You have been the person responsible for making an assembly perform correctly, and you have lived with the consequences when it did not. You have read, or in some cases failed to read, manufacturer’s installation instructions. You know what a correctly installed base flashing looks like from three feet away because you have installed hundreds of them.
Jeff Martin started full-time in commercial roofing in March 1987. He grew up in Savannah, working summers and weekends in his family’s roofing business alongside his father and grandfather, learning the trade from the ground up before he ever became a consultant. Mark Stewart spent 31 years at Hamlin Roofing Company, managing estimating, sales, and production across single-ply, modified bitumen, built-up, and standing seam metal systems. Both of them know the contracting world from the inside.
When they walk onto a job site or through a building involved in litigation, they are not consulting a checklist of things that can go wrong. They are reading a building the way someone reads a situation they have seen a hundred times before. The tells are familiar. The shortcuts are recognizable. The excuses are predictable.
That is field experience. And it changes everything about what a construction defect expert witness can do for your case.
What a Contractor-Background Expert Catches That Others Miss
The installation errors that generate construction defect litigation are rarely complicated in principle. They are usually simple things done wrong repeatedly because no one with the authority to stop them was watching closely enough.
Clips installed at 24 inches on a metal roof when the specification called for 12 inches. Step flashing omitted or reversed on a shingle installation. A sealant joint that is the right material but applied in the wrong sequence, meaning it is bonded to a surface it should be able to slide against. A membrane termination that looks correct at a glance but is missing a critical bond at its edge.
An expert who learned building science from drawings and specifications can identify these failures by comparing what exists to what the documents required. That comparison produces a technically accurate opinion. What it does not produce, in many cases, is a clear picture of why the failure happened and whether the person who did the work knew or should have known better.
A contractor-background expert approaches the same failure differently. They are not just asking whether the installation matches the spec. They are asking whether this is the kind of error that a trained, supervised installer would make, or whether it looks like someone who was never taught correctly, never supervised, and never checked their work against the manufacturer’s requirements. Those are different conclusions. They point to different levels of culpability, different parties in the chain of responsibility, and different arguments at trial.
When the contractor on the other side of a deposition says “I’ve been doing it this way for 25 years,” a textbook expert hears a claim that needs to be evaluated against standards. A contractor-background expert hears something else: a direct admission that this installer has never been corrected, never been trained to the right standard, and has left a trail of identically defective installations behind them on every project they have ever touched. That is a significantly different piece of testimony, and knowing how to develop it requires having heard that same phrase on actual job sites.
How Contractor Experience Shows Up in Depositions and at Trial
The value of a construction defect expert witness is not just in the written report. It is in what happens when opposing counsel tries to take the report apart.
Cross-examination of an expert with only theoretical knowledge often goes after the gap between the standard and the reality of field conditions. “Isn’t it true that installation crews don’t always have access to manufacturer guidelines on the job site?” “Isn’t it true that the industry commonly deviates from these specifications without adverse consequence?” These are questions designed to create reasonable doubt about whether the failure represents a genuine departure from the standard of care, or just normal variation in field practice.
An expert who has spent decades in the field is not vulnerable to those questions in the same way. They can answer from experience about what installation crews actually do and do not do, what supervisors actually are and are not responsible for, and where the line sits between normal field variation and a departure that a competent contractor should have caught and corrected. Their testimony on the standard of care is grounded in having operated within that standard, not just having read about it.
There is also a specific advantage when the opposing expert gives testimony that does not match field reality. A contractor-background expert recognizes the mismatch immediately because they have direct experience with how the work is actually done. When an opposing expert describes an installation process in a way that no working crew would ever execute it, or claims that a particular failure mode is uncommon in ways that contradict what actually happens in the field, a Fortress expert can identify that disconnect with authority. Not theoretically. Because they have been there.
In one case, a defense attorney retained Fortress BEC to analyze a $2.9 million construction defect claim. The forensic investigation and expert analysis produced a report that identified specific flaws in the plaintiff’s case. The matter settled for $700,000. The expert fee was a fraction of the difference.
The Disconnect Between the Office and the Field
There is a phrase that comes up again and again in construction defect investigations. The disconnect between the office and the field.
It works like this. A manufacturer develops an installation system, documents it thoroughly, prints the instructions on every package, publishes it on their website, and makes it available in training sessions. The general contractor who purchases the material theoretically has access to all of it. The subcontractor doing the work may or may not have been given the documentation. The crew installing it almost certainly has not read it, was not trained to it, and is executing based on whatever the person who trained them passed on, which may trace back through three layers of informal instruction.
By the time the installation happens in the field, there can be a significant gap between what the manufacturer designed, what the contractor specified, and what the installer executed. That gap is where most construction defect cases live.
An expert who has operated in that field environment understands the chain of failures that produces the gap. They know which party in the chain bears responsibility for training and supervising the installer. They know what documentation should have existed and did not. They know what questions to ask in discovery to trace accountability back to its source.
Mark Stewart has watched this disconnect play out throughout three decades in commercial roofing. He saw it from the contractor side: the reality of trying to maintain quality when labor is subcontracted through multiple layers, and manufacturer training sessions are no longer reaching the people doing the work. That perspective now informs every forensic investigation he undertakes. He is not guessing about how the system broke down. He has managed the system that broke down.
What This Means for Your Case
If your construction defect case turns on whether work was done correctly, whether the installer knew or should have known the right way to execute the assembly, and whether the testimony from the other side reflects what actually happens in the field, you want a construction defect expert witness who has built their career doing that work.
Certifications matter. The RRC, REWO, CIT, and CEI designations that Jeff and Mark hold are not decorations. They represent verified technical knowledge that supports the credibility of their testimony and their opinions. But certifications alone do not give an expert the ability to stand in front of a jury and explain what it looks like when a foreman decides that 25 years of doing something wrong constitutes sufficient authority to keep doing it wrong.
That ability comes from the rooftop. From the field. From 60-plus years of combined experience in a trade before becoming the consultants who now investigate it.
If you have a construction defect case involving water intrusion, roofing, waterproofing, or exterior walls, contact Jeff Martin at (864) 965-8668 or [email protected]. Initial case reviews are always at no charge.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does contracting experience matter more than a P.E. license for construction defect cases?
A professional engineering license demonstrates mastery of design principles, structural analysis, and code compliance. It is the right credential for cases where the central question is a design failure or a code violation. In cases where the question is whether an installer executed the work correctly, whether a contractor followed manufacturer requirements, or whether a supervisor should have caught an error before it became a defect, field installation experience is more directly relevant. An expert who has personally installed the systems in question can evaluate execution with a precision that no amount of design training replicates.
What is the “I’ve been doing it this way for 25 years” problem in construction defect litigation?
It refers to a pattern of testimony in which a contractor or installer claims their non-compliant installation method is acceptable because it has been their standard practice for many years. A contractor-background expert recognizes this claim for what it is: evidence that the error was systemic, habitual, and unsupervised across potentially dozens or hundreds of past installations. That shifts the analysis from an isolated workmanship error to a pattern of conduct, which can significantly affect how liability is assessed and argued at trial.
How does an expert with a contracting background evaluate opposing expert testimony?
They compare the opposing expert’s description of how installations are executed against their direct knowledge of how work is actually done in the field. When an opposing expert describes a process, a sequence, or a standard practice in a way that does not reflect the reality of how crews operate on commercial job sites, a contractor-background expert can identify and articulate that discrepancy specifically. That makes for more effective rebuttal testimony and a stronger cross-examination strategy.
Does Fortress BEC work plaintiff and defense cases?
Yes. Jeff Martin and Mark Stewart work both plaintiff and defense side in construction litigation. They take cases based on the merits of the technical facts, not based on which party is retaining them. That approach means their opinions reflect genuine analysis, and opposing counsel cannot credibly argue that their conclusions are shaped by who is paying the bill.
