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Comment by abduhl | Hacker News Reader

I'm unaware of any liability that can be picked up through rendering an opinion on a design. I have participated in forensic engineering / expert witness cases in geostructural matters. In fact, the opinion of an engineer as an "expert witness" is often codified in law as retaining no liability. Asking questions and drawing conclusions is not something that presents any risks besides you being possibly proven wrong later. If you don't stamp the design to be constructed, then there is no liability.

I would be very interested in any law or regulation you can find that says otherwise.

I would also add that most of the involvement of engineers during lawsuits is to establish exactly what state of practice is in the local area. It would be hard to do that if all these other engineers didn't have or couldn't give an opinion.

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> I would also add that most of the involvement of engineers during lawsuits is to establish exactly what state of practice is in the local area. It would be hard to do that if all these other engineers didn't have or couldn't give an opinion.

An engineer in a lawsuit as an expert witness is a VERY different beast from making public statements about an engineering failure.

Much of the way this is being played out in the press is that the statements by the outside engineers are implying that the engineering firm didn't due sufficient analysis.

That's a statement that they do NOT have the facts to support and falls under "libel". Under a "libel" charge, the defendant has to prove that the statements made are true rather than the plaintiff showing that they are false.

In addition, it's quite easy to take a known failure point and then backfill the analysis to find the mistake. The more interesting question would be to take the design and give it to a firm that doesn't know about the failure and see if they can find the flaw in the analysis.

I used to be a structural engineer in Canada (EIT, left before getting PENG) and one of the projects I was involved with was analyzing a collapsed building to determine fault.

Being an expert witness is completely different than being an engineer talking to the public. Generally speaking an engineer close to the details of the project is going to know more than you. If you have concerns, you call up the engineer and you have a discussion. If he's dismissive you still have the choice to escalate the matter, but it's usually to someone in the government, not the public at large. Engineers need to be trusted by the public and shooting your mouth off about another engineer degrades public trust.

bsder said: "As a licensed Professional Engineer, you have to be quite careful criticizing other engineers. As long as the engineer signing off met "standard practices", he is covered and saying that he is not could get you in quite hot water."

I am disagreeing with the statement that you could get in "quite hot water" by noting that the only liability you are exposing yourself to by stating your opinion is looking stupid. Yours and my opinions on public trust and how someone should conduct themselves is orthogonal to the question.

So basically the code of ethics says you don't get caught arguing and doubting each other's work in public because it makes all engineers look bad. To me that sounds like a thin blue line, just not blue.

Acting as an expert witness and sounding off unbidden are somewhat different.

It's also not so much a matter of law as it is professionalism.

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