LF Martin LLC

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The Record Doesn't Pick a Side.

Your Expert Shouldn't Either.

A dropped-object claim is decided by the opinion built on top of it — and that opinion is only as honest as the record beneath it. The near-miss reports, the permits, the audit findings, the training files, and the object itself were created long before anyone chose sides; they say what they say, and they will say it for whichever party's expert reads them with discipline. The safety expert's obligation, in either chair, is to bring the entire toolbox to that record — the physics, the standards matrix, the hierarchy of controls, the causation models, the discovery demands that produce the record in the first place — and to follow the analysis to the conclusion the evidence supports, not the conclusion the retention letter hoped for. Using the 2025 Valdivia v. Brock Services verdict — a $411 million award for a worker struck by a falling bar — together with recent appellate, spoliation, and Rule 702 decisions, this paper maps how the same record and the same methods build the opinion for each side, where each construction is vulnerable, and why the expert who would reach the same conclusion in either chair is the only one worth retaining in yours.

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