A conflict check for a construction expert isn't the same inquiry as a conflict check for co-counsel and treating it as a formality worth skipping is a common, avoidable mistake. An expert's conflicts run through prior project involvement, financial relationships and professional history in ways a standard attorney-conflicts database was never built to catch. Running the check properly, before any confidential case information changes hands, protects the retention itself, not just the expert's schedule.
- 1. Prior involvement with the same project. The most direct conflict: has this expert, or the firm, already worked on the specific building, site or project at issue, for any party, on any prior matter? A prior inspection, design review or even an informal consultation years earlier can create a conflict even if it had nothing to do with the current dispute.
- 2. Prior work for any party or closely related entity. This extends past the named parties to related entities: a parent company, an affiliated developer, a shared ownership group. Construction litigation frequently involves entities that look unrelated on the case caption but share ownership or management and that relationship matters even when it isn't obvious from the pleadings.
- 3. Relationships with opposing counsel or opposing experts. Has the expert testified against this attorney's client before, or worked opposite opposing counsel in a way that creates an appearance problem? Has the expert had a prior professional relationship (co-authored testimony, shared employment, ongoing referral relationships) with an expert already retained by the other side?
- 4. Financial relationships that could be used to challenge independence. Any current or recent financial relationship with a party (a contractor who's also a client on unrelated work, an insurance carrier the firm does other business with) is worth surfacing early. It doesn't automatically disqualify the expert, but it's exactly the kind of thing that surfaces badly for the first time during cross-examination if it isn't addressed up front.
- 5. Confirmation before, not after, confidential facts are shared. The entire point of doing this first: once case-specific facts, theories or documents have been shared with a potential expert, a conflict discovered afterward is a much harder problem: for privilege, for strategy exposure and for finding a replacement expert who hasn't now been "tainted" by a competing side's information secondhand.
A conflict check runs on relatively little information, which is deliberate: enough to check against, not so much that the inquiry itself becomes a confidentiality problem. Typically useful: the project name and location, the parties and any known related entities, opposing counsel's name and firm and any experts already retained by either side. None of the underlying facts of the dispute need to be shared to run this check.
All submissions are held in strict confidence and reviewed within one business day. If a conflict does turn up, the honest outcome is usually a same-day referral rather than a delayed "maybe." A fast no is more useful to a case timeline than a slow one.
None of this replaces your own firm's conflicts process: it's specifically the additional layer that a construction expert's project history and industry relationships require, on top of the standard attorney-conflicts check. Running it early is a small step that protects the retention, not a formality to get through on the way to the real work.
This article is a general informational overview, not legal advice and does not create an attorney-client or expert-client relationship.
