TAE Accreditations
- Expert Witness
Mr Gordon Hunt
Structural Engineer
Qualifications
- Civil Engineering BSc (Hons) (1981)
- MICE (1986)
- CEng (1986)
- MIStructE (1987)
- MBA (1991)
Expert Witness Snapshot
Forty-five years engineering, construction and infrastructure finance experience. Mr Hunt brings exposure to a wide range of design, construction, project management and  infrastructure investment-related disputes. These have in the main related to contracts, but also torts, forensic and legacy matters. Mr Hunt has worked on pursuit of claims and their defence, and the finding of technically based resolutions to foreshorten or settle claims.Mr Hunt’s early career had a focus on structural assessment and forensic engineering.  This work concerned disputes or contention regarding both structural and civil engineering assets. Settings including marine dockyards (assets such as piled jetties, pontoons, and buoyage), the defence-sector (assets such as blast walls, range structures, bunkers and tunnelled munitions stores), short-span bridges, commercial buildings, domestic housing, earth-retaining structures and slope stability, and a variety of masts and towers.  This wide scope ran to heritage and distressed and life-expired assets. It involved following evidence trails using inductive and deductive reasoning. It involved construction materials issues such alkali aggregate reactivity, electrolytic corrosion failure of façade fixings, and finally also ground movement (shallow foundations, trees, impacts of leaking drainage) and fire damage.
Where these or other instances progressed to contractual claims or disputes Mr Hunt’s drafting and his opinions anticipated use of reports as key elements of evidence in tribunals. In certain cases, following dispute resolution, Mr Hunt led teams on specifying remedial work, optioneering, and reporting on costing recommendations.
Mr Hunt has acted on many occasions as an expert in structural and fire-insurance claims, being engaged both by Loss Adjusters and by Insureds.  Typically, his reporting determined through some combination of physical investigation, contractual review, technical research, and the taking of verbal evidence, the causes and severity of damage, and, where applicable, opinion on responsibility for damage and loss.
Mr Hunt’s engineering career has been combined with infrastructure-financing roles. He added a wider perspective to his engineering expertise whilst working as Principal in equity-investor or debt-provider roles. Mr Hunt appeared as a witness on technical aspects of financial disputes, including concerning asset valuations In Spain.  He was lead Principal in a shareholder-control arbitration in Singapore which turned on the parties engineering project management capabilities. He was involved in a London remuneration dispute related to the party’s technical skill and judgement, and a dispute in Mumbai concerning the engineering intellectual property provisions of a joint-venture agreement.
Mr Hunt’s has a diverse range of report-writing experience, including as guided by CPR Part 35. All of this work had in common rapid assimilation of large volumes of raw data, distillation and exposition of evident and assumed facts, assessment of materiality and risk, and justification of opinions and remediation recommendations.
Early years in engineering design and mainstream construction led rapidly to qualification as a professional engineer[1]. A further fifteen years included a wide variety of engineering and project management roles. In total five of these post-chartership years were spent in the Middle East, in Oman, Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Post MBA-graduation ten years of diverse experience was gained with US Management Contractor Bechtel. Within Bechtel Mr Hunt transitioned from project engineering to project management and to project finance i.e. as investment Principal financing engineering projects.
In aggregate has gained engineering design (non-dispute) experience across a wide diversity of structural and civil-related sectors. These included commercial buildings, roads/short-span bridges, marine berthing/mooring/loading structures, oil/gas field development civil works, repair of bomb-damaged steel/concrete/timber jetties, structural refurbishment of offshore single-point-moorings, nuclear station-located steelwork, retaining structures and piled foundation grillages.
[1] Chartered Engineer, CEng, MIStructE, MICE.