Lack of Credibility Can Destroy a Claim

August 18, 2025 — David Adelstein - Florida Construction Legal Updates
Lack of credibility can undermine your claim in a HUGE way. That lack of credibility can come from a party or a party’s expert. In Appeal of ECC International Constructors, LLC, ASBCA No. 59586, 2025 WL 1357784 (ASBCA 2025), a contractor’s delay expert was construed to have deliberately omitted a key factual event in his analysis that the contractor previously claimed was a delaying event. This fact was a focus of cross examination during an Armed Services Board of Contract Appeals’ proceeding. This omission was noted and gutted the expert’s credibility to the Board:

To demonstrate that the government delayed project performance, [the contractor] relies primarily upon the opinion of [the expert]. To be credible, a contractor’s delay analyst must take into account, and give appropriate credit for, all of the delays that were alleged to have occurred. We have found that the expert] deliberately omitted from the crux of his delay analysis the ECP security changes that - until we ruled against [the contractor] upon that issue - [the contractor] had alleged delayed its performance. That is, [the expert] did not make the ECP security changes the subject of a fragnet, as he did 22 other potential delay events. That renders [the expert’s] opinion not credible, and therefore, not helpful to us or to [the contractor’s] case. We are free to reject expert testimony [that] we find intrinsically unpersuasive . . . and here, we find [the expert’s] opinion intrinsically unpersuasive.

See, supra, Appeal of ECC International Constructors, LLC.

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Reprinted courtesy of David Adelstein, Kirwin Norris, P.A.
Mr. Adelstein may be contacted at dma@kirwinnorris.com