Marine Investigations

Qualifications

Ultimately, testifying in court as a qualified expert provides the basis for qualification of the investigator in that venue, but that is only a partial answer.

An expert is defined as one who has special skills derived from training or experience.

Note that the dictionary definition specifically includes experience as a basis for expertise, so we need not feel insecure about being challenged on the lack of formal training.

As I point out in a later chapter, experience precedes the university professor who, in most instances, is only parroting what he learned from his teachers and so on.

Somewhere along the line, someone has to gain the personal experience that is later taught to others.

Insurance companies, attorneys and others go to the expense of hiring bona fide experts to investigate casualties either for the purpose of determining the cause of loss, whether insurance coverage applies, and who, if anyone, is responsible for the loss. Or simply due to anticipation that litigation may be forthcoming.

Thus the overriding concern of the one who hires an investigator is that the investigator possesses the requisite expertise. And because litigation is always a possibility, the expertise of the investigator must be demonstrable.

Before an expert is accepted as such in a court of law he has to be qualified to the court.

Qualification means the presentation of sufficient evidence of qualification as to satisfy all parties to the litigation, as well as the judge, that the witness is qualified.

This comes in the form of questioning from both sides. Lacking proof of qualification, the opposing counsel will challenge the expert’s credentials and probably have him disqualified.

In some cases, even the judge may question the assertion that the witness is qualified and subject the witness to his own questioning.

Thus, anyone who approaches casualty investigation as something anyone with a bit of knowledge can do, he’s likely to have a rude awakening when that investigator ends up in deposition or court.

The author’s motivation for writing this book is based on the fact that there are so few opportunities available to obtain the necessary training or experience, yet there is a great need for more qualified experts.

The maritime attorney, rightly so, will usually seek a much higher degree of experience than the insurance company, the later of which serves as the primary training ground for those who seek to perform this kind of work.

Fortunately, it is not necessary to present a university diploma in order get qualified as an expert, for the author’s experience is that the courts are fairly liberal in civil cases as to what constitutes an expert.

The fact is that experts abound in a huge array of subjects, the vast majority of which there are no collegiate degree programs for the subject matter.

But for a handful of seminars, virtually all marine investigators are self-taught to one degree or another.

The overriding criteria is whether the investigator can demonstrate that he or she posses superior knowledge and experience on the subject. Here we can see that a college diploma can provide one with a lot of secondhand information, but never real world experience.

Even so, formal training in any allied subject such as engineering is certainly beneficial, but it is very rare to find a surveyor that has a degree in engineering.

So why aren’t there more engineers working as surveyors? The answer probably lies in the fact that there are more comfortable opportunities for employment at higher starting salaries.

The prospect of starting one’s own business in this line of work does not appear to be widely appealing to engineers. The marine investigator probably has more in common with the police detective than he does with the typical engineer.

Forensics

The marine surveyor is an expert, but he is also a generalist in the same way as a family doctor is.

Surveyors know a lot about boats generally, but boats are assemblages of materials, systems, hardware and other components, some of which he has expertise about, others not.

Like the police detective, the marine expert often makes use of other experts.

The dictionaries define forensics as follows: “1: belonging to the courts of judicature or to public discussion and debate 2: used in legal proceeding or public discussions 3: the art and study of argumentative discourse; broadly: argumentative, rhetorical.”

While the term forensic is Latin in its root, its meaning as defined in the dictionary only bears a small resemblance to the way the term is used today.

Perhaps our dictionaries are a bit behind the times, because the term forensic is today taken to mean just about any kind of technical investigation for any purpose, whereas in the past it meant mainly the theory of debate whether judicial or not.

Today the term is used in conjunction with specific disciplines of physical investigation not only relating to criminal and civil proceedings but also to many other areas of organized human contention such as dispute resolution, insurance claims and so on.

Therefore, forensic investigation can be taken to mean the evidence obtained by means of the physical investigative sciences and its application toward the discovery of truth. 

The important point to understand about the term concerns evidence that is used as the basis of an argument to arrive at the truth of an issue.

Today the forensic investigator is a person equipped with specialty knowledge and training, as in ballistics, medical, pathology, chemistry and even accounting and computers.

In the strictest sense of the term, the marine surveyor who investigates sinking casualties is performing a forensic service, the collection and analysis of evidence leading to the determination of the cause of an event that may ultimately be litigated, and therefore belonging to the courts of judicature.

That the work of the marine surveyor has a high probability of ending up as a forensic argument should remain foremost in the investigator’s mind.