Litigation support (assistance à expertise)

When a French court appoints an expert to value a property, each party may be assisted by its own expert. This is not a sign of distrust towards the court expert: it is the means by which a party takes a useful part in technical operations that its lawyer is not expected to master in detail. The party-appointed expert prepares the file, accompanies the client on the inspection, discusses the comparables and the methods, drafts the dires (a party’s written observations to the expert) with the lawyer and analyses the draft report and then the final report.

He does not replace the court expert and does not claim the court expert’s impartiality: he defends a position, but with the same tools, which makes the debate more precise and faster. He is bound by the same professional rules: he does not disparage the appointed expert, he discusses his work.

Where the rule comes from

The adversarial principle (article 16 of the French Code of Civil Procedure) guarantees the parties the right to discuss the material on which the judge will base the decision. Article 276 organises the way the expert takes their observations into account. Nothing prevents a party from being assisted by a technician to formulate them, and court practice routinely accepts it. The fees of the party-appointed expert are not part of the recoverable costs, but may be claimed under article 700 of the Code of Civil Procedure. The Charte de l’expertise en évaluation immobilière (French property valuation charter, Title II chapter 6) describes the consistency review of a valuation carried out by a third party.

In a valuation report

The work of the party-appointed expert takes the form of technical notes for the lawyer, who turns them into dires: examination of each comparable used by the court expert (date, comparability, source), checking of floor areas and index calculations, production of additional verifiable comparables, proposal of a cross-check method. After the report is filed, he writes a critical analysis which allows the lawyer to make submissions on the merits, or to ask for a supplementary appraisal.

Example

In a court-ordered appraisal of the rental value of restaurant premises, the draft report concludes at €42,000 on the basis of four comparables, two of which are shopping-arcade units. The tenant’s expert points out this inconsistency, produces three rents of street-front restaurants in the same district between €28,000 and €33,000, and recalculates the capped rent with the correct index quarters. The dire, drafted with the lawyer, leads the court expert to set aside the arcade comparables and to bring his conclusion down to €34,500.

Not to be confused with

The sapiteur (specialist consulted by the court expert himself), and the single-party valuation, a full report commissioned by one party outside any court-ordered appraisal.