Written observations to the expert (dire)

The dire is the voice of the parties in a French court-ordered expert appraisal. The expert conducts his operations, inspects, gathers documents, forms hypotheses; the parties, through their lawyer or their party-appointed expert, send him written observations: to challenge a comparable, to point out a document that has been overlooked, to propose another method, to ask a question. These documents are called dires. The expert is bound to take them into consideration and to state in his report what he has done with them.

The dire is the main tool of the adversarial process during the appraisal. A party that has submitted no dire will find it hard to contest the report before the judge afterwards; a party that has submitted a precise, reasoned dire obliges the expert to answer it, and prepares the debate in court.

Where the rule comes from

Article 276 of the French Code of Civil Procedure provides that the expert must take into consideration the observations or claims of the parties and, where they are in writing, attach them to his opinion if the parties so request. It specifies that, where the expert has set the parties a time limit for their observations, he is not bound to take account of those made after that time, save for serious and duly justified cause, and that he must state in his opinion what he has done with the observations or claims submitted. The adversarial principle laid down by article 16 underpins the whole.

In a valuation report

In my summary note or draft report, I set a time limit for dires, usually three to four weeks. I then reproduce each dire in the report, or attach it, and answer it point by point: I either accept the observation and amend my valuation, or set it aside and explain why. A useful dire in property valuation is concrete: it produces a comparable sale the expert did not have, contests a floor area, points out an error in the index date, attaches a quote. A dire that merely asserts that the valuation is too high or too low calls for a short answer.

Example

In an appraisal of the value of a house to be shared between heirs, the draft report concludes at €285,000 from six sales. The dire of one heir, prepared with his party-appointed expert, produces two recent sales of comparable houses at €310,000 and €318,000, and points out that the floor area adopted omits a separate 22 m² studio. The expert checks, adds the two comparables, corrects the floor area and raises his conclusion to €302,000, explaining in the final report each element accepted and those set aside.

Not to be confused with

Written pleadings (conclusions), exchanged between lawyers before the judge, and the application to disqualify the expert (récusation), which concerns the person of the expert and not his findings.