That’s a great question. There’s three things that we like to do. First of all, we look up the engineer at the state level and find out what is his area of expertise? I want to know, is he civil? Is he electrical? Is he a computer engineer? Because I have seen computer engineers making structural opinions and trying to figure out why. Okay? So I want to see what kind of background they have. Number two, we look up to see if they’re associated with the company that they’re stamping the name on. A lot of times these engineers are stamping these reports and they’re not authorized to be working for that particular company. As far as the state’s concerned. That basically invalidates the entire report. It’s not valid. Not to mention the engineering board of that state wants to hear about stuff like that. So we start there.
Then you get out a red pen like back in grade school and you just start chopping it up, take out blurbs, add the photo. He says, “There’s no damage,” you put a photo next to it showing that’s patently false. After the 13th or 14th false thing, the only conclusion we can make is that he’s doing it on purpose. Right? A professional with a license is intentionally misleading or misconstruing the situation to the insured or to the insurance company’s benefit. Right? That’s a windfall. That’s a no, no. Right?
So the key to that is documentation, documentation through photographs, documentation through different scientific methods, thermal cameras, rulers, the same kind of stuff that some of these engineers do. So one of the ways that she was talking about not needing us, one of the first things we do, we check on the state licensing of the engineer. We check to see if they’re valid working for that company, then we chop up that engineering port as best we can.