Engaging with Civil Engineer & Snow Sports Expert, Randy Wall

Randy Wall is both a certified instructor and a licensed civil engineer, and he shows us how that combo changes everything when snow sports accidents land in court. 

Randy explains how time gaps complicate site visits, why a consistent report template keeps testimony inside the “lane,” and how to translate dynamic crashes into clear, simple language that juries trust. Visuals are a cornerstone of his approach. He hand-draws clean diagrams to ground perspective and sequence, and when the record supports it, he partners with a crash reconstruction expert to build compelling animations that align physics with documented facts.

We also map the standards landscape. Snow sports live inside a patchwork of state statutes, county rules, ANSI ropeway codes, ASTM equipment standards, and the National Ski Areas Association Responsibility Code—many of them voluntary. Randy shows how real cases hinge on duty of care, standard of care, breach, cause-in-fact, and proximate cause, not on blanket rules. He walks through the cascade of decisions that often leads to injury and how to separate foreseeability from hindsight.

On the business side, Randy lays out his contract strategy: hourly, on retainer, with a thorough agreement. And how he screens for attorneys who want independent analysis rather than a prefabricated conclusion. His closing playbook for experts is crisp: prepare so your report leads, answer only the question asked in deposition, and never volunteer a tangent that opens new lines of attack.

If you value sharp thinking, clean visuals, and courtroom-ready explanations, this conversation delivers. Subscribe, share with a colleague who works in litigation or risk, and leave a quick review telling us your biggest takeaway.

Transcript

Sponsor And Guest Introduction

Noah Bolmer 0:01

This episode is brought to you by Round Table Group, the experts on experts. We've been connecting attorneys with experts for over 30 years. Find out more at RoundtableGrip.com. Welcome to Engaging Experts. I'm your host, Noah Bolmer, and today I'm excited to welcome Randy Wall to the show. Mr. Wall is the principal at Snow Sports Expert in Consulting, where he provides expert and forensic services for cases involving skiing, sledding, tubing, and other snow sports. Mr. Wall holds a master of public administration from Montana State. Mr. Wall, thank you so much for joining me here today on Engaging Experts.

Randy Wall 0:41

Well, thanks for having me.

Noah Bolmer 0:42

Of course, let's jump into it. So your career has spanned civil engineering to so to snow sports. How did you first become involved in expert witnessing?

Randy Wall 0:53

Well, let me just correct you right out of the gate, Noah, because I've actually been a certified ski instructor longer than I've been a licensed civil engineer. Wow. I yeah, I got my first Alpine certification from the Professional Ski Instructors of America or PSIA in Mammoth Mountain, California in 1982. And uh then I think I got my first civil engineering license in 1987. Yeah, so I've been around for a while.

Noah Bolmer 1:25

So how did you first become involved in expert witnessing?

Randy Wall 1:28

I was born and raised in California, and my wife and I, who's also a civil engineer, we've been entrepreneurs our entire lives. And we had an engineering firm in Northern California in a town called Auburn, California that we owned there for 15 years. And I was pretty well known in the community, and attorneys in the community sought me out to do expert witness work in the civil engineering field. It wasn't a a career pursuit. It was just something that I did because they contacted me and wanted me to do it. So that's really how I got started.

First Expert Cases And Vetting Engagements

Noah Bolmer 2:05

Were you aware of expert witnessing at all at that point? Is it something that you were looking for or did it just kind of fall on your lap?

Speaker 2 2:14

I like the work because I've got pretty good communication skills, which is kind of atypical for engineers. And yeah, I like the work. I like the research. I like I've always been intrigued by the legal field.

Noah Bolmer 2:32

When you get a phone call from for a potential engagement, how do you decide whether or not you're going to accept it? What are some of the main things that you look for to vet a potential engagement?

Speaker 2 2:44

Well, one thing I learned through my engineering career and basically being all things, all sales, all entrepreneurial, is to uh get people talking and listen to them. Attorneys are pretty cool like that because they like to talk. And so I get them to tell me through follow-up questions and just conversationally, just everything they know about the case right off the bat. A lot of times, what a an attorney will do is send me the complaint first in an inquiry over the internet, and then we'll schedule a call. Yeah, sometimes it's just not a good fit because my expertise is very specialized.

Noah Bolmer 3:34

What are, you know, some of the kind of tangential engagements that you have to think about for a minute, whether or not you're the right person, and how do you go about saying no?

Speaker 2 3:45

I just had an inquiry from an attorney, and they had absolutely no evidence. There was collision on the hill, and the plaintiff got hit by a snowboarder, and it broke his ribs and it broke his arm, but he skied down to the clinic. Typically, in a ski accident, what will happen is that there'll be a collision, somebody goes down, they call the ski patrol, the ski patrol shows up towing a toboggan, they assess the situation, they'll do what's called an incident report, and they'll put the person in the toboggan. The ski areas that really have got it together, somebody from the ski area will show up on the site, typically like a mountain manager or assistant mountain manager, and they'll take pictures of the event, the area, the event, and make their own sketch. Uh, but in this particular case, there was no documentation. The ski boarder went off, the guy skied down to the clinic, and the only the only piece of paper that they had for the entire case was this medical intake form at the clinic. So there just wasn't enough. Yeah, it was it was it really came down to he said she said. They wanted to hire me to do accident reconstruction, to go to the site and look at it. There really wasn't any there wasn't any evidence. There were no eyewitness reports, nothing. That was not a good fit.

Noah Bolmer 5:31

Do you do a lot of site visits and reconstructions, things like that, that use demonstratives?

Explaining Complex Accidents To Juries

Speaker 2 5:37

Sometimes. Most of the time what happens is is the event will have occurred a couple of years ago. And by the time the attorneys file the complaint and the case starts going forward, it's two or three years old. Sometimes I do. I have done that in the past. I've looked at the situation, gone out and looked at a ski area, but it's it's a little abstract because of the the the temporal aspect of it, you know, it's just separated by a few years. Right.

Noah Bolmer 6:10

How how do you convey things like that to a judge in a bench trial or a jury? How do you convey things, you know, that are have a lot of complex moving parts, people running into things and you know, the timeline that occurred for an accident? How do you to lay people communicate that in a way that they understand?

Speaker 2 6:32

One skill I honed as an engineer, and this has to do with initial conversations, initial sales conversions, projects like in an engineering venue. Some some projects last for years, you know, three or four years. Is the one skill I honed was to how to take really complex concepts and be able to explain them in simple, easy to understand language. And this is this is really key if I'm on a stand and I'm talking to a jury.

Preparation, Staying In Your Lane, And Reports

Noah Bolmer 7:11

Tell me about uh your your preparation method. So you have a deposition tomorrow, or you have a jury trial, or you know, whatever the case may be, something big's gonna happen. What are the sorts of things that you like to do to get yourself, A, prepared with the material, but B in the right head space? I've had experts tell me they like to meditate or they like to, you know, listen to loud music or fast or eat or drink coffee. Tell me a little bit about your getting ready for the big day routine if you have one.

Speaker 2 7:43

I think some of my colleagues and and my friends think I'm very strange because I am intrigued by uh the challenge of depositions and essentially going toe-to-toe with attorneys. So the number one rule of an expert witness is to stay in your lane. This starts right off the bat with a cli with a case when I write my expert report, because that's my roadmap. That's my lane that I stay in from start to finish. One of the things that really honed my skills as a communicator, as a researcher, as a writer, was I had a technical degree, civil engineering technical degree, which is great, which by the way sets me apart from all the other consultants in my field, which there aren't that many. And then later on in my career at age 51, I went back to school and I got my master's in public administration, which is a social science degree, essentially. Okay. And it was two and a half, two years of graduate level research and writing and communication. What I didn't realize at the time was that master's stacked on top of my engineering degree gave me uh an extraordinary skill set for expert witness work. So my research, my writing all feeds into my expert report. And then at depositions, my lane is my report.

Report Structure, Diagrams, And Visualization

Noah Bolmer 9:19

Absolutely. So tell me a little bit about your report writing strategy. Um, do you like to organize everything with indices or do you use visuals in them? How do you like to go about writing an expert report? Do you ever are you ever given a bare bones or any kind of an outline from uh your engaging attorney?

Speaker 2 9:40

No, I wouldn't even take it because I have a template that I use. All of my reports look exactly the same, and they contain different information based upon the forensic evidence that's available to the case.

Noah Bolmer 9:58

Naturally.

Speaker 2 9:59

So if there's pictures, pictures are great. Uh, I'm pretty good at drawing diagrams. Back in the day, when I was coming up through engineering school, it was pencil on vellum, ink on myler, and it was all handwork. I came up, that's called coming up on the boards. I came up on the boards. So my penmanship is really good, people tell me. I'm very good at communicating through diagrams. A lot of times I'll draw, I'll hand draw diagrams and put them in my report. And I also have another skill that I don't know if this is intrinsic to me. I know a lot of people don't have this skill, but I have extraordinary visualization skills. For example, plans are two to like house plans are two-dimensional, right? Okay, well, I can look at a house plan and I could pull it right up off out of the paper in three dimensions, sprint it around, cut sections through it. And I just thought, hey, can't everybody do that? It's like, no. And it really helps out, especially combined with my hundreds of ski lessons that I've done, thousands of hours I've spent on the ski hills. Um, it that really helps out in regard to the physics, the mechanics, and the visualization of how things happen on the ski hill.

Noah Bolmer 11:22

So those images in the in your expert reports are invaluable and you tend to draw your own. Do you ever have to contract out any demonstratives or do you take care of all of those diagrams and photographs yourself?

High-Tech Reconstructions And Collaborations

Speaker 2 11:37

Actually, there's a colleague of mine here in town uh who is uh a forensics crash reconstruction expert. Wow. And yeah, and there is this amazing software now out on the that they're using now where he can take a he was showing me a picture of this video of this Dodge truck pulling a trailer, like a 25-foot airstream that went off a dam. And he reconstructed he they take all the aerial photographs and they and and they have all the images of the cars, it's all in the software. And he had this movie of this car just going off this bridge, uh, off this dam up in the mountains. Now, so I went to him and I said, Hey, can we can you make me some like crash test dummies with skis on? And can we do this together? Said, yeah. When I want to do accident reconstruction, if there's enough information to do an accident reconstruction of a collision, I can I can do that and put it up on the screen, and it's so impressive.

A Niche Field And Professional Community

Noah Bolmer 12:54

That's amazing. Yeah, and and and I'm sure that that really lands with uh with judges and juries. Um so you you've mentioned a few times at how small your field is in terms of having experts. With that, do you find yourself on the other side of a case against the same experts time after time? Do you develop relationships or at least acquaintanceships with the other experts in your field? What's that dynamic like?

Speaker 2 13:26

Honestly, I dedicated myself to working in the snow sports fields. It it just happened organically. Uh about three years ago, I realized that the combination of my engineering and my ski experience just merged. And it was actually at a um an expert winners conference where I was talking to this guy by the name of um James Magravetti. He's uh he's the education director for Seek, and he really helped me get clear on my direction.

Contracts, Retainers, And Getting Paid

Noah Bolmer 14:03

Yeah, it it definitely can help to have somebody, you know, not just show you the ropes, but kind of guide you a little bit. Um, let's talk a little bit about uh contracts. So when you have a new engagement, do you have any special terms that you like to put into contracts? Some people have um, you know, do project rates, some people do hourly rates, some people take a retainer. Tell me a little bit about how you structure your contracts.

Screening Attorneys And Defining Standards

Speaker 2 14:31

So one of the things that I've done in my career is I am an educator in the engineering industry. Civil engineers like attorneys and doctors, in order to maintain their licenses, they have to do continuing education units. Typically, for an engineer, it's 30 contact hours or what they gave PDH, professional development hours, every two years. But I do that. I think it's important for me to get back to the industry. And one of the things, the reason why I bring this up is because one of the things I teach to engineers is professional services contracts. Years ago, the state where I got my what they call base license was California. Now the base license is the first engineering license I got. And by the way, if there's any engineers out there listening, do not ever let your base license expire. Years ago, when I was practicing in California, California passed a law, and they said that all engineers have to have a written contract for everything they do. And that was fine because I did anyway. From a one-page to a full-on master agreement. Um I wrote all my own contracts, had them vetted by uh attorneys. So when I got into the expert witness business, it turns out that Seek has a time-tested agreement, canned agreement that you can buy, which I did, and I bought it, and then I went through it and I tweaked it and I made it my own, and it's it's 10 pages long, and it covers everything. And so I've heard different schools of thought like, ah, you know, just like have a one-page agreement. It's like, no, I want everything in writing. I do all my work by the hour on retainer because that's my experience based upon results. That's the most surefire way for me to get paid.

Noah Bolmer 16:33

Have you ever had any difficulty with uh either getting paid or with having an attorney agree to sign your contracts? Yes. Tell me a little bit about that. You don't have to get you don't have to you don't have to name any names, but uh tell me a little bit, you know, in general how that went.

Speaker 2 16:50

When I was first starting out an engineering addict, I had a a mentor friend of mine who said, Yeah, he sat me down when he's like, you know, he's like, What let me tell you the three phases of this work of consulting work. I'm like, okay. So first of all, you can't even believe that people are paying you for what you love to do. Greg. Yeah. So second of all, you start to realize that you gotta get that you're gonna have expenses and you need to make money. You need to get the money in the door. And so, okay, what's the third phase? He says, Well, the third phase that you get to is just a heck with it, just give me the money. All right, now that's a little bit unjust, but there's a lot of truth in that. Because right now, every once in a while, a an attorney will get out ahead of me with in regard to you know, some deadline or whatever, and I I know better and that I have to chase them down. It's just I don't, it's just the nature of the beast, I guess. Right. Yeah. And through my engineering career, I got really good at chasing people down for money because I'm really good at what I do and I'm worth it.

Noah Bolmer 17:56

Absolutely. Speaking of, you know, getting a good engagement, how do you how do you get off on the right foot with a new attorney? How do you proceed at the beginning of an engagement to make sure that that momentum carries you throughout the entire engagement? It's a good working relationship between you and the engaging attorney.

Laws, Voluntary Codes, And Duty Of Care

Standard Of Care, Breach, And Causation

Final Advice: Discipline In Depositions

Speaker 2 18:19

Okay, well, there's this word, and the word is hubris. For those listeners who don't know what hubris means, it's having all the answers, but it's more than that. It's more like having all the answers and sucking all the oxygen out of the room at the same time. Those types of attorneys are not a good fit for me. I know how to answer the ask the right questions to figure that out. Now, for example, I had an attorney call me up, so I listened to him, you know, and I was prodding in along the way, asking follow-up questions. I wanted to see where it's come from. So he said, What do you think? And I said, Well, that's not it. And he said, What do you mean that's not it? I said, It's not it. He goes, Okay, tell me what it is. The really intriguing part about working in the snow sports industries, there's very little statute, standing law that regulates snow sports. Very, very little. Some states have what they call ski responsibility laws. Some state like California doesn't the state doesn't have one, but counties within the state that have ski areas in them have them, but they're all kind of squishy in regard to language and they're not consistent. Okay, so you got that. Then you have other organizations. There's two national standards organizations: ASTM, American Standards for Testing and Methods, and then you have ANSI, American National Standards Institute. ASTM has standards for snow and water sports, mostly equipment oriented. ANSI has a code called B-77, which is for toes and rope ways, in other words, chair lifts or rope toes, or all that, right? So that's a different part. By the way, I was on the ANSI B-77 committee, but that's more for mechanical engineers. I am a sitting member on the ASTM F-27 Committee for Snow and Water Sports. But these codes and standards are voluntary. Compliance is voluntary. Then you have National Ski Areas Association, which all the ski areas in America block to there's just over 300 ski areas in the United States that belong to the National Ski Areas Association. And they issue this thing called your responsibility code. And it's 10 guidelines like ski control, don't ski when you're drunk. You know, the obvious stuff, right? Like look uphill before you start. You need to be able to control your speed and avoid objects, don't ski in closed areas, that kind of stuff. That too is voluntary. Then you have the duty of care, which establishes the responsibilities for the parties that are typically involved in a ski case or a snow sports case, such as the ski area, the skier, you know, the skier's the plaintiff, something happens, they see the ski area. Okay. The standard of care establishes the responsibilities of each of the parties, every single situation is extraordinarily unique, both from what applies, what doesn't, you know, did they comply with this? Oh, wait a minute, it's voluntary. There was so much to this. You know, let's bring this back around to that case that I was talking about. Where I told them was as I said, look, fencing, flagging, signage, all that other stuff, that's all applies sometimes. This is about Standard of care, breach, cause, and my favorite, which is proximate cause or foreseeable cause. Because typically, what these things come down to is a is a series of decisions made by either the plaintiff or the defendant that creates a situation that somebody just happens to walk into. It happens over time. That's a fascinating part of this forensic work that I do is to go and unpack that. So that's what I told him. I said, look, we need to establish a standard of care. You know, what was the breach? Who breached it? What was the cause in fact? What was the foreseeable cause, and who was negligent? So you know what he did? What did he do? He hired me. Not only that, but and this is the best attorneys that I work with, he did not tell me anything about how he wanted me to write my report. So those are the best attorneys to work with because they don't have some preconceived conclusion in their head.

Noah Bolmer 23:01

Absolutely. Uh before we wrap up, do you have any last advice for expert witnesses or for attorneys working with experts?

Speaker 2 23:10

So much of this work is for an expert, what we don't know, we don't know. To me, that's right in my sweet spot. But it does take a lot of courage because the lessons to learn are can be tough at times. And just for one example, in a deposition, never ever offer anything outside of just answering the question on the table. I had the opposing attorney, they issued this opinion, a rebuttal to something that I had done, and it completely supported our position. I mean, it was like a gift. Like, oh man, I you know, I got this thing in my pocket. And in the deposition, they they kind of grazed it. I'm like, all right, here's my opportunity. And nope, I brought this up, and the attorney's like, oh, well, tell me more about that, you know? And overall, it bolstered our our the conclusion, but it opened the door for them for a classic deposition tactic, which to just, I mean, they went off on it for like two hours that didn't even need to be there. And, you know, they were just trying to wear me down and get me to make a mistake, which didn't happen. But at the end, the attorney on marketing goes, you know what, you did a really good job, but it says, never ever offer anything that's oh my sage advice.

Closing And Show Notes Link

Noah Bolmer 24:32

Mr. Wall, thank you so much for joining me here today.

Speaker 2 24:36

You're welcome. Thanks for having me.

Noah Bolmer 24:38

And as always, thank you to our listeners for joining us for another edition of Engaging Experts. Cheers.

Speaker 24:45

Thank you for listening to our podcast, Engaging Experts. Our show notes are available on our website, roundtable group.com.