By Jay Prigmore II, Ph.D., P.E. Last reviewed · Prepared and reviewed by a licensed Professional Engineer
Testifying and consulting expert services in electrical engineering disputes, retained by plaintiff and defense counsel, insurers, owners, and manufacturers, including matters with over $1 billion in potential dispute value.
By Jay Prigmore II, Ph.D., P.E. Last reviewed · Prepared and reviewed by a licensed Professional Engineer
Electrical failures produce disputes that turn on technical questions a jury cannot evaluate unaided: why a transformer failed, whether a protective device should have cleared a fault, whether an arc flash study was performed to the governing standard, or whether a maintenance program met the standard of care. PEFG is retained to answer those questions, state the basis for each answer, and testify to it when required.
Engagements are handled personally by Jay Prigmore, Ph.D., P.E. There is no junior staff performing the analysis and no principal signing work they did not do. The same person who inspects the evidence writes the report and gives the testimony.
Opposing experts often disagree about how a standard should be applied. PEFG's principal is a voting member of the IEEE 1584 working group (which develops the IEEE guide for arc flash hazard calculations) and a founding member of the NFPA Technical Committee on Electrical Inspection Practices.
That work gives a working knowledge of how the guide’s equations were developed and where the model’s limits are. It does not replace the analysis. An opinion on how a standard applies still has to rest on the text of the edition in force and the evidence in the matter.
Over his career, Jay has led or directed more than 400 forensic investigations and has testified at deposition, trial, or arbitration in over 15 matters. From 2020 to 2025 he led electrical quality and field reliability engineering for a global hyperscale data center fleet, building the incident-response and forensic-analysis functions that investigate failures across live, mission-critical infrastructure.
The opinions therefore draw on both investigation methodology and operating experience with the same classes of equipment.
PEFG accepts retention nationwide and works for either side of a dispute. Because engagements are not routed through a staffing process, a conflict check and retention letter can typically be turned around in one to two business days. That matters when evidence is at risk of being disturbed.
A 4,160 V motor feeder faults; the plant loses production for eleven days; the owner sues the maintenance contractor. Everyone agrees the cable failed. The dispute is whether the upstream relay should have cleared it before the cable burned back into the switchgear.
The opinion is built from the relay’s own record: the event file gives fault current magnitude and the actual clearing time in cycles. Those two numbers get compared against the relay’s as-found setting file, and the setting file against the coordination study of record. If the study called for an instantaneous element that the setting file does not contain, the question stops being metallurgical and becomes documentary: who changed the setting, when, and under whose authority.
If the settings match the study, the analysis moves upstream: was the study itself correct? A short-circuit model reconstructed from the as-built one-line will show whether the fault current at that location was inside the range the study assumed. Each step narrows the disputed issue, and each step is independently checkable by the other side’s expert, which is the point.
Download the printable checklist and evidence log (PDF, 2 pages) →
Where the arithmetic behind an opinion is publishable, it is published. The derivations and calculators at PowerEngCalc, including the IEEE 1584 incident energy calculator and the 2018-versus-2002 edition comparison, are public, so the method can be checked independently of any one matter.
Questions that come up before a retention decision, answered by the engineer who would do the work.
Two distinct jobs, and they are usually phased. As a consulting expert, the work is to tell retaining counsel what the evidence shows, including when it does not support the theory of the case. As a testifying expert, the work is to form an opinion to a reasonable degree of engineering certainty, disclose it in a Rule 26 report, and testify to it in deposition and at trial. The technical analysis is the same; the disclosure obligations are not. PEFG will say early and plainly when the engineering does not support the position being advanced, which is more useful before an expert designation than after it.
Before the evidence moves. Electrical evidence is unusually perishable: relay and meter event records overwrite on a rolling buffer measured in days or weeks, SCADA historians age out on a retention schedule, and failed switchgear gets cleaned, repaired, or scrapped as part of getting a facility back into production. An engineer involved before the equipment is disturbed can establish origin and cause far more defensibly than one working from photographs taken by someone who was not looking for the same things. Retention can happen before liability theories are settled. A preservation protocol costs very little and cannot be re-created later.
Scope drives cost more than the hourly rate does. The largest drivers are the number of site inspections, whether laboratory examination or destructive testing is required, the volume of documents to be reviewed, and the number of depositions. PEFG bills hourly on a time-and-expense basis, with deposition and trial testimony billed at a higher rate than analysis and report work, which is standard practice. Scope is phased and separately authorized: document review, site inspection, laboratory work, and report are each budgeted before they start, so the expected cost of each phase is documented before it starts.
Both. Retention is accepted from plaintiff and defense counsel, insurers, owners, and manufacturers, and the engineering analysis is the same regardless of who retains PEFG. Every engagement begins with a conflict-of-interest check against the full party list before any substantive discussion of the matter.
The same things that make it correct: a method published by a recognized body rather than invented for the case, inputs traceable to primary evidence rather than to counsel's summary, calculations that can be reproduced by the other side from the report alone, and explicitly stated assumptions with a sensitivity analysis where an assumption is doing real work.
Typically one to two business days. Engagements are not routed through an intake coordinator or a staffing process; the party list is checked and the retention letter is issued by the same engineer who will do the work. If physical evidence is at immediate risk, a written preservation protocol is issued in parallel with the paperwork rather than after it.
Direct principal access. Conflict check within one to two business days.