Representative Matters

More than 400 forensic investigations and 15+ testifying engagements across matters exceeding $10 billion in aggregate dispute value. Organized here by the technical question that actually decides each type of case.

Ask About a Fact Pattern Full Curriculum Vitae

By Jay Prigmore II, Ph.D., P.E. Last reviewed 28 August 2026 · Prepared and reviewed by a licensed Professional Engineer

Engagement details are confidential, and most matters are covered by protective orders or non-disclosure terms that survive the case. What follows is therefore organized by matter type rather than by client: the equipment, the technical question that actually decides the dispute, the analysis that answers it, and the standards it is anchored to.

Specific anonymized matter summaries — venue type, equipment, issue, role, and outcome — are provided to retaining counsel on request, together with the full curriculum vitae and the four-year testimony list contemplated by Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(a)(2)(B). If you need to know whether a particular fact pattern has come up before, ask directly; the answer is faster and more useful than anything that can responsibly be published.

Matter Types

Practice

Six categories account for most of the work. In each, one technical question usually decides the outcome.

Electrical fire — origin and cause

Equipment: Switchgear, motor control centers, panelboards, busway, conductors and terminations, transformers, luminaires and appliances.
Question in dispute: Did the fire originate in the electrical equipment, or did the fire damage the equipment? Where in the equipment, and what defect, installation error, or maintenance failure explains it?
Analysis: Scene and artifact examination, arc mapping and arc surveys, conductor and connection metallurgy, protective-device interrogation, load and fault-current reconstruction, and elimination of non-electrical hypotheses.
Standards applied: NFPA 921 methodology; NFPA 70 (NEC) for installation compliance; IEEE C37 and C57 apparatus standards for the equipment involved.
Typical role: Retained by defense counsel, plaintiff counsel, subrogating insurers, and manufacturers. Frequently the first expert on site.

Arc flash injury

Equipment: Low- and medium-voltage switchgear, switchboards, MCCs, disconnects, metering compartments, and cable terminations.
Question in dispute: What incident energy did the worker actually receive, was the PPE adequate for it, was a study performed and labeled correctly, and did the employer’s program meet the electrical safety standard?
Analysis: Incident-energy reconstruction against the as-found system configuration, protective-device clearing-time verification from actual settings and time-current curves, arcing-current sensitivity, working-distance and enclosure-geometry review, and PPE burn-injury correlation.
Standards applied: IEEE 1584 (2002 and 2018 editions — the edition in force at the time of the study controls); NFPA 70E; ASTM F1506 and F1959 for protective clothing.
Typical role: Both sides. Opinions frequently turn on whether the study in evidence was performed to the edition of IEEE 1584 that governed when it was issued.

Equipment failure and product defect

Equipment: Circuit breakers, protective relays, generators and rotating machinery, transformers, UPS and DC systems, wind turbine electrical systems, solid-state and switching apparatus.
Question in dispute: Was the failure a manufacturing defect, a design defect, a misapplication, an installation error, or the predictable end of service life under the duty actually imposed?
Analysis: Teardown and failure-mode analysis, design-margin and duty-cycle review against nameplate and type test, review of the manufacturer’s qualification testing, comparison against fleet failure history where available.
Standards applied: IEEE C37 series (switching apparatus), IEEE C57 series (transformers), IEC type-test equivalents, and the manufacturer’s own application and instruction literature.
Typical role: Retained by manufacturers defending a product and by owners and insurers asserting one failed.

Protection and coordination misoperation

Equipment: Protective relays, fuses, low-voltage trip units, reclosers, and the coordination study that set them.
Question in dispute: Should the protective device have cleared this fault? Was it correctly specified, correctly set, correctly maintained, and correctly coordinated with the devices upstream and downstream?
Analysis: Relay event-file and oscillography analysis, setting-file review against the coordination study of record, time-current curve reconstruction, short-circuit modeling, and CT and instrument-transformer performance under fault conditions.
Standards applied: IEEE 242 (Buff Book), IEEE 399 (Brown Book), IEEE C37.112 and the C37 relay series, NEC Article 240.
Typical role: Consulting and testifying expert; often the single technical issue that decides liability between an owner, a contractor, and an engineer of record.

Business interruption and subrogation

Equipment: Utility service equipment, substations, GSU and unit transformers, standby generation, automatic transfer schemes, and critical-facility distribution.
Question in dispute: What was the electrical cause of the outage or the damage, who controlled the equipment or condition that caused it, and is the claimed damage physically consistent with that cause?
Analysis: Sequence-of-events reconstruction from relay, meter, SCADA, and BMS records; damage-to-cause correlation; alternative-cause elimination; and independent assessment of the repair or replacement scope actually attributable to the event.
Standards applied: IEEE 493 (Gold Book) reliability practice, IEEE 1159 for power quality event characterization, and the applicable apparatus standards.
Typical role: Retained by subrogating carriers, by insureds, and by defendants challenging causation or the quantum of electrically-attributable damage.

Standard of care — engineering, installation, inspection, maintenance

Equipment: Any electrical installation where a design, construction, inspection, or maintenance decision is alleged to have fallen short.
Question in dispute: What did the governing code, standard, or accepted practice actually require at the time of the work, and did the engineer, contractor, inspector, or owner meet it?
Analysis: Reconstruction of the code and standard editions in force on the relevant date, review of the design and submittal record, inspection and test documentation, and the owner’s electrical maintenance program against the recognized practice.
Standards applied: NFPA 70 (NEC), NFPA 70B, NFPA 70E, the National Electrical Safety Code (IEEE C2), NFPA 78 and 1078 for inspection practice, and the state licensing act where design liability is in issue.
Typical role: Frequently the framing opinion in a multi-party construction or professional liability matter.

Scale of the Record

Experience

Forensic investigations completed	400+
Testifying engagements	15+
Aggregate dispute value across matters	$10B+
Retained by	Plaintiff & defense, insurers, owners, manufacturers
Availability	Nationwide

Those investigations were led at Exponent between 2016 and 2020. The five years that followed — running electrical quality and field reliability for a global hyperscale data center fleet — added something a consulting-only record does not contain: failure data across a live equipment population large enough that failure modes are statistically visible rather than anecdotal. Both halves matter under cross-examination, and for different reasons.

Has this fact pattern come up before?

Ask directly. Anonymized matter summaries and the four-year testimony list are furnished to retaining counsel on request.

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