joe ferry

Arbitrators Don’t Need to Know the Home Inspection Business

A question that comes up fairly frequently at my home inspector training with the Law and Disorder Seminars when I am extolling the virtues of requiring disputes to be settled in Arbitration is whether or not there should be a requirement that the arbitrator be “familiar with the home inspection business.” And many home inspectors have such requirements in the Arbitration Clauses of their Agreements.

As I have written elsewhere on this site, home inspectors have a very dim view of the American legal system and do not expect to get a fair shake. So some of them, in an effort to level the pitch or stack the deck – choose your own metaphor – have inserted this additional requirement into their Agreements.

What I tell them is this: when I was in the Army, forty-some years ago – yeah, I know, I don’t look that old – the Uniform Code of Military Justice had recently been revised to give Enlisted Men who were facing Courts-Martial the right to have one Enlisted Man on the Court-Martial panel. The change was widely hailed as a victory for Enlisted Men [and Women]. The reality for those exercising this “right” was that the Enlisted Man selected to fulfill it was always some cranky senior NCO with a chest festooned with decorations and a lengthy series of service stripes on his sleeve.

It didn’t take long for Enlisted Men to realize that they were much better off with a baby-faced Lieutenant who would actually listen to the evidence before making up his mind.
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Home Inspectors: Use CAUTION When Combining Contract Clauses

Contract clauses pre-inspection agreements Contract clauses sometimes do not mix well. There is at least one state that will nullify contractual limitation of liability clauses when paired with arbitration clauses. (Do you know which state that is? Let us know on Facebook, Twitter and/or LinkedIn.) And we all know – or should know – that arbitration clauses in pre-inspection agreements are valuable.

Find out more about what contract clauses don’t mix and how to handle this situation in this week’s home inspector training video.
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5 Stages of Home Inspection Claim Grief

A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with a home inspector in Connecticut. The inspector was trying to neutralize a claim by a former client over asbestos contamination issues with a property that he had inspected some months previous.

Now, as a general matter, the determination of environmental hazards and toxins is some distance outside of extant home inspection standards of practice (“SOP”) and Connecticut, which has its own state home inspection SOP, is no exception. Unfortunately, Connecticut is no exception only because the Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection issued a letter clarifying the fact that notwithstanding the fact that the law, itself, states that inspectors are required to inspect for and report asbestos, in reality they do not have to. Thus, as elsewhere, Nutmeggers are in the very best of hands.
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All About Arbitration – Who Should Pay?

Tip 44 - All About ArbitrationA Connecticut home inspector recently wrote to me about a “finding” he heard at a local law course, in which he has told that the American Arbitration Association (AAA) is now looking at DEFENDANTS for a substantial sum of money when a claim initiates.

This law course “professor” instructed the students to specify arbitration using an attorney qualified to arbitrate and with related experience.

He asked for my opinion – henceforth this week’s video tip!

I believe the AAA is feeling the financial pinch just like the rest of us and believes pushing the financial burden to the defendant is just what the doctor ordered to gin up a slew of new arbitration matters by removing the financial disincentive to the filing of ludicrous claims.

Home inspectors can head off this change by inserting key phrasing in their pre-inspection agreement. Watch the video tip below to find out the exact verbiage plus listen to why I believe the “professor” was wrong in saying that inspectors should demand an arbitrator have home inspection-related experience.
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The Expense of Home Inspector Meritless Claim Defense

If you ever find yourself being named as a defendant in a lawsuit alleging that you were professionally negligent in conducting your inspection of the plaintiff’s prospective home, I have really good news for you. You are going to win. The overwhelming majority of lawsuits alleging professional negligence that are actually tried to verdict result in the exoneration of the professional defendant.

Why do you suppose that is? It is because professionals are, by and large, pretty competent at what they do. They know what they are doing, how to do it, follow an established protocol and do it every day.

Well, if that’s the case – and it is – you have to ask yourself this question: Why are there so many unfruitful professional negligence lawsuits and what can be done to stop them?

Most lawsuits alleging professional negligence stem from what attorneys term a “bad result” or a “bad outcome.” A patient acquires an infection during surgery. Never mind that the surgeon took every conceivable precaution to prevent that from happening, In the patient’s mind, he is responsible.
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The Six Home Inspection Claim Categories Are All Defensible

Rare is a home inspector training Law and Disorder Seminar that does not have a few – and often several – casualties of war among the attending home inspectors – the multi-front war between them, their unreasonable and unrealistic clients, their referring real estate agents and, all too frequently, their insurance companies. They all seem to think that it is the inspector’s responsibility to “make things right”, even if he has no culpability whatsoever, which, in my experience, he almost never does. Here’s why.

Almost every home inspection claim will fall into one of the following six categories.
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Reputation Management: There’s an app for that!

One thing that I have decided after five years of total immersion in the trials and tribulations of home inspectors is that I could never be one.

Now, my father was a union carpenter and worked for decades as such on literally thousands of houses constructed in Philadelphia, once known as the City of Homes, and its suburbs. On weekends, he would take a busman’s holiday and work on our house, conscripting his home-grown workforce as gofers. No tradesman ever came into our house to do anything. My dad did it all: painting, wall-papering, plastering, masonry, electrical, plumbing, roofing, tile work.

One day he decided that we needed to convert to gas heat. And took a sledge hammer to our ancient and massive coal furnace. Now that furnace could take a punch but, by and by, it yielded to my dad’s John Henry-like determination. Then he installed and plumbed the gas boiler.
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Dirty Harry and Home Inspection: You Don’t Need to Pay

There’s a scene in the original Dirty Harry movie that resonated with me when I first saw it and that I am frequently reminded of in my practice of advising home inspectors. Clint Eastwood, as Inspector Harry Callaghan, is hustling against a deadline set by a lunatic serial killer, based on the Zodiac killer that plagued San Francisco in the early ‘70s. Along the way to his rendez-vous with the killer, Harry is accosted by some street toughs whom he handles methodically despite being outnumbered. They keep coming back for more, however. Finally, exasperated by their perseverance, he whips out the huge .44 Magnum, sticks it in the face of one relentless punk and says “You don’t listen, do you, Asshole?”

Recently, one of the home inspectors who participates in my ClaimIntercept had this unhappy experience. The inspector conducted the inspection in August and was accompanied by the client’s agent on his rounds. He reported his findings in the normal fashion and everyone seemed to be happy with the results.
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Look at Me Now: Defendants Aren’t Always Guilty

A week or so ago, I received an email invitation to attend Alumni Weekend at my law school alma mater, the Temple University Beasley School of Law. And because this is my class’ Silver Anniversary year, there is additional hoopla planned for us. Attached to the email was a list of all of the members of the class and their current contact information.

Glancing at the list, I was surprised at how large the class actually was on the one hand and how few of the names I actually recognized on the other. Our class includes a former US Congressman and a current one, senior partners at large Philadelphia law firms, Federal and State Court judges, top homicide prosecutors and criminal defense attorneys, and a surprising number of married couples. Who knew law school was such a “meet” market?

Law school, of course, is a much different experience than a resident college where you’re interacting with classmates continually: in class, in the dorms, in the dining hall, in the gym, on the quad and at off-campus student hangouts.
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Risk, Its Place in the Home Inspection Industry and How to Combat It

The recent earthquake that hit near Japan set me to thinking about emergency preparedness in general and disaster-preparedness, in particular. The earthquake-prone nation is being widely praised for the strength of its building codes which contemplate the need for buildings to be able to withstand these inevitable periodic massive shocks to their structural integrity. And by all accounts, all things considered, the minimal damage that was sustained by buildings in cities closest to the epicenter of the huge quake has vindicated the decision to implement those precautions.

Where I live, we seldom experience earthquakes, a fact that prompted the actor David Morse [St. Elsewhere] to move here with his Philly-born wife, after an earthquake destroyed their family home in California in 1994. And the ones we do experience tend to be at the lower end of the Richter Scale. I personally have never experienced one and apparently slept through one that took place here in the early ‘70s.

We do get our share of capricious weather, however – Nor’easters, blizzards, hurricanes and the occasional tornado – for which you do have to be prepared. As President Kennedy sagely observed, “The time to fix the roof is when the sun is shining.” The time to plan for disaster is before disaster strikes.
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