Legal and insurance professionals come to process safety from a different angle than the facilities themselves: the question usually isn’t how to design a safeguard, it’s what happened, what should have happened, and whether the gap between the two is defensible. Insurers need technical risk evaluations that actually reflect a facility’s real hazard profile before writing or renewing a policy, not a generic industry classification that either overstates or understates the exposure. Attorneys handling litigation, subrogation, or regulatory matters need an independent technical analysis that can withstand scrutiny in a deposition or on the stand, not just a summary that sounds reasonable in a report.
That need for defensibility shapes how this work has to be done differently than a typical consulting engagement. Every finding needs a documented technical basis, every assumption needs to be stated rather than implied, and every conclusion needs to be something an expert can stand behind under cross-examination. Incident investigations in particular carry this weight, since the same report that identifies root cause and corrective actions for the facility may also become the technical foundation for a claim, a lawsuit, or a regulatory finding.
HazBasis supports legal and insurance clients with incident investigation, facility risk evaluation and Dust Hazard Analysis for underwriting and loss prevention, and expert technical review of process safety documentation, hazardous area classification, PHA and DHA records, and prior engineering work. We approach this work the same way regardless of which side of a claim we’re supporting: the technical conclusions follow the evidence, not the outcome either party would prefer.