The Court held that expert opinion evidence could be admitted despite significant non-compliance with the Practice Note, case management orders, and UCPR requirements for expert reports, where the defendant had long been in possession of the relevant material and was not unfairly prejudiced. The Court confirmed, following Dasreef and subsequent intermediate appellate authority (Taub, Fuller, Kyluk), that the truth of factual assumptions underlying expert opinions need not be proved as a precondition to admissibility under s 79(1) of the Evidence Act, and that a structural engineer need not hold specialised heritage engineering qualifications to opine on matters of structural stability of heritage stonework. The Court also ruled that expert opinion evidence must not be led to establish a particular cause of an incident where the parties have agreed that the cause is unknown, but may be led on the more limited basis of establishing that a foreseeable risk existed at the relevant time.
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