The Subrogation Strategist

In Ghaznavi v. Arby Constr., Inc., No. 14-24-00213-CV, 2025 Tex. App. LEXIS 839, the Court of Appeals of Texas (Court of Appeals) considered whether the trial court properly excluded the plaintiffs’, Kambiz Moavenzadeh Ghaznavi and Anahita Nokkonejad (collectively, the Ghaznavis), liability expert. The case arose from a fire at the Ghaznavis’ residence. The trial court held that because the Ghaznavis’ expert did not physically inspect certain fire damaged areas before they were repaired, the expert’s testimony was unreliable and thus inadmissible. The Court of Appeals reversed the lower court’s ruling, finding that the expert’s review of photographs of the repaired areas and his testimony explaining his opinions were sufficient to survive summary judgment. 

In this case, the Ghaznavis’ hired the defendant, Arby Construction Inc. d/b/a National Residential Services (Arby Constr.), to install new tiling in a corridor inside their home. The corridor was adjacent to the garage. While Arby Constr. was performing the work, the Ghaznavis asked the defendant to fix an outlet inside the garage that was not working. Arby Constr. installed a new wire that connected the outlet to the garage door opener at the ceiling of the garage. Less than 2 months later, a fire occurred in the garage area. The fire marshal placed the origin of the fire in the ceiling of the corridor adjacent to the garage. The fire marshal’s report stated that “faulty wiring in the corridor behind the garage” caused the fire.

The Ghaznavis filed a lawsuit against Arby Constr. in November 2021 for damages related to the fire. In June 2022, over 17 months after the fire, the plaintiffs’ retained an electrical engineer to investigate the origin and cause of the fire. By this time, the corridor had been remediated, but the outlet in the garage was still in its immediate, post-loss condition. The engineer inspected the outlet and garage and reviewed the fire marshal’s photographs of the adjacent corridor. The engineer opined that the fire originated at the connection between an LED lamp and the outlet rewired by the defendant. The engineer further opined that the outlet became overstressed, generating heat over time until it caused the fire.  

After the Ghaznavis’ expert engineer was deposed and produced a written report, Arby Constr. objected to the admissibility of the engineer’s opinion, arguing that it was unreliable because the engineer admitted he did not and could not inspect the location where the fire marshal determined the fire had originated. Arby Constr. also filed a motion for summary judgment on grounds that it did not perform any work in the area in which the fire marshal concluded the fire started. The trial court agreed that the engineer’s opinion was unreliable and granted the defendant’s motion for summary motion.  

The Court of Appeals acknowledged that, regarding expert admissibility, it must consider not only whether the expert’s methods are grounded in science, but also whether the facts to which the expert applied his methods are reliable. If an expert’s opinion is based on certain assumptions about the facts, then the court must consider evidence showing that those assumptions were baseless. The court also recognized that the plaintiff bears the burden to account for plausible alternative causes. An expert’s failure to rule out other causes renders his opinions merely speculative. 

The Court of Appeals found that while the plaintiffs’ expert did not inspect the corridor before it was repaired, his review the fire marshal’s photographs and his deposition testimony explaining why he disagreed with the fire marshal were sufficient to deem his testimony reliable and admissible. The plaintiffs’ expert testified that the fire damages in the area in the garage near the outlet were more severe than the damage in the corridor, indicating that the garage was the origin point. The engineer explained that the fire marshal’s photographs established that the fire patterns on the wood in the corridor ceiling showed that the fire was not burning as long in that area as the damage found in the garage and thus could not have started there. The Court of Appeals found that the engineer provided a sufficient basis for his conclusions and the process by which he adequately excluded the fire marshal’s original location of the fire. Thus, it reversed the lower court’s rulings.

The Ghaznavi case establishes that, in Texas, an expert may form opinions on the origin of a casualty without a physical inspection if the expert adequately relies on other evidence, such as photographs, to support the expert’s opinion and process. This case is helpful to subrogation professionals handling matters where the scene was modified prior to the completion of the origin and cause investigation. If the scene is properly documented and/or there is other data that an expert can rely on to support opinions regarding origin and cause, then it may be worth proceeding with recovery efforts.