Draft version 1.7 beta — Revised October 84, 2026

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Inappropriate advocacy for client

A topic page linked from Chapter 4 § 5, Examples of Reported Violations of Enforceable Ethics Codes.

Definition

The role of a geoscientist is easy to understand if that role is confined to geoscience. In addition to their geoscience work, they can play a role in public education about geoscience, particularly with respect to the Earth environment, energy, minerals, natural hazards, and the geological aspects of certain infrastructure or development projects. They also have a role in forensic geological investigations of natural or human-caused disasters involving the geological environment — landslides, debris flows, foundation damage caused by expansive soils, flooding, earthquakes, coastal erosion, and so on.¹

Credentialed geoscientists with relevant knowledge and skills are often employed by lawyers on either side of a legal dispute or directly by the court as subject-matter experts. The lawyers' role is to advocate for their clients. Ideally, the geoscientist's role is to serve as a subject-matter (geoscience) expert who can inform the lawyers about the geoscientific aspects of the case (facts, interpretations, background on relevant geologic processes, etc.) and may be called to testify as an expert witness. Problems sometimes arise when a geoscientist steps out of their expert role to become an advocate, which typically diminishes or eliminates their effectiveness as a disinterested or impartial subject expert.

Three entries in Black's Law Dictionary that relate to advocacy are instructive.²

advocacy. (15c) 1. The work or profession of an advocate. 2. The art of pleading for or actively supporting a cause or proposal, especially in lawsuits.

advocate. n. (14c) 1. Someone who assists, defends, pleads, or prosecutes for another.

advocate's bias (1971) The bias that attorneys often develop in favor of a client involved in a dispute and that may potentially cause such missteps as overlooking certain arguments or misjudging the way facts or legal precedents may appear to a dispassionate observer.

A geoscientist's proper work involves reproducible observations, testable explanations, the application of scientific principles, and the use of their knowledge and skill to develop reliable information about geologic processes, history, resources, hazards, and physical properties in support of engineering work. Their work does not involve advocacy, marketing, or public relations unless it is made clear to everyone that, in taking on one of these other roles, they are no longer acting as a geoscientist.

ASBOG included inappropriate advocate for client as one of the 13 ethical issues in its Task Analysis surveys in 2010 and 2015, each of which was completed by a few thousand respondents—professional geoscientists and academics in the United States and Canada.^5-7 The results of those surveys indicated that inappropriate advocate for client was considered a serious problem.

A case recollection. The slope above Las Flores Canyon in Malibu had been mapped by the U.S. Geological Survey as a landslide. A developer acquired land on that slope, just below Rambla Pacifica Drive. A licensed geologist was hired, and wrote a report indicating that he had found a continuous sandstone bed across what had been mapped as a landslide, which he interpreted as evidence that the USGS geologists had been mistaken. Permits were granted for a house with a septic tank on the downslope side of Rambla Pacifico, and the house was built. Just as the moving vans were unloading the new owner's belongings, the landslide reactivated, nearly stranding the moving van and destroying the new house, the roadway, a house on the slope above, and houses along Las Flores Creek below. That landslide has now resulted in property and infrastructure loss totaling many tens of millions of dollars.

The preferred explanation is that the new house was indeed built on a pre-existing landslide that was reactivated as it filled with septic waste water. The geologist seems to have been influenced by the developer to the extent that his work focused on disproving existing landslide mapping, which was abundantly verified by subsequent events. His report advocated for development of a manifestly unsafe slope.

Another case recollection. As a young engineering geology professor in the upper Midwest, I received a phone call asking for help from an older couple in a small rural town whose 1925-era house was being broken apart by vibrations. They had lived there for years, never having experienced these vibrations in the past. Other neighbors also experienced the vibrations, including a local preacher and the village president.

Teamed with a geophysicist with expertise in engineering seismology, we visited the site and verified fresh cracks in their house exterior and basement walls. We installed a small portable seismometer and collected records of the vibrations, which had a consistent frequency around 20 Hz. We later discovered a metal building in an industrial area about 200 meters away in which a mining-equipment company was engaged in unpermitted testing of large rock crushers mounted on a thick concrete slab. The vibrations seemed to occur when a rock crusher was turned on, and they ended when the crusher was turned off. We reported our findings to the homeowners, who hired a lawyer.

The corporation responsible for the rock crusher hired a company of consulting engineers and geologists in an attempt to invalidate our initial findings. For a day or two, they positioned an employee in the homeowners' front yard where he documented every possible source of vibration in the vicinity of the house.  Lawyers and the consultants' report sought to attribute the vibrations to a variety of sources (e.g., passing cars and trucks, the washing machine, banging of metal trash can lids, etc.) without considering the rock crushers. The resulting report seemed to indicate that truck traffic in front of the house was very likely the source, while it openly disparaged our instrument, data, and qualifications. Their report included the following sentence:

The conclusions presented in this report have been promulgated in accordance with generally accepted professional engineering practice in the field of geotechnical engineering.

The homeowners' lawyer arranged for a test of our source hypothesis. The rock crusher would be turned on at noon and operated under the typical test conditions for just over two minutes while we collected seismic data at the house. Although we could not hear any sound from the crusher, at noon the amplitude of the seismic record increased almost instantaneously, far above background noise, and quickly dropped to background level at the end of the test.

We had previously used the same seismic sensor to record the vibrations caused by a large fully-loaded truck as it passed along the street in front of the damaged house, so we were able to compare the truck's transient signal with the sustained signal from the rock crusher test. The amplitude of the measured vibrations from the rock crusher were ~3x the peak amplitude of the vibrations from the passing truck. Fourier analysis of the waveforms from the two different sources showed them to be distinct from one another. Dinner plates on shelves in the kitchen of the damaged house audibly rattled and moved laterally during the rock crusher test.

Soon after the staged test that we had observed with the seismometer, the corporation removed the rock crushers and settled the damage claim out-of-court. The house was spared further damage, has been repaired, and is still a functioning residence.

The corporate clients seemed to have dictated the results they would like reported by the consultants, and the consultants obliged. The consultants had become client advocates, creating a biased report filled with irrelevant observations while avoiding any consideration of the rock crusher's possible role. A true test of our hypothesis conclusively revealed the source of the damaging vibrations: the rock crusher.

Notes and References

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