Week 11 Session: Estimate Court

The written estimate and its disclosure are already submitted. Today a panel reads them, asks one shared question, and follows up on whatever it likes

17 May 2027

Your written estimate and your pre-hearing disclosure are already in. Nothing about either is rewritten today. What happens today is that both get read out loud, in front of people who did not write them, who are allowed to ask anything they like about what is in them.

A duty that is not owed to whoever is paying#

The Federal Court requires anyone giving expert opinion evidence to read and be bound by a code with this clause at its centre:

“An expert witness is not an advocate for a party and has a paramount duty, overriding any duty to the party to the proceedings or other person retaining the expert witness, to assist the Court impartially on matters relevant to the area of expertise of the witness.”

You are not an expert witness and this is not a trial. But the panel you sit in today borrows that duty’s shape: your job is not to defend a number because it is yours, and it is not to win. It is to show the room, honestly, what your estimate can and cannot support.

Why the disclosure had to come first#

A panellist can only challenge an assumption they can see. That is the entire reason your written disclosure was due before today rather than produced on demand in the room — a challenge aimed at something you never stated is not a challenge, it is a guess about what you might have assumed. Because the material facts and assumptions behind your estimate are already on the record, every question asked of you today can be pointed at something specific you actually wrote, not at what a questioner imagines you might have meant.

The panel, not the witness stand#

You sit with everyone who took the same brief — the same target, the same published figures, different chains. Your written estimate and disclosure sit in front of you; nothing here is done from memory. Every panel is asked at least one question drawn from a pool shared across the room, so every hearing answers something comparable before it answers anything unique to your chain. After that, the panel chair and your fellow panellists follow up on whatever in your disclosure they actually want to press.

To each challenge you have exactly three moves, and you already own all three from week 7: accept it, naming the new evidence or the flaw in your own reasoning that materially changes the assumption; reject it, saying what the challenge failed to supply — no evidence, and no reasoning that changes anything; or widen your stated range without moving its centre, because the challenge revealed more uncertainty than your number implied without justifying a move in either direction. What is new today is not the vocabulary. It is that the challenge is live, aimed at an assumption someone else chose, and you cannot revise your paper before answering it.

What a challenge that lands actually shows#

An assumption that does not survive being questioned is not, on its own, evidence you did something wrong at the writing stage. Plenty of reasonable assumptions fail to survive contact with a question nobody thought to ask until the room asked it. What is being watched is what you do in the next ten seconds: whether you can say precisely what changed your confidence, or whether you simply fold because someone with a panel badge pushed.

Conceding cleanly, with a stated reason, is not a smaller achievement than holding your ground. Neither is a free pass on its own — “I changed it because they pushed” is not an answer, on the accept side any more than the committed-anyway version was on Week 7’s negotiation floor. Whichever move you make, name what made it the right one.

What the room leaves you with#

Nobody is scored as a panel. Whatever happens to the person next to you, your own answers are what get marked, and your own answers are what you carry out of the room — a specific list of which of your assumptions held, which gave way, and what exactly moved you on the ones that did. That list is the raw material for the revision note due after the Court closes. Nothing here goes into the Calibration Diary; there is no range committed today, only a written one being tested.