ALARP is one of the fundamental principles of risk management. It is often also referred to as SFARP or SFAIRP (so far as is reasonably practicable). What the terms mean ALARP: “As Low As Reasonably Practicable”. Focuses on reducing risk to the lowest level that is reasonably achievable, typically by comparing risk levels against target or tolerable criteria, in the context of available resources.…
Turning analysis into court-ready material — Part 3 of 3 If you haven’t read the previous articles, please start with the first in the series or go to the second article if you have read the first. They explain how the Structured Evidence Analysis Matrix (SEAM) works — the analytical engine borrowed from intelligence tradecraft, and the adaptations that make it fit for legal use. This final…
How the Structured Evidence Analysis Matrix works — Part 2 of 3 If you haven’t read the previous article, please read this one first. It introduces the case study this series is built around: a contested court matter with cross-allegations, a documentary record running to thousands of pages, and a client who needed the court to see the wood for the trees. In Part 1, I described the outcome:…
A case study in structured evidence analysis — Part 1 of 3 This is the first article in a three-part series introducing the Structured Evidence Analysis Matrix (SEAM), a method I developed for testing competing accounts against the documentary record in contested legal matters. Consider a person accused of stealing a car. They hold a driver’s licence. They knew where the car was kept. They had…
When an accident is serious, tragic, and technically complex, the hardest task is often not collecting information, but making sense of competing explanations. Different witnesses see different things. Technical systems interact in ways that are not obvious. Early narratives can harden before the evidence is fully examined. NOTE: The MRH-90 incident is a real-world example of a tragic event. This…
For more insights into ACH related topics, click here. In litigation, coronial inquiries, and high-stakes policy disputes, the hardest problem is rarely a lack of information. It is the opposite: too many facts, too many narratives, and too many incentives pushing decision-makers toward a preferred explanation long before the evidence has been properly weighed. Once a narrative takes hold,…
When people hear the phrase risk assessment, they often imagine a spreadsheet, a heat map, or a list of obvious hazards ranked from red to green. In routine operational settings, that may be sufficient. In the context of a lobby effort, a coronial inquiry, or litigation, it is not even close. In these environments, risk assessment is not an administrative task. It is a discipline of structured…