A case is not decided by what happened. It is decided by what can be proven to have happened.

What decides is the record: the sampling data and the calibration logs beneath it, the energy-control procedure that was or was not written for that machine, the soil that was or was not classified, the training file, the audit finding that was or was not closed out, the 300 entry that was made — or conspicuously not made. It was created long before anyone chose sides, and it says what it says for whichever party reads it with discipline.

The Record Decides is about reading it with discipline.

Drawing on almost forty years of practice in safety and industrial hygiene, and on his own work as an expert witness, Logan F. Martin, PhD, CIH, CSP, CHMM, delivers the field guide neither law school nor a safety certification provides: how an air sample becomes a number and where it breaks; how an eight-hour time-weighted average is built and how it is taken apart; what the Field Operations Manual requires of a compliance officer, and what happens when the case file shows he did not; how an exposure is reconstructed decades after the fact so it survives Rule 702; and why the "competent person" on the org chart may not have been one.

Written for both sides of the "v." For the attorney who needs the discovery targets, the governing standards, and the cases. And for the industrial hygienists, safety professionals, and EHS managers whose ordinary work product becomes the evidence binder — because the exposure assessment you write this year may be read aloud as Exhibit 14.

The hierarchy of controls does not rearrange itself for the defense. The calibration record is missing or it is not.

The record doesn't pick a side. An expert worth retaining doesn't either.