He knows what a safe golf course looks like, because he has built them.
Tom Drauschak provides expert witness services in golf-related injury, premises-liability, and construction-defect litigation. Over forty years he has personally designed, permitted, engineered, built, and operated championship golf courses and their facilities, the cart paths, bridges, tees, greens, ranges, and clubhouses that are so often at the center of these cases.
That hands-on record is difficult for other experts to match. When a matter turns on how a cart path should have been graded, whether an errant-ball hazard was foreseeable, or whether construction met the standard of care, Tom can speak to it not from theory but from having done the work, drawn the plans, moved the earth, and run the operation.
Matters he is retained on
How Tom supports counsel
On-site evaluation of the course, cart path, hazard, or facility at issue, documented against how it should have been designed, built, and maintained.
Clear, defensible reports on causation, foreseeability, and standard of care, grounded in real design, construction, and operating practice.
Prepared, plain-spoken testimony that holds up under cross-examination because it rests on firsthand experience, not secondhand theory.
Credible courtroom testimony that explains golf course design, construction, and operations to a judge and jury in language they understand.
Qualifications
Forty years of hands-on design, construction, and operations stand behind every opinion.
At Stonewall Golf Course, Tom performed all construction of the golf course and its facilities, including the entrance roadway, grew the course in to opening day, and served on its Board of Directors for decades. At Bellewood Golf Club he was architect of record: he designed and built the entire golf course, grew it in, reconstructed the clubhouse facilities from a historic mansion, and handed over the keys on opening day in under twelve months. Across his career he has engineered cart paths, bridges, tees, greens, and driving ranges, repurposed clubhouses and pro shops, and operated golf and hospitality facilities through opening and beyond. He founded Earth Enterprises, a full-service land-planning, engineering, and construction firm, and today advises owners through Bellwether Solutions, Inc. That breadth, construction through operations, is exactly what lets him address the standard of care across the full life of a golf facility.
Tell him the matter and the venue. He will confirm availability, conflicts, and scope, and can begin with a site inspection or a review of the file.