Case Comment on the Judgment of the Chamber for Economic Disputes of the RF SC No. 305-ЭС19-21740, 28 February 2020In a dispute concerning cadastral value, the market value established by an appraiser was found by the court to be unreliable. In the opinion of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, this decision has an absolute legal effect based on the absolute legal meaning of the market value’s credibility itself. Therefore, it is sufficient for declaring the appraisal services provided to be of poor quality and for the recovery of damages from the appraiser even though the appraiser was not involved in the first dispute. However, this approach binds the appraiser to the results of a process to which he was not a part and does not take into account uncertainty that is inherent in most market value assessment results and therefore the appraiser must be involved as a third party in court cases where the correctness of the report he has produced is being assessed. Otherwise, the judgment that find his report unreliable can only be partially binding in a new dispute, leading to the redistribution of the burden of proof.