Your Trusted Winter Sports
Safety Engineer

Services

Complementary Consultation & Review

We provide a complementary consultation to discuss your case and whether Impact Technical Consulting is the right fit for an extensive expert review.

Accident & Collision Reconstruction

ITC reconstructs ski and snowboard accidents using engineering principles, biomechanics, and objective evidence to determine how and why an accident occurred.

Equipment Performance, Testing & Analysis

Leveraging expertise in materials science and testing, ITC evaluates the integrity, design, and condition of winter sports equipment to assess if and how it contributed to an injury.

Liability Determination

Our analysis will determine if another party should be held accountable in a personal injury case. This might be a resort, equipment manufacturer or individual.

Expert Witness Reporting

We compile concise and professional expert reporting that presents our findings and conclusions. These reports are designed to be understood by technical and non-technical audiences during discovery.

Deposition & Testimony Support

ITC is available to provide extensively prepared deposition and testimony support at the pretrial and trial stages of your case.


About Us

Expertise

Our expertise draws from in-depth knowledge of skier biomechanics, sports injuries, winter sports equipment and standards, safety protocols, materials science, stress analysis, testing, and accident reconstruction. ITC approaches each case objectively and impartially, delivering clear, credible, and honest reporting. With experience both on-snow and in the lab, ITC bridges the gap between real-world winter sports injury scenarios and technical engineering analysis.

Continued Education

We stay updated on the latest mountain safety protocols, equipment design, testing, and safety standards to provide informed, evidence-based guidance and expert support in winter sports injury cases.

Commitment to Safety

ITC advocates for safe equipment and safe mountain experiences, striving to minimize future accidents.

Mission

Our mission is to ensure complex concepts are clearly understood by non-technical audiences — whether that’s a judge, jury, or claims team.

Impact Technical Consulting is proudly owned and operated by Austin Bourret, a Salt Lake City-based Mechanical Engineer with 30+ years of skiing experience. Austin combines his practical expertise with a scientific approach to provide high-quality, objective, and unbiased technical reporting when things go wrong on the hill.

Experience & Qualifications

Austin earned a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Utah in 2018. While studying, he worked as a Research Assistant at the University of Utah Composites Lab, contributing to leading research on composite material and failure mechanics. He is an acknowledged contributor to the 2023 doctoral publication Machine Learning Guided Design of Experiments to Accelerate Exploration of a Material Extrusion Process Parameter Space. This position led to opportunities with a local ski company where he led prototyping and testing for a novel, composite ski boot. Since graduating, his career has spanned engineering roles in the orthopedic medical device and geotechnical coring industries. 

A former nationally ranked freestyle mogul skier, Austin competed for 13 years and has coached for almost 15, giving him an expert eye for skier technique, performance and biomechanics. He is a licensed United States Ski & Snowboard Coach for the Park City Ski & Snowboard Team where he shares his passion for the sport with the next generation of skiers. Austin encourages his athletes to push themselves safely, promoting incremental progression, situational awareness, sportsmanship, and on-hill etiquette. His passion for the sport has amounted to tens-of-thousands of hours on and off-snow. He has used, tuned, fit and modified a vast range of winter sports equipment and gear, giving him an intuitive mechanical understanding of how it performs and how it can fail. 

Austin started ITC to apply his specialized knowledge of skiing and engineering to deliver a unique legal consulting service within the ski industry. He’s provided technical consulting and expert witness services in personal injury cases involving equipment performance, failure, and right-of-way collisions.  


Case Studies

Below are several case studies that Impact Technical Consulting has worked on over the years.

Foot Injury from Catastrophic Ski Boot Failure

ITC was retained to investigate the catastrophic failure of a ski boot that resulted in a significant foot injury. The client—a law firm representing the injured party—sought expert analysis to determine the root cause of the failure.

Through systematic analysis of the incident and equipment, we determined that a manufacturing defect led to a Mode 1 fracture, leading to a complete separation of the upper and lower boot shell. This report was used in a settlement against the ski boot manufacturer.

Knee Injury & Binding Performance

ITC was retained to investigate whether a binding performed correctly after a skier experienced a knee injury. A detailed review was conducted on the equipment to determine whether the binding’s torque release values matched calculated values.

No evidence of improper adjustment or binding failure was discovered. All test results fell within an acceptable tolerance for the skier’s calculated release setting, indicating the binding system functioned properly. Our investigation concluded that the injury fell within the inherent and accepted risk associate with skiing.


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