"Having to hire an SA consultant to help with the analysis would make sense."
No, the SA expert should have assisted BEFORE the trial. It would make no sense to hire one after it. Cortex had to be sure of the reliability of the data for analysis – a SA expert would (hopefully) do that.
“To make valid inferences about a population, we must be reasonably certain that the sample is representative of the population” – Byrkit, D.R. 1987
The set up of the trial should have already indicated the statistical procedures for the analysis. At the end of the trial, it is a good statistician that is important, not a SA expert. It takes a statistician to recognize that the proposed statistical procedures are not powerful enough or are wrong for the data set and apply procedures that will produce a reliable conclusion.