Can’t you control shading of meshes by editing the UV map? Either way, shadows=false would make the part neon (without the glow). I’m curious if the problem here is directional shadows – does the issue still persist if you disable Global Shadows and set Ambient to 127, 127, 127?
Yep this definitely looks like a Normals/Topology issue. If this were done correctly, you’d have no problem with shadows for a model like this. Ask your guy to look into it, or if the model is available for download I’d take a look.