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The lucrative economics of expert witnesses

thehustle.co

21–30 of 113 posts

Re: The lucrative economics of expert witnesses

#21
post #18

I've done a few pieces of expert witness work over the 2-3 years (on deceptive design / dark patterns). Although expert witness hourly rates may look high, it really depends on how many hours you bill in a given period. If you're an expert in something very niche, there might not be enough cases in a given year to give you a meaningful income. Don't quit your tech job yet. Expert witness work is usually only lucrativ…

I often tell my consulting clients that you are not paying for my by-the-hour efforts, but you are essentially leasing my 20+ years of experience and expertise.

My hourly rates are frequently >$1,000/hr, but as you mentioned, that kind of work is not full-time. And in 99% of the cases, my clients could not get equivalent information and decision-making input faster or cheaper anyplace else.

Re: The lucrative economics of expert witnesses

#23
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That he was paid is not enough reason to invalidate his testimony. Everyone in court that day, the lawyers, the judge, you, were paid. Why not him? If he indeed has expertise that would win his party's case, what exactly is wrong with getting paid, even paid handsomely, for his being there? This seems a lawyerly sort of ad hominem to discount expert testimony without directly challenging the evidence.

Expert witness testimony, at least in this case, isn't about evidence. It's a person, nominally an expert, saying what they think/know and providing some expert-y looking handwaving to back it up. You've got two choices (at least) as an attorney for the opposing party: one, get into a domain turf war with the "expert" about whether what they've said is correct; two, discount the "expert" personally. The problem with…

>It's a person, nominally an expert, saying what they think/know and providing some expert-y looking handwaving to back it up.

Disagree. The other side have the ability to qualify the expert witness during voir dire [0]. The other side's also have the opportunity to find their expert to counter and bring in expertise.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voir_dire

Re: The lucrative economics of expert witnesses

#24

I once sat on a jury for a personal injury trial. The medical expert witness for the insurance company was an orthopedic surgeon who was renowned as one of the best in the area. The witness for the plaintiff was the head of her department and the man who literally trained her to do her work professionally.

And?

Your comment could almost be intriguing, but as you left it is almost meaningless. Here's personA acting as a witness, but the counter witness is personA's ex-boss just isn't too usefull. Have you 100% always agreed lock-step with whatever your boss has said? Is it impossible that the student becomes the master becoming better than the teacher?

I'm just not really sure the point to which you were trying to make.

Re: The lucrative economics of expert witnesses

#25
The economics of most employment is a tradeoff between how much value you add to the equation and how much you can extract (you can also participate with resource depletion and leveraging of starting capital, but for most employees value insertion vs value extraction is the main issue).

Are you a nontechnical sales drone who can't figure out when your product fits the requirements, but you are a mandatory middleman between a company who really needs your product and someone (or many someones) who built something really valuable? You can extract a commission of a few percent of the vast amount of value that flows past you, which may be far in excess of the value you provide.

Are you a subject-matter expert in a cubicle farm full of other SMEs? You may be contributing far in excess of the value you provide, because you just don't have any leverage to extract any of it.

When a court only has time for a few hours of testimony to help decide a case worth hundreds of millions regarding some enterprise that's affected millions of people over many years, that's a recipe for value extraction far in excess of the normal value of an hour.

Re: The lucrative economics of expert witnesses

#26
I wonder how much the lawyer is being paid for their expertise? Kind of rich to imply that the expert witness' motivation should be called into question when that question could even more easily be turned around on the lawyer. Why would we believe any of the facts of the matter laid out by a lawyer when their paycheck (and future paychecks) depends on the outcome of the case? In fact, the lawyer is paid to lay out the facts in as biased a manner as possible to convince the jury side with their client regardless of what actually happened. If a jury should be coached to disregard anyone during a trial, it's the lawyer.

Re: The lucrative economics of expert witnesses

#27

I've done several patent trials as a lay/fact witness in cases involving patents related to an employment contract addendum I created when I worked for Amazon. The contract described various early web tech hacks (such as embedding session IDs in the URL) and denied Amazon the chance to patent them (0). In the first one, I was in court while the plaintiff's damages expert witness (there to estimate how much this large…

I recently was a juror in a personal injury case.

It wasn’t quite cut and dry questioning but the result was the same.

An insurance company medical expert was testifying and it went similarly.

Under questioning it was clear that:

- This doctor never actually examined the injured patient.

- They reviewed some… but not all of the medical documents.

- Their conclusions were strangely specific for not having reviewed some information.

- This guy appeared to just be a hired gun for the insurance company.

During deliberations everyone agreed to ignore his testimony entirely.

Several jurors were actually kinda pissed that dude even testified.

Re: The lucrative economics of expert witnesses

#28
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That he was paid is not enough reason to invalidate his testimony. Everyone in court that day, the lawyers, the judge, you, were paid. Why not him? If he indeed has expertise that would win his party's case, what exactly is wrong with getting paid, even paid handsomely, for his being there? This seems a lawyerly sort of ad hominem to discount expert testimony without directly challenging the evidence.

As far as I understand, "lawerly ad hominem" is most of what cross-examination is. The jury is free to recognize that impugning the character and/or motives of a witness is only a probabilistic argument that they're lying or wrong, and not a deductive argument.

I believe that "ad hominem" is not actually a fallacy in general. Like anywhere intent is involved. And in math too. You can never take the camera out of the room, if you see the camera taken out of the room that's not the camera, that's a camera, you're looking through *the* camera. "Hidden camera" scenes involve a second hidden camera, only some of the shots are made pointing at the camera, plus the "fools" in pranks that "fall" for hidden camera jokes are paid actors themselves, everyone you see in 2D is an actor. Mirrors aren't quite 2D, it's 3D in practice, a flat decent mirror that was built properly, and looks even when you move from side to side and up and down, and back and forth, that's the real you, that's different. People in general look like they look in the mirror, it's the shitty photos with tiny little cameras that make them look like shit, and often distort the image to neg them, like in 1984 when the tortured Winston goes to look at the cameras, under the effect of drugs, which are allegedly mirrors, plus the put makeup on him, plus the lighting, everything. When I was scouted as a model and went to castings the cameras were invariably bigger than the eye of a squid. A tiny camera can only take a good picture with photoshop, it's super distorted and can't be placed on a phone except for crappy images (like photos of contracts). Anything else is trying to distort distortions into looking right. It's like a straight wire, once bent it can't be straightened again by bending it back, it's never going to be straight again.

A camera can only fit on a tripod or around your neck, a camera can't be smaller than a human eye. In fact cameras are based on dissections of eyes, particularly human eyes, in the dead. One flaw is they're projected onto planes, instead of the retinal spheres. There's many other problems.

So ad hominem? Eh. Who told you about ad hominem, and what did they want from you when they told you about it? Who put that in the curriculum, and why? I suppose it's taught as an alternative to name-calling and dragging people down like in more raw fighting. So criminals are when they're in crazy arrogance mode continually insulting and degrading their victim as loud as possible.

There's also a huge amount of ad hominem masquerading as accusations of ad hominem, like "my ad hominem doesn't count as ad hominem" or "you're not a hominem." Prejudging while forbidding judgment in return, criminality basically. Libel and slander for sure.

There's no objectivity. What does no eye see? What does no mind think?

This comment is as objective as I think I can be.

Re: The lucrative economics of expert witnesses

#29
i know an expert witness. he got a degree in CS. worked for a year or two writing code. then has been considered an expert in the field and now flies around the country to various trials being an expert on modern development choices. the side that’s hiring him gives him a pdf with all the info. he basically memorizes it, repeats it while testifying, and gets paid absolutely bank cash. he’s been doing this almost 20 years. i think it’s legalized corruption in the justice system

Re: The lucrative economics of expert witnesses

#30
The Depp-Heard trial was fascinating in many ways. This article mentions Dr Shannon Curry specifically. Whatever she was paid was money well spent. It wasn't just her testimony but how she handled cross-examination and how she carried herself (eg [1][2]). By comparison, the Heard equivalent expert witness got utterly destroyed on cross [3]. And then you had Dr Spiegel who, depending on who you ask, might be called 60 year old Ninja (the streamer) or budget Jordan Peterson who clearly came across as a grifter [4].

One instructive thing about all this is you start to get a sense of how expensive actual litigation actually is. This should both dissuade you from taking that route (unless you have really pockets) and embolden you when others make threats to sue you.

Yes the pay rates are high but these are also people who generally have a ton of experience so comparing what they earn to say median income from doing their actual day job is misleading.

I mean whether or not this is a good system or not is another matter.

But another lesson to draw from this is that binding arbitrarion is often daemonized but it's not necessarily a bad thing. Generally the arbitrator is a subject matter expert and such things are common in, say, the construction industry.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wb2p5xR9xjY

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNpEeIus_tY&t=3889s

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7WdtBFY4J4

[4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IwUlKPSVQs

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