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The lucrative economics of expert witnesses

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Re: The lucrative economics of expert witnesses

#71

Post by rayiner »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #44
devchix wrote: 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.

That's deeply naive. Incentives matter to humans. A lot in fact. Ask any lawyer that has hired expert witnesses. Over there entire career, ask them how many times the expert witness they hired did not come to conclusions supporting the side they were hired by. Even amongst lawyers that have hired 100's of experts, that number is usually zero. In theory, an expert should be using their expertise to assess the situatio…

There is a strong survivorship bias-like aspect to that. Almost everything is debatable, and experts disagree on almost everything. Seasoned lawyers will have a pretty good idea of which experts will have which takes on any given issue. In the rare cases there is no disagreement, those cases simply won’t go to trial.

Look at it this way. Plenty of highly credentialed experts have taken the minority position in COVID measures and masking. In most cases, they’re doing that for free. And even if they can’t say the weight of the field is on their side, they can certainly point out holes and shortcomings or instances of overreach on the other side.

Re: The lucrative economics of expert witnesses

#72

Post by daniel-cussen »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #45
daniel-cussen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pra…

Welcome, GPT-3 or it's cousin! So glad you could join us.

People (EDIT: posts on this forum) keep saying that. It's cousin I guess. Daniel Cussen. Nice to meet you.

Since in this case surely you're not insulting me by proposing I'm an AI, may I too ask you are a bot? We both have full human names as our handle.

Is it like in Terminator, are you more advanced, am I obsolete, should I be afraid of you replacing me?

Re: The lucrative economics of expert witnesses

#73

Post by ghaff »

ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #53
AlbertCory wrote: post #43

I went to one day of the Apple - Samsung trial in San Jose in front of Judge Lucy Koh. Google indemnifies Android manufacturers against stuff like this, so we were heavily involved. Samsung put up three expert witnesses the day I was there. Amber Heard's lawyer is incompetent, because she should have asked what they got paid per hour , not the total. They have to know that. The first guy said he got $450 / hour. The…

Do "expert witnesses" really put 6 months of work into their testimony? That kind of confuses me. It seems like if someone puts that much work into something they are more like a Detective on a case, than an outside resource. Does that make sense? Like isn't that way too much time to assume they are unbiased?

There are often written reports in addition to testimony. I don't remember the exact timeframe as it was a long time ago but the report we created was something like 150 pages and was probably roughly halftime+ work for two people for a few months spread somewhat over a longer period.

Honestly, we had a perspective going in--which we had already written about publicly. Facts and conclusions were extensively footnoted. Someone could certainly choose to disagree with us but the fact that we worked on it for quite a bit of time (for which we were well-paid) didn't increase any bias. Indeed, we absolutely would not have taken the case from the other side.

Re: The lucrative economics of expert witnesses

#75

Post by gamblor956 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #2

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…

Conversely, I was in a case where we paid our expert about $75,000 for their expertise, which took about 2 weeks of prep and 2ish days of trial to present.

Opposing counsel tried the same stunt Amazon's lawyers did in your story.

And lost the case. Quite badly.

Speaking to the jury afterwards, we learned the jurors didn't care how much the expert got paid. What mattered was that he did an excellent job of presenting his expert opinion.

And in the scheme of things, his fee was peanuts compared to the damages at issue (and a very small fraction of the legal fees incurred by the lawyers), and trying to make someone look bad for getting fairly paid for their work when there are tens of millions at stake was just a bad take for a lawyer.

Re: The lucrative economics of expert witnesses

#76

Post by gamblor956 »

devchix wrote: post #59
Enginerrrd wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's deeply naive. Incentives matter to humans. A lot in fact. Ask any lawyer that has hired expert witnesses. Over there entire career, ask them how many times the expert witness they hired did not come to conclusions supporting the side they were hired by. Even amongst lawyers that have hired 100's of experts, that number is usually zero. In theory, an expert should be using their expertise to assess the situatio…

Well I went to the same law school my cousin Vinny did, and I'm pretty sure you can disqualify the expert witness by asking questions like, what's the correct ignition timing be on a 1955 Bel Air Chevrolet with a 327 cubic-inch engine and a four-barrel carburetor? You can also have your own expert witness called to directly rebut their expert witness. If expert witnesses are never paid, no one will be an expert witne…

Note that in the special case of My Cousin Vinny, Mona was introduced as a last-minute rebuttal expert witness, so the opposing counsel did not have prior opportunity to vet the expert., and moreover, was the defense counsel's fiance, so the judge granted the prosecution additional leeway in questioning her.

However, the actual attempt to disqualify her was pretty standard, and generally something many lawyers would attempt to do with experts who are either new to the expert witnessing game or have been expert witnessing for so long that they no longer actively practice the underlying occupation that originally gave rise to their expertise. (This is actually how many expert witnesses discover their calling as a witness: they get called as an expert as a routine part of their day job, discover how easy it is, and after talking to the lawyers discover how lucrative it can be.)

Despite being a comedy, My Cousin Vinny is actually one of the most accurate courtroom movies ever made.

Re: The lucrative economics of expert witnesses

#78

Post by yxwvut »

jmyeet wrote: post #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…

Of course, if the arbiter is chosen by the defendant (as is the case in most fine-print 'gotcha' arbitration clauses), the same problem of motivated reasoning applies as in the article.

Re: The lucrative economics of expert witnesses

#79

Post by SkyBelow »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #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 b…

Is there even a consistent notion to the idea of a person adding a set amount of value?

If we take a 3 person company and use a simple system to measure value added, how do you break down the value added by A who is +100k, B who is x2, and C who is x2?

If you remove either B or C, half he value of the company is gone, so they each add half. But if you remove A then the entire value of the company disappears. So they add 50%, 50%, and 100% of the value of the company respectively?

This is a pretty simple example, modeling real world would involve much more complex interactions, yet even with this simple one it would be hard to create a universal way of measuring value that is universally applicable.

Is the notion that a person contributes a set amount of value something like set theory, in that it sounds pretty good and usable for many things but with enough analysis there is a flaw underlying the entire system that requires some creative work to get around, enough so the common mental model no longer applies and thus the original concept can be said to not be possible?

Re: The lucrative economics of expert witnesses

#80

Post by sanj »

I spent a year being a part time expert witness. I got paid what seemed like a lot of money.

But I was also examining the specific implementation details of avionics for their enhanced ground proximity warning system.

The combination of understanding code, aircraft dynamics, and existing patents was complex. It was made more so by the attempt by other avionics manufacturers to design around the patents and write the code sufficiently differently.

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