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The lucrative economics of expert witnesses

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Re: The lucrative economics of expert witnesses

#91

Post by kingcharles »

I'm currently a criminal defendant in an ongoing case involving digital forensics. The state's expert witness testified one time so far and I was very impressed with his knowledge and demeanor. He really knew his tech and could explain it very well to a lay person.

The problem was that the judge allowed a corrupt police detective to testify as a computer expert when he has no formal training in computer forensics and can babble on about things which are essentially science fiction and have them accepted by the judge as truth, leaving the appellate courts to try and untangle the mess.

My biggest issue with these things in court is that your lawyer needs to have domain knowledge too. Your lawyer needs to not only be able to come up with a reasonable set of questions to challenge the opposing party's expert, but to also understand the answers and come up with new answers on-the-fly. There are very few lawyers who can do this, and they are expensive.

In a criminal trial you are not going to find such a competent lawyer to represent you, and you are probably not going to get your own expert to dispute the state's version of events, either. So whatever the state's expert puts out there is going to be the "truth" for the purposes of trial.

Re: The lucrative economics of expert witnesses

#92

Post by warkdarrior »

hnxs wrote: post #74

Does serving as an expert witness violate employment agreements with typical tech employers (eg FAANG)? Assuming you are being paid and you’re witnessing for an entity other than your employer.

You should review any such planned engagements as expert witness with your employer's conflict-of-interest team. They should be able to give you the go/ahead if it's really unrelated to the company.

Re: The lucrative economics of expert witnesses

#93

Post by TheCoelacanth »

nonameiguess wrote: post #16
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.

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.

Expert witnesses are generally committing the "argument from authority" fallacy anyway.

Re: The lucrative economics of expert witnesses

#94

Post by Banana699 »

SkyBelow wrote: post #79
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…

Cooperative Game Theory is one field that has been studying dividing payoff among cooperating players in proportion to how much they contributed to achieving the goal.

Re: The lucrative economics of expert witnesses

#95

Post by ghaff »

milsorgen wrote: post #64
matthewdgreen wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did the Amazon lawyer tell the jury their own hourly billing rate?

Tbf, they're probably not paid hourly.

I'm guessing that the "Amazon lawyer" in those circumstances would probably be outside counsel.

Re: The lucrative economics of expert witnesses

#96

Post by ghaff »

pc86 wrote: post #70
devchix wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm surprised to see it suggested that being unable to immediately recall arcane trivia in a high pressure situation would be a disqualifying feature, but then... gestures broadly at every technical interview . Witnesses are already paid. You can be subpoenaed to present fact or character testimony, and you're required by law to show up (but you're still paid). I'm pretty sure subpoenaing random experts isn't the sol…

>$1,500/hr is pretty crazy regardless of your field.

So that's $3 million/year assuming someone takes pretty much normal US vacations and holidays. And bills 8 hours/day which certainly no lawyer does unless they're working insane hours. So maybe cut that in half. (And leaving aside that you almost certainly can't book a full schedule.)

Is $1.5 million/year still a lot of money? Sure. It's also not out of the realm of even non-executive compensation in places like Silicon Valley or even the medical field. And, in practice, most people doing this even those who command the highest sums, are probably doing this much less than 1,000 hours/year. Those who do earn the highest amounts are doing it, like lawyers and consultancies, by billing out associates who earn a lot less than their billable rate.

Re: The lucrative economics of expert witnesses

#97

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

anigbrowl wrote: post #83
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.

The jurors are free to ignore the lawyers and rely on the expert's testimony. But they're also free to conclude that said expert just provides the desired opinions on demand. I would guess the lack of time invested in performing the analysis counted for as much with the jury as the high fee; patent litigation tends to be long and tedious, and a jury is likely to reflect on the fact that they're being asked to spend m…

More generally, lay juries making decisions about patent cases that hinge on arcana like the ways a session could be embedded in a URL and the stateless nature of HTTP is just ... totally fucking absurd.

Yes, it's the lawyers' jobs to explain it to the jury so that they can understand it, but sometimes you just have throw you hands up in the air and say "this is absurd, we can't possibly expect you to get this".

Re: The lucrative economics of expert witnesses

#99

Post by pclmulqdq »

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…

It sounds like Amazon's lawyers had no real arguments against his testimony or his presence in court. They could have voir dired him if they thought he wasn't an expert, and they didn't. They could have cross-examined him on some aspect of his testimony, and they didn't.

Re: The lucrative economics of expert witnesses

#100

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

gamblor956 wrote: post #75
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…

As a more personal aside, in this particular case (in which Amazon, the defendant, did win the case), the judge noted that they found my testimony compelling and that it likely made a large impact on the jury's deliberations. I was not paid for my time appearing in court, though I was paid for prep time (code review, mostly). Money well spent, I would guess. More important for me was at least one small instance of vanquishing one of the worst patent trolls on the planet (even if the defendant is not exactly a model client).
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