10 ms·

The lucrative economics of expert witnesses

171 points by yarapavan 4y ago

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
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 three-letter tech company had lost due to Amazon infringing their patents) gave a presentation that concluded with some number in the $100M range. He was even gracious even to given Amazon the "benefit of the doubt" on a few details. Having never heard this sort of thing before, I have to admit that found it convincing even though I was about to go on the stand and demonstrate that at least some of the patents in the case were bogus. Oh dear, I thought, how are the Amazon lawyers going to deal with this? Amazon's lead lawyer started the cross-examination of this expert witness. It was very short. Q: How many hours have you spent working on the presentation you just offered us? A: <some number that was less than a week's worth of work> Q: How much are you being paid for your testimony here today? A: About $25,000 Q: No further questions, you honor. You could feel the impact in the room. (0) I participated in these trials only when the plaintiffs were patent trolls, not to defend Amazon. I'm on the record as opposing Amazon's first patent, and would likely object to many others if I knew about them. In the 3rd trial I participated in (Amazon was not the defendant in this instance), I agreed to participate only so that I could donate all of my fees to the EFF.
- devchix 4y ago
  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.
  - HWR_14 4y ago
    > 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? His continuing to be paid depends on him saying what the lawyers want. See also one of the main issues that people have with arbitration (that the companies supply repeat business to the arbiters they choose, so they wouldn't want to rule that hard against the company or the way accounting firms have an incentive to not lose their contracts by siding with the client on questionable choices.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      In fairness, one of the things that happens is that expert witnesses get chosen based in part on past record, writings, etc. When I wrote a report, I wasn't pressured to write anything I didn't believe. However, I had previously written a public research note that laid out my take on the case pretty unambiguously.
      - HWR_14 4y ago
        I totally believe that. I don't necessarily think it's as direct as "cross lawyer X, never work for lawyer X". I think past expert testimony is a big part of that past record that lawyer Y will look at, and people who want to become professional expert witnesses know that.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    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 the first approach is that (at least in the case I was describing), there was nothing actually wrong with what the expert witness had said. If it actually was the case that the defendant had infringed on some validly held patents, then the expert's damages estimate was probably pretty accurate. The dilemma is that the defendant's whole case is based on having not infringed and/or the patents being invalid. Consequently, there's zero motivation to get into the details of what the expert said, and every motivation to do something to as much as possible erase it from the minds of the jury.
- whoomp12342 4y ago
  the correct response per the article is "I dont do my own accoutning"
- duxup 4y ago
  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.
  - lupire 4y ago
    Same thing happened with the psychiatrist Amber Heard hired to diagnose Johnny Depp without ever meeting him.
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
  Well laying out that he was payed $2 million per year pro rata when the guy--in court--clearly does not have that stature in the economy, which you can tell by his appearance and bearing and how he speaks--is suspicious. Like these guys are negotiating in court, he himself is negotiating in court on behalf of his client, the fee looks like he's cashing in with them as opposed to offering objectivity. Which doesn't exist, a smoke and mirror concept, but the idea is to reduce prejudice, meaning judge in the moment, with partiality switching, rather than being neutral, and the judges in the room, the one with the gable, the ones in the jury box, and the pews, everyone--switching back and forth until coming to rest on one side, with the amount of nuance or lack thereof they see fitting.
- pfortuny 4y ago
  Yeah, that is (post facto) obviously answered truly saying “including background studies around hundreds but I do not keep count”. Otherwise you are being forced to be untruthful despite thinking that you are objective.
- erosenbe0 4y ago
  Noble. Thanks for standing up for a cause. Amazon and other large caps have some sketchy patents but shouldn't we judge as follows: A) Does Amazon use its patent portfolio largely on defense, never broadly asserting sketchy patents? B) Does Amazon ever sell tranches of patents to non practicing entities?
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  Did the Amazon lawyer tell the jury their own hourly billing rate?
  - milsorgen 4y ago
    Tbf, they're probably not paid hourly.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      I'm guessing that the "Amazon lawyer" in those circumstances would probably be outside counsel.
      - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
        That's correct.
- gamblor956 4y ago
  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.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    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).
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  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.
overthemoon 4y ago
I worked in worker's comp briefly as a paralegal, and we'd pay doctors handsomely for a written opinion based on their review of medical records, which was most likely filled out by an assistant and polished off by the doctor. Good work if you can get it!
dwheeler 4y ago
I was an expert witness this year. In that case, I wasn't paid by either side. But I can understand better why people ask for big paydays. The opposing side does their best to make you and your statements look bad. Even when you know that's what they are doing, it's quite unpleasant. The lawyer on the side I was supporting said that this unpleasantness was why they often had to pay handsomely for testimony.
- lukas099 4y ago
  Was this for a case that you had strong feelings about, or was there another reason that you did this pro bono?
  - dwheeler 4y ago
    I had strong feelings about it, and I figured it wouldn't take too much time. I was wrong about that second part :-).
z2 4y ago
The bigger non-financial question, as the Inside Job (2010 documentary) claims, is that this expert witness ecosystem is a conflict of interest for academic experts. If I am a real estate economist, and an investment bank wanted to hire me to testify that the mortgage-backed securities bubble wasn't the result of negligent behavior, wouldn't I be inclined to publish papers to that effect? Naturally I'd also leave my engagements with those banks off my CV.
- Fomite 4y ago
  In contrast, my expert witness work is expressly founded on papers I published, and it absolutely goes on my CV.
ghaff 4y ago
I co-authored an expert witness report once. We were paid about $500/hour. That wasn't out of line with what we normally charged clients but, it was actually quite a lucrative job for us given we charged for travel, research, etc. which were often at least partially unpaid time with our regular work. It was a very interesting project but it made you appreciate why big lawsuits cost so much. I think our expert witness report cost about $100K from our side, but there was also about nine other complementary reports, all the time for the white shoe New York law firm, to say nothing of the creation of the boxes of depositions that we went through. The other side had about the same. Oh, and the case never got to trial.
- dboreham 4y ago
  Interesting. The two times I worked for litigators they told me they _never_ pay travel time. I even checked with my bil litigator (different industry) and he confirmed the practice. Otoh they said I could charge whatever hourly rate I wanted for actual work.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Long time ago and the travel was very limited. I may not be remembering properly but it would have been very small potatoes in any case. (And may have been adjusted at the back end as I didn't handle the business side.) I expect "whatever you want" exists within some sort of customary and reasonable window. In any case, my basic point was that our regular consulting had a lot of off the clock time which this didn't.
galaxyLogic 4y ago
Why doesn't the court prescribe what the max. fee for expert witnesses can be?
- ghaff 4y ago
  States sort of do. "The professional responsibility rules in many states prohibit lawyers from paying more than a “reasonable and customary fee” to expert witnesses." The amount will vary based on the expert, but the idea is that if a, say, expert in computer programming would normally be paid $500/hour, if someone is paid $10,000/hour, something fishy is going on.
- brk 4y ago
  Capitalism?
tiahura 4y ago
Whenever I hear someone suggesting that it’s easy to file frivolous lawsuits against doctors, or whomever, as a plaintiff‘s attorney - who pays for the report, the deposition time, the court reporter, and the videographer out of pocket - I groan.
harrybr 4y ago
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 lucrative if your expertise is in high demand, like personal injury or medical malpractice.
- brk 4y ago
  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.
- InefficientRed 4y ago
  The real expert witness cash cow is to become the go-to expert witness on a particular issue/incident and then travel around to every state representing various plaintiffs against the same single/small set of defendants.
- Fomite 4y ago
  I ended up having some expert witness work during the pandemic, about pandemic related stuff. It was interesting, and engaging, and was indeed a nice bit of side income for a bit, but I'd be happy if I was never called upon again.
cshokie 4y ago
I recently served on jury duty for a civil case and both sides hired a doctor to make statements in their favor. I thought it was funny that each lawyer attacked the other expert in the exact same way. “How much did you bill to be here? That seems like a lot”.
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
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.
- dylan604 4y ago
  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.
  - ksdnjweusdnkl21 4y ago
    Maybe his point was that those witnesses would most likely agree on the topic at hand, but are on opposite sides of the argument.
    - dylan604 4y ago
      And maybe it wasn't the point. But we'll never know because it was an incomplete thought. Hence the question being asked rather than just making something up
LeifCarrotson 4y ago
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.
- SkyBelow 4y ago
  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?
  - LeifCarrotson 4y ago
    What do you mean by "B who is x2, and C who is x2?" I think the fundamental insight provided by the model is that each of A, B, and C are human, and have comparable intelligence, skill, and efficiency. But if B draws half the salary of A for 12 hours of sales calls in which he gets a lot of details wrong, while A spends 600 hours customizing the product for the user, that's ridiculous. It's not believeable for one expert witness to be worth thousands of dollars an hour while someone in the same profession with the same education and experience, but without connections to some buddies who went to law school, is only worth $20/hr. That's why juries freak out when they learn what expert witnesses are compensated.
DangitBobby 4y ago
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.
- Retric 4y ago
  It’s assumed that each side’s lawyer(s) is biased, expert witnesses on the other side tend to be viewed as neutral even if only one side is paying them. That’s often abused in court cases which is one reason they can command such huge checks. Nobody is paying for an expert witness that helps the other side so a little bias one way or the other is helpful when pulling down those checks.
  - DangitBobby 4y ago
    I think it's worth pointing out even if it's "assumed." One should not cast stones from glass houses, and the jury needs to be reminded that a lawyer's framing of facts should be taken with a gigantic pinch of salt.
- cool_dude85 4y ago
  But everyone knows the lawyer for one of the parties in a trial is representing his party and is not some neutral observer. But expert witnesses are presented as essentially neutral experts making their own determinations on areas of expertise. Being explicit about the money paid to the expert makes the situation much more clear; not so for the lawyer.
  - DangitBobby 4y ago
    I disagree. If the lawyer is trying to call the process into question rather than addressing the facts, it's important to remind the jury of lawyer's questionable part of the process as well. Fallacious reasoning shouldn't stand in a courtroom.
foolfoolz 4y ago
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
jmyeet 4y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wb2p5xR9xjY [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNpEeIus_tY&t=3889s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNpEeIus_tY&t=3889s [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7WdtBFY4J4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7WdtBFY4J4 [4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IwUlKPSVQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IwUlKPSVQs
- gbronner 4y ago
  The cost of the Heard Depp trial could have paid for a pretty good movie...
- yxwvut 4y ago
  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.
rayiner 4y ago
It should be noted that, in the context of a legal proceeding, “expertise” is both broader and narrower than the common usage. “Broader” in the sense that evidentiary law rigidly distinguishes between fact testimony, which for the most part is the testimony of people with personal knowledge of the facts, from expert testimony. As a result, the latter can include things like accounting, summarizing, or analyzing financial numbers to calculate damages. On the other hand, the Supreme Court’s decision in Daubert v. Merrill Dow imposes the requirement that expertise be based on “reliable” methods. That would arguably exclude a number of academic discipline that aren’t based on such methods.
AlbertCory 4y ago
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 second guy, a very experienced and articulate professor from MIT, got $850 / hour. They asked him how many hours he put in, and he said 900. Q: So that's a lot of money, huh? A: It was a lot of work The last guy was a professor from a university in western Canada (Manitoba maybe). He said he got $350 / hour. I probably wasn't the only one in the court thinking "Loser!"
- ghostbrainalpha 4y ago
  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?
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    Yes, they do. It probably won't surprise anyone that their "declaration" is written by the lawyers, and then they go over it, line by line, making sure it's something they would have said. The check that they are "unbiased" is that the other side asks them "does your compensation depend in any way on the outcome of this trial?" Of course it doesn't, officially.
    - sigstoat 4y ago
      my wife works as an expert witness. she and her non-lawyer assistant write everything themselves. the lawyers can request changes. sometimes she’ll make them. that doesn’t lose her any business.
  - matthewdgreen 4y ago
    If it involves substantial code review of a huge codebase (think, all of Android) it sure does take a lot of hours. The opposing counsel will often make it even less efficient by tightly limiting the tools that can be installed on a given workstation. Source: I've done this work in the past, but don't now.
3np 4y ago
It's funny how arbitrary it seems; "Computers & IT" @ $385/h and "Internet" @ $575/h. But maybe it's low number of cases enough that it's skewed by outliers and noise.
ilamont 4y ago
A former neighbor made a living doing this. He was an MIT-trained physicist with a very unusual area of expertise that was somehow in demand in certain types of personal injury cases. I think it might have been how things bounce. That was his only occupation. His wife had a regular job that provided health insurance and income in between expert witness gigs.
gene-h 4y ago
Had a professor who taught structural engineering and served as an expert witness, he said we'd better pay attention in class because there's more money to be made when stuff falls down than building it up.
klik99 4y ago
I really don't want to go into details for obvious reasons, but I was close with someone who was called frequently for cases regarding sampled music with some pretty big stakes and could speak with a lot of perceived (and honestly, well earned) authority. He would show an FFT analysis and time waveform and say "See? they look nothing alike". I pointed out that it's pretty easy for things to look completely different on FFT and waveforms but be the same sound. I got the sense it was a pretty lucrative side hustle. This was many years ago and I don't think the problem has gotten any better.
- paultopia 4y ago
  unfortunately, this sort of garbage is really common in court. the FBI crime lab is kind of notorious for this kind of nonsense comparison --- see https://www.propublica.org/article/with-photo-analysis-fbi-lab-continues-shaky-forensic-science-practices https://www.propublica.org/article/with-photo-analysis-fbi-l... Every few years I teach a kind of super-basic stats (plus some python) class to law students mostly for the purpose of equipping them with the tools to notice that expert witnesses are lying to them.
  - IshKebab 4y ago
    That was a great read.
afian 4y ago
This might be interesting to the hn crowd. I was an expert witness for a big lawsuit in California where thousands of newspaper delivery drivers were systematically underpaid by a major US newspaper company (https://www.sacbee.com/news/business/article2613374.html https://www.sacbee.com/news/business/article2613374.html). The delivery drivers did not keep records of which customers they delivered to, but given the customer manifest and subscription data, I was able to use route optimization (which I learned in school at MIT) to calculate a baseline for how much they were paid. link: https://afi.io/case_studies/callahan_blaine https://afi.io/case_studies/callahan_blaine edit: since people asked - I was paid well in the range of a few hundred k. Totally worth doing the math homework in school.
hnxs 4y ago
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.
- warkdarrior 4y ago
  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.
throwaway193948 4y ago
Mr Show covered this already https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTy1Qyl03kI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTy1Qyl03kI
sanj 4y ago
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.
NateLawson 4y ago
My company, Root Labs, has consulted on various lawsuits. We aren't trial witnesses but we've done supporting work, such as reverse engineering and writing a detailed technical analysis of how a product works. This report was then reviewed by the testifying expert, who wrote their own report to be entered as evidence. I recommend not working as a testifying expert for a few reasons: - You have to take sides, and the other side will never want to work with you again. Are you sure you'll never want to work with AT&T if you represented Verizon once, for example? What if you want a job there some day? - Despite the term "expert", it comes down to how you present yourself in the courtroom versus what you know. The opponent's "expert" might seem more believable than you, despite being wrong about the technical issues. - You have to stick to one particular area of technology your whole career, and many of the cases cover the same ground. Do you want to be "Ethernet Implementation Person" your whole life? - A lot of the work is boring, and lawyers are generally not technically adept. Juries are worse. So if you love explaining something repeatedly in oversimplified terms, maybe you'd like this. Usually testifying experts are older and do it after they've finished a career in some subject area. It might make sense at that point as a second career.
coldtea 4y ago
Expert witnesses should be like jurors. Randomly selected by the court from a list of experts, not hired.
kingcharles 4y ago
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.
antognini 4y ago
A friend of mine was an astronomer at Carnegie Observatories and he was telling me about how every now and again lawyers would ask for an astronomer there to be an expert witness in a trial. It was usually traffic accidents where one side wanted to show that the Sun was in a particular place at the time of the accident. Of course, they could just look it up in any astronomical almanac (which is what the astronomer would do anyway), but getting an official astronomer on the stand to say "the Sun was not in his eyes" gave the jury a better show.
dopidopHN 4y ago
I met a CS witness expert at a bar, we got drunk and he got my wife dinner. Those peoples live large and the tales are entertaining. Typically he was told what was the expected findings of his research.

171 points by yarapavan 4y ago

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 three-letter tech company had lost due to Amazon infringing their patents) gave a presentation that concluded with some number in the $100M range. He was even gracious even to given Amazon the "benefit of the doubt" on a few details. Having never heard this sort of thing before, I have to admit that found it convincing even though I was about to go on the stand and demonstrate that at least some of the patents in the case were bogus. Oh dear, I thought, how are the Amazon lawyers going to deal with this? Amazon's lead lawyer started the cross-examination of this expert witness. It was very short. Q: How many hours have you spent working on the presentation you just offered us? A: <some number that was less than a week's worth of work> Q: How much are you being paid for your testimony here today? A: About $25,000 Q: No further questions, you honor. You could feel the impact in the room. (0) I participated in these trials only when the plaintiffs were patent trolls, not to defend Amazon. I'm on the record as opposing Amazon's first patent, and would likely object to many others if I knew about them. In the 3rd trial I participated in (Amazon was not the defendant in this instance), I agreed to participate only so that I could donate all of my fees to the EFF.

devchix 4y ago
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.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  > 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? His continuing to be paid depends on him saying what the lawyers want. See also one of the main issues that people have with arbitration (that the companies supply repeat business to the arbiters they choose, so they wouldn't want to rule that hard against the company or the way accounting firms have an incentive to not lose their contracts by siding with the client on questionable choices.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    In fairness, one of the things that happens is that expert witnesses get chosen based in part on past record, writings, etc. When I wrote a report, I wasn't pressured to write anything I didn't believe. However, I had previously written a public research note that laid out my take on the case pretty unambiguously.
    - HWR_14 4y ago
      I totally believe that. I don't necessarily think it's as direct as "cross lawyer X, never work for lawyer X". I think past expert testimony is a big part of that past record that lawyer Y will look at, and people who want to become professional expert witnesses know that.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  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 the first approach is that (at least in the case I was describing), there was nothing actually wrong with what the expert witness had said. If it actually was the case that the defendant had infringed on some validly held patents, then the expert's damages estimate was probably pretty accurate. The dilemma is that the defendant's whole case is based on having not infringed and/or the patents being invalid. Consequently, there's zero motivation to get into the details of what the expert said, and every motivation to do something to as much as possible erase it from the minds of the jury.
whoomp12342 4y ago
the correct response per the article is "I dont do my own accoutning"
duxup 4y ago
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.
- lupire 4y ago
  Same thing happened with the psychiatrist Amber Heard hired to diagnose Johnny Depp without ever meeting him.
daniel-cussen 4y ago
Well laying out that he was payed $2 million per year pro rata when the guy--in court--clearly does not have that stature in the economy, which you can tell by his appearance and bearing and how he speaks--is suspicious. Like these guys are negotiating in court, he himself is negotiating in court on behalf of his client, the fee looks like he's cashing in with them as opposed to offering objectivity. Which doesn't exist, a smoke and mirror concept, but the idea is to reduce prejudice, meaning judge in the moment, with partiality switching, rather than being neutral, and the judges in the room, the one with the gable, the ones in the jury box, and the pews, everyone--switching back and forth until coming to rest on one side, with the amount of nuance or lack thereof they see fitting.
pfortuny 4y ago
Yeah, that is (post facto) obviously answered truly saying “including background studies around hundreds but I do not keep count”. Otherwise you are being forced to be untruthful despite thinking that you are objective.
erosenbe0 4y ago
Noble. Thanks for standing up for a cause. Amazon and other large caps have some sketchy patents but shouldn't we judge as follows: A) Does Amazon use its patent portfolio largely on defense, never broadly asserting sketchy patents? B) Does Amazon ever sell tranches of patents to non practicing entities?
matthewdgreen 4y ago
Did the Amazon lawyer tell the jury their own hourly billing rate?
- milsorgen 4y ago
  Tbf, they're probably not paid hourly.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I'm guessing that the "Amazon lawyer" in those circumstances would probably be outside counsel.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
      That's correct.
gamblor956 4y ago
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.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  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).
pclmulqdq 4y ago
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.

overthemoon 4y ago

I worked in worker's comp briefly as a paralegal, and we'd pay doctors handsomely for a written opinion based on their review of medical records, which was most likely filled out by an assistant and polished off by the doctor. Good work if you can get it!

dwheeler 4y ago

I was an expert witness this year. In that case, I wasn't paid by either side. But I can understand better why people ask for big paydays. The opposing side does their best to make you and your statements look bad. Even when you know that's what they are doing, it's quite unpleasant. The lawyer on the side I was supporting said that this unpleasantness was why they often had to pay handsomely for testimony.

lukas099 4y ago
Was this for a case that you had strong feelings about, or was there another reason that you did this pro bono?
- dwheeler 4y ago
  I had strong feelings about it, and I figured it wouldn't take too much time. I was wrong about that second part :-).

z2 4y ago

The bigger non-financial question, as the Inside Job (2010 documentary) claims, is that this expert witness ecosystem is a conflict of interest for academic experts. If I am a real estate economist, and an investment bank wanted to hire me to testify that the mortgage-backed securities bubble wasn't the result of negligent behavior, wouldn't I be inclined to publish papers to that effect? Naturally I'd also leave my engagements with those banks off my CV.

Fomite 4y ago
In contrast, my expert witness work is expressly founded on papers I published, and it absolutely goes on my CV.

ghaff 4y ago

I co-authored an expert witness report once. We were paid about $500/hour. That wasn't out of line with what we normally charged clients but, it was actually quite a lucrative job for us given we charged for travel, research, etc. which were often at least partially unpaid time with our regular work. It was a very interesting project but it made you appreciate why big lawsuits cost so much. I think our expert witness report cost about $100K from our side, but there was also about nine other complementary reports, all the time for the white shoe New York law firm, to say nothing of the creation of the boxes of depositions that we went through. The other side had about the same. Oh, and the case never got to trial.

dboreham 4y ago
Interesting. The two times I worked for litigators they told me they _never_ pay travel time. I even checked with my bil litigator (different industry) and he confirmed the practice. Otoh they said I could charge whatever hourly rate I wanted for actual work.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Long time ago and the travel was very limited. I may not be remembering properly but it would have been very small potatoes in any case. (And may have been adjusted at the back end as I didn't handle the business side.) I expect "whatever you want" exists within some sort of customary and reasonable window. In any case, my basic point was that our regular consulting had a lot of off the clock time which this didn't.

galaxyLogic 4y ago

Why doesn't the court prescribe what the max. fee for expert witnesses can be?

ghaff 4y ago
States sort of do. "The professional responsibility rules in many states prohibit lawyers from paying more than a “reasonable and customary fee” to expert witnesses." The amount will vary based on the expert, but the idea is that if a, say, expert in computer programming would normally be paid $500/hour, if someone is paid $10,000/hour, something fishy is going on.
brk 4y ago
Capitalism?

tiahura 4y ago

Whenever I hear someone suggesting that it’s easy to file frivolous lawsuits against doctors, or whomever, as a plaintiff‘s attorney - who pays for the report, the deposition time, the court reporter, and the videographer out of pocket - I groan.

harrybr 4y ago

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 lucrative if your expertise is in high demand, like personal injury or medical malpractice.

brk 4y ago
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.
InefficientRed 4y ago
The real expert witness cash cow is to become the go-to expert witness on a particular issue/incident and then travel around to every state representing various plaintiffs against the same single/small set of defendants.
Fomite 4y ago
I ended up having some expert witness work during the pandemic, about pandemic related stuff. It was interesting, and engaging, and was indeed a nice bit of side income for a bit, but I'd be happy if I was never called upon again.

cshokie 4y ago

I recently served on jury duty for a civil case and both sides hired a doctor to make statements in their favor. I thought it was funny that each lawyer attacked the other expert in the exact same way. “How much did you bill to be here? That seems like a lot”.

MisterBastahrd 4y ago

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.

dylan604 4y ago
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.
- ksdnjweusdnkl21 4y ago
  Maybe his point was that those witnesses would most likely agree on the topic at hand, but are on opposite sides of the argument.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    And maybe it wasn't the point. But we'll never know because it was an incomplete thought. Hence the question being asked rather than just making something up

LeifCarrotson 4y ago

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.

SkyBelow 4y ago
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?
- LeifCarrotson 4y ago
  What do you mean by "B who is x2, and C who is x2?" I think the fundamental insight provided by the model is that each of A, B, and C are human, and have comparable intelligence, skill, and efficiency. But if B draws half the salary of A for 12 hours of sales calls in which he gets a lot of details wrong, while A spends 600 hours customizing the product for the user, that's ridiculous. It's not believeable for one expert witness to be worth thousands of dollars an hour while someone in the same profession with the same education and experience, but without connections to some buddies who went to law school, is only worth $20/hr. That's why juries freak out when they learn what expert witnesses are compensated.

DangitBobby 4y ago

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.

Retric 4y ago
It’s assumed that each side’s lawyer(s) is biased, expert witnesses on the other side tend to be viewed as neutral even if only one side is paying them. That’s often abused in court cases which is one reason they can command such huge checks. Nobody is paying for an expert witness that helps the other side so a little bias one way or the other is helpful when pulling down those checks.
- DangitBobby 4y ago
  I think it's worth pointing out even if it's "assumed." One should not cast stones from glass houses, and the jury needs to be reminded that a lawyer's framing of facts should be taken with a gigantic pinch of salt.
cool_dude85 4y ago
But everyone knows the lawyer for one of the parties in a trial is representing his party and is not some neutral observer. But expert witnesses are presented as essentially neutral experts making their own determinations on areas of expertise. Being explicit about the money paid to the expert makes the situation much more clear; not so for the lawyer.
- DangitBobby 4y ago
  I disagree. If the lawyer is trying to call the process into question rather than addressing the facts, it's important to remind the jury of lawyer's questionable part of the process as well. Fallacious reasoning shouldn't stand in a courtroom.

foolfoolz 4y ago

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

jmyeet 4y ago

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wb2p5xR9xjY [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNpEeIus_tY&t=3889s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNpEeIus_tY&t=3889s [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7WdtBFY4J4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7WdtBFY4J4 [4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IwUlKPSVQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IwUlKPSVQs

gbronner 4y ago
The cost of the Heard Depp trial could have paid for a pretty good movie...
yxwvut 4y ago
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.

rayiner 4y ago

It should be noted that, in the context of a legal proceeding, “expertise” is both broader and narrower than the common usage. “Broader” in the sense that evidentiary law rigidly distinguishes between fact testimony, which for the most part is the testimony of people with personal knowledge of the facts, from expert testimony. As a result, the latter can include things like accounting, summarizing, or analyzing financial numbers to calculate damages. On the other hand, the Supreme Court’s decision in Daubert v. Merrill Dow imposes the requirement that expertise be based on “reliable” methods. That would arguably exclude a number of academic discipline that aren’t based on such methods.

AlbertCory 4y ago

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 second guy, a very experienced and articulate professor from MIT, got $850 / hour. They asked him how many hours he put in, and he said 900. Q: So that's a lot of money, huh? A: It was a lot of work The last guy was a professor from a university in western Canada (Manitoba maybe). He said he got $350 / hour. I probably wasn't the only one in the court thinking "Loser!"

ghostbrainalpha 4y ago
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?
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  Yes, they do. It probably won't surprise anyone that their "declaration" is written by the lawyers, and then they go over it, line by line, making sure it's something they would have said. The check that they are "unbiased" is that the other side asks them "does your compensation depend in any way on the outcome of this trial?" Of course it doesn't, officially.
  - sigstoat 4y ago
    my wife works as an expert witness. she and her non-lawyer assistant write everything themselves. the lawyers can request changes. sometimes she’ll make them. that doesn’t lose her any business.
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  If it involves substantial code review of a huge codebase (think, all of Android) it sure does take a lot of hours. The opposing counsel will often make it even less efficient by tightly limiting the tools that can be installed on a given workstation. Source: I've done this work in the past, but don't now.

3np 4y ago

It's funny how arbitrary it seems; "Computers & IT" @ $385/h and "Internet" @ $575/h. But maybe it's low number of cases enough that it's skewed by outliers and noise.

ilamont 4y ago

A former neighbor made a living doing this. He was an MIT-trained physicist with a very unusual area of expertise that was somehow in demand in certain types of personal injury cases. I think it might have been how things bounce. That was his only occupation. His wife had a regular job that provided health insurance and income in between expert witness gigs.

gene-h 4y ago

Had a professor who taught structural engineering and served as an expert witness, he said we'd better pay attention in class because there's more money to be made when stuff falls down than building it up.

klik99 4y ago

I really don't want to go into details for obvious reasons, but I was close with someone who was called frequently for cases regarding sampled music with some pretty big stakes and could speak with a lot of perceived (and honestly, well earned) authority. He would show an FFT analysis and time waveform and say "See? they look nothing alike". I pointed out that it's pretty easy for things to look completely different on FFT and waveforms but be the same sound. I got the sense it was a pretty lucrative side hustle. This was many years ago and I don't think the problem has gotten any better.

paultopia 4y ago
unfortunately, this sort of garbage is really common in court. the FBI crime lab is kind of notorious for this kind of nonsense comparison --- see https://www.propublica.org/article/with-photo-analysis-fbi-lab-continues-shaky-forensic-science-practices https://www.propublica.org/article/with-photo-analysis-fbi-l... Every few years I teach a kind of super-basic stats (plus some python) class to law students mostly for the purpose of equipping them with the tools to notice that expert witnesses are lying to them.
- IshKebab 4y ago
  That was a great read.

afian 4y ago

This might be interesting to the hn crowd. I was an expert witness for a big lawsuit in California where thousands of newspaper delivery drivers were systematically underpaid by a major US newspaper company (https://www.sacbee.com/news/business/article2613374.html https://www.sacbee.com/news/business/article2613374.html). The delivery drivers did not keep records of which customers they delivered to, but given the customer manifest and subscription data, I was able to use route optimization (which I learned in school at MIT) to calculate a baseline for how much they were paid. link: https://afi.io/case_studies/callahan_blaine https://afi.io/case_studies/callahan_blaine edit: since people asked - I was paid well in the range of a few hundred k. Totally worth doing the math homework in school.

hnxs 4y ago

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.

warkdarrior 4y ago
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.

throwaway193948 4y ago

Mr Show covered this already https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTy1Qyl03kI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTy1Qyl03kI

sanj 4y ago

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.

NateLawson 4y ago

My company, Root Labs, has consulted on various lawsuits. We aren't trial witnesses but we've done supporting work, such as reverse engineering and writing a detailed technical analysis of how a product works. This report was then reviewed by the testifying expert, who wrote their own report to be entered as evidence. I recommend not working as a testifying expert for a few reasons: - You have to take sides, and the other side will never want to work with you again. Are you sure you'll never want to work with AT&T if you represented Verizon once, for example? What if you want a job there some day? - Despite the term "expert", it comes down to how you present yourself in the courtroom versus what you know. The opponent's "expert" might seem more believable than you, despite being wrong about the technical issues. - You have to stick to one particular area of technology your whole career, and many of the cases cover the same ground. Do you want to be "Ethernet Implementation Person" your whole life? - A lot of the work is boring, and lawyers are generally not technically adept. Juries are worse. So if you love explaining something repeatedly in oversimplified terms, maybe you'd like this. Usually testifying experts are older and do it after they've finished a career in some subject area. It might make sense at that point as a second career.

coldtea 4y ago

Expert witnesses should be like jurors. Randomly selected by the court from a list of experts, not hired.

kingcharles 4y ago

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.

antognini 4y ago

A friend of mine was an astronomer at Carnegie Observatories and he was telling me about how every now and again lawyers would ask for an astronomer there to be an expert witness in a trial. It was usually traffic accidents where one side wanted to show that the Sun was in a particular place at the time of the accident. Of course, they could just look it up in any astronomical almanac (which is what the astronomer would do anyway), but getting an official astronomer on the stand to say "the Sun was not in his eyes" gave the jury a better show.

dopidopHN 4y ago

I met a CS witness expert at a bar, we got drunk and he got my wife dinner. Those peoples live large and the tales are entertaining. Typically he was told what was the expected findings of his research.