This is a gross misunderstanding on multiple fronts. For starters, Kevin Murphy is an external expert witness and not on the payroll of Google. During trials l

This is a gross misunderstanding on multiple fronts. For starters, Kevin Murphy is an external expert witness and not on the payroll of Google. During trials like this, it is expected to hire outside expert witnesses to testify why party X’s thing is “good actually” and why party Y got it wrong. So Mr. Murphy will be fine. Secondly, witnesses, expert or otherwise, are indeed compelled to answer questions when on the stand. It would otherwise be quite useless to put them on the stand in the first place. What happens in cases like this, however, is that there are parts that occur only in front of the judge and the two parties for confidentiality reasons and parts that happen in public for everyone in the gallery to hear. It’s the job of the lawyers to pay attention to the questions asked to ensure that questions that could lead to answers with confidential information are answered behind closed doors. Witnesses aren’t expected to keep track of this when answering questions unless explicitly briefed by the court to save specific topics for the confidential part of the cross/direct examination. So the ones that screwed up are the lawyers, perhaps the court, but not the expert witness.