I once watched a trial where a professor emeritus from the computer engineering department of a major CS school, who had been one of the founders of the departm

I once watched a trial where a professor emeritus from the computer engineering department of a major CS school, who had been one of the founders of the department there, was a member of the National Academy of Engineering and an IEEE Fellow, had been a major figure in the development of integrated circuits, had many highly cited papers, and I think a major textbook or two, testify that it is common in the industry for the term "RAM cache" to include data that is stored on a hard disk, and explained that "RAM" means random access memory, and hard disks are random access and are memory. Hence, when people say "RAM" they mean to include hard disks. I was doing some work for the other side, and asked one of their lawyers why that professor would testify to something so ridiculous. Wasn't he worried that this would damage his reputation? The lawyer told me that all the people in academics and industry know about the expert witness gig. If they see that the professor emeritus said something ridiculous at a trial they will assume that he wanted a new RV or boat or to remodel his house or something like that, and was offered enough money to pay for that in exchange for reading the claims in the case, spending maybe a few days writing up a report in support of the side that hired him, and spending maybe 30 minutes to an hour on the stand testifying about that report. I then asked one of their expert witnesses what he was doing with his pay for his report and hour on the stand. He told me he was buying a Tesla Roadster which at the time was launching soon and sold for around $100k, and it was being paid for entirely from that one expert witness gig.