Articles Posted in Expert Witness News

South Carolina, along with other states, is tightening regulations that must be met in order for a computer forensics expert witness to testify in court. A South Carolina bill would only allow computer forensic expert witnesses to testify in court if they are employed by businesses that primarily engage in legal work or divorce cases. This would result in the experts needing a PI license if they wish to testify in court. Joel Hruska of Ars Technica.com also writes:

As Baseline Magazine reports, there’s a significant amount of controversy over whether such legislation will improve the quality of digital forensic testimony or damage it. The South Carolina law is meant to ensure that the expert testimony offered by computer forensic investigators actually is expert testimony. Ensuring that such testimony meets a certain standard of quality is in both the state’s and the accused’s best interest.

Critics, however, worry that the new South Carolina legislation will put the title of computer forensic expert in the hands of PIs across the state who are utterly unequipped to handle real computer forensics. Such an outcome would lower the quality of digital forensic analysis available to both the state and to defendants; it could potentially affect trial outcome.

In Alternative Dispute Resolution in the Hospitality Industry hospitality expert witness Maurice Robinson writes that the International Society of Hospitality Consultants (ISHC) has facilitated customized dispute resolution training programs to industry experts.

This exercise has resulted in a panel of highly experienced and qualified arbitrators and mediators with extensive experience in dealing with hospitality industry issues – the best of both worlds. Thus, the industry now has a supply of industry experts, the vast majority of them being current or former ISHC members with 10 to 40 years of industry experience – who have been trained and certified as commercial arbitrators, mediators and Issue Review Board members, and who are ready to support the resolution of disputes, from the simplest to the most complex.

A wide variety of complex business and real estate disputes in the hospitality industry are now arbitrated, ranging from the parties’ respective rights and obligations under management contracts and franchise agreements to disputes concerning capital improvements, annual budgets and the calculation of incentive and other fees, to disputes concerning allocation of chain-wide costs, and even the composition of competitive sets.

In Get the Most From Engineering Experts, Christopher L. Brinkley writes on how thorough preparation of engineering expert witnesses is the key to winning your case. In this excerpt Brinkley discusses the reliability of the expert witness’s work.

The reliability of an engineer’s work may also be supported by testimony from defense witnesses. The defendant’s in-house engineers and testifying expert should be questioned regarding the processes they followed in drawing their conclusions about the product and the materials on which they relied in performing their work. When the engineering experts testfiying on behalf of both the plaintiff and the defendant have used the same type of methodology and data, you can make the inference that the work is reliable, notwithstanding any difference in the ultimate conclusions.

More to follow…….

In Get the Most From Engineering Experts, Christopher L. Brinkley writes on how thorough preparation of engineering expert witnesses is the key to winning your case. In this excerpt Brinkley discusses challenges you may face regarding their expert witness testimony.

It is good practice for the expert to conduct his or her analyses in a manner that will satisfy a Daubert challenge. The expert should rely on materials and methods that are used by engineers working in the relevant industry. These include:

6) raw test data, test reports, applicable test protocols, photographs and videotapes, and equipment calibration reports 7) mathematical formulas, input data, and calculations preformed 8) notes, photographs, videotapes, and other materials related to inspections, measurements, examinations, or analyses 8) other factual information relevant to the engineer’s analysis 10) diagrams, animations, models, charts, or illustrations of the engineer’s work and the underlying engineering concepts.

In Get the Most From Engineering Experts, Christopher L. Brinkley writes on how thorough preparation of engineering expert witnesses is the key to winning your case. In this excerpt Brinkley discusses challenges you may face regarding their expert witness testimony.

It is good practice for the expert to conduct his or her analyses in a manner that will satisfy a Daubert challenge. The expert should rely on materials and methods that are used by engineers working in the relevant industry. These include:

1) industry or government treatises, studies, and other publications referencing applicable engineering principals 2) engineering and design and performance standards related to the product at issue 3) engineering reports and drawings related to the product at issue, similar products, and products with alternative designs 4) patents related to the product at issue and improved designs

In Get the Most From Engineering Experts, Christopher L. Brinkley writes on how thorough preparation of engineering expert witnesses is the key to winning your case. In this excerpt Brinkley discusses challenges you may face regarding their expert witness testimony.

Virtually every products liability case requires the assistance of one or more experts in the field of engineering. To use thse expert effectively at trial, you must be prepared to contront and overcome the unique legal and practical challenges associated with their testimony.

The law views expert engineering evidence from a unique perspective. Whether an engineer’s work constitutes sound practice within the engineering community is often of secondary importance to how the law evaluates the engineer’s methodology. As a result, you must make sure your engineering experts are aware of the procedural and substantive law that is applicable to their testimony.

Reporter Jennifer McPhee writes that some people say the “CSI effect” raises jurors’ expectations about what kind of forensic evidence they can expect criminalistics expert witnesses to deliver from every crime scene in the real world. “If I only come to court with a single fingerprint or a single piece of DNA, they are either going to think I’m stupid or lazy,” says Richard Devine, team leader at the Ontario Police College’s forensic training unit. In LawTimes.com McPhee also reports:

And even when the science on television is realistic, the scenarios aren’t, Devine later tells Law Times. “The bad guys in this province just drive by and shoot you. There’s nothing special about that. A good forensic investigator should be able to place the shooter. But I don’t want any bias that says a good forensic officer would have done this because that’s what they do on television.” Devine says one impact of these shows is they’ve made real world forensic investigators more professional and careful. Jurors are coming in looking for what they’ve seen on television, and also want to know how the Crown got the evidence and what it means for the trial, he says. Where people used to go to sleep during the forensic stuff, they don’t anymore. They are wide awake and they are listening. And they have a standard and that standard is created by the media,” says Devine.

In How They Can Squeeze More Miles From the Gallon, December 05, 2007, Marianne Lavelle writes on how car manufacturers can make more fuel-efficient cars. In her article, Lavelle tells us about the 244-page decision handed down in September by Vermont Federal Judge William K. Sessions regarding California’s effort to force carmakers to limit their greenhouse gas emissions. Lavelle writes:

The short version is that the judge agreed with California’s (fuels) expert witness, who estimated that the initial increased vehicle cost for consumers would be about $1,500. Not only would this be offset by about $5,000 in fuel savings over the car’s lifetime, if fuel is $3 per gallon, but the judge said it is likely the premium would be only temporary. “The automobile industry has historically been very effective at improving the quality of necessary technology while decreasing its cost,” he said. Sessions said the estimate by the automakers’ expert witness, that more fuel efficiency would cost consumers $5,000 per car, was inflated because he had not considered these already available technologies.

For more please see Beyond the Barrel.

The Georgia Supreme Court decided last week in favor of tighter expert witness rules. Their 5-2 decision on the SB 3 provision (O.C.G.A. § 24-9-67.1(c)), is a rare defense victory in the state. Atlanta defense lawyer R. Page Powell Jr. says the state Supreme Court’s ruling is “a very fair, very reasonable threshold requirement for expert competency.” The ruling says that medical malpractice expert witnesses must have “actual professional knowledge and experience in the area of practice or specialty in which the opinion is to be given.” The Daily Report also writes:

The court hasn’t decided an unrelated state Supreme Court appeal, Mason v. Home Depot, S07A1486, challenging another part of the law establishing a more general rule that tightens standards for admission of expert testimony in all civil cases. That rule is sometimes known as the Daubert rule for the 1993 U.S. Supreme Court case to which federal rule makers responded in crafting a similar, but not identical, rule of evidence.

In Utilizing Experts In An Expert Way, Kelli Hinson and Tesa Hinkley describe the crucial role expert witnesses have at trial and give advice on how best to use them. In this excerpt, Hinson and Hinkley give tips on ensuring that testimony is based on science.

Contrary to what many believe, expert testimony in litigation is not always based on rigorous quantitative analysis of the data involved in a case. Too often, we hve seen experts provide analysis that does not scientifically demonstrate the validity of their claims.

For example, we were recently contacted by a lawyer seeking an industry expert who could opine on the impact that a particular song on a CD had in influencing sales of that CD. We stressed that the question should be addressed in a scientifically rigourous way, and therefore the client decided to retain an economist. The plaintiff side retained an industry expert who formulated an opinion based solely on her experience, not on science. Her testimony was stricken on a Daubert challenge and consequently the plaintiff could not present damages testimony at trial.