Expert Witness Blog

In The Many Faces of TRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURY, brain injury expert witness Dr. John D. Lloyd, PhD, MErgS, CPE, CBIS, writes:

Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) is often considered the signature injury of the ongoing military conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, there are many more non-combat victims of the devastating effects of TBI, which can affect anyone, anytime, anywhere.

The very young and very old are both highly vulnerable to significant head trauma from otherwise innocuous household short falls. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), accidental falls are the number one cause of injury and number two cause of fatality in infants and young children. While teens and adolescents may believe they are superhuman at times, their young brains, which continue to develop into their mid-twenties, require extra protection due to the risky behaviors, which coincide with a peak in TBI fatalities. While the fully-formed adult skull may serve well as a helmet to protect the brain from milder impacts, there are many potentially injurious events that affect this group including automobile and motorcycle accidents, blunt force trauma, and impacts due to amateur and professional sports, including football, hockey, soccer, horse-riding, etc. Finally, in our golden years, where the brain atrophies, thereby increasing the risk of deformation, in combination with anti-coagulant (blood-thinning) therapies for various medical conditions can place elders at heightened risk of injury due to minor falls.

In EFFECTIVE VALUATION & LITIGATION SUPPORT IN CORPORATE SECURITIES LAWSUITS, forensic accounting expert witness Richard M. Squar, CPA, CVA, ABV, CFF, MBA-Taxation, writes:

Okay, let’s face it. There are always important concerns for the board of directors of any company, public or private. Today you, Director, and the board and company are served a lawsuit from dissenting shareholders. The lawsuit asserts the shareholders’ right to appraisal and alleges that the directors did not meet their duties of care and loyalty to the corporation and shareholders you serve. Substantial damages are being claimed due to alleged corporate securities fraud.

Great. And you thought this was going to be a nice, warm, bright Orange County day! Do you lose your appetite, kiss and hug your spouse, and call your therapist? Of course. When the company’s legal counsel tells you not to worry, do you continue to worry? Of course. Do you go to the special board meeting with corporate legal counsel and begin dealing with the matter head-on? Of course you do. You’re a director!

In Construction Process Can Lead to Defects, construction expert witness Michael S. Poles, GC, CM, RCI, DABFET, ACFE, writes on the complex process involved in a building project:

Building Materials Before building materials can be used in any building, they are first run through a highly complex, and extensive engineering, testing, and review process. This review process is usually conducted by a vast number of independent testing laboratories and the results are reviewed by many professional committees, such as the American Society for Testing and Materials, (A.S.T.M.) and the International Conference of Building Officials, (I.C.B.O.).

Reports of the testing results and the Professional Societies’ findings are published and updated regularly. These reports, often referred to as A.S.T.M. Standards, I.C.B.O. Reports, and Uniform Building Code Standards, state the minimum recommended standards for the use of the materials.

In Challenges in Recovering Deleted Email computers expert witness Steve Burgess writes:

There are three main types of email in common usage – Microsoft Outlook (often paired with a Microsoft Exchange Server), text-based email client programs, and web-based email, or webmail.

In Microsoft Outlook, all emails are kept in one large, encrypted, non-text file – the PST, or Personal Folders file. Outlook has additional functions and additional content as well. There is an integrated address book, multiple mailboxes, a calendar, and a scheduler, all of which are contained within the PST file. When one looks into a PST file with a file editor or word processing application, there is little or nothing intelligible to the human eye. The file content looks like nearly random characters.