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Insurance expert witness Barry Zalma and principal of Zalma Insurance Consultants writes that It is Necessary to Know Insurance to Fight Insurance Fraud.

According to the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud: “When it comes to insurance fraud, the United States is a world leader. We arguably have the most severe problem on the planet. But we also have the most sophisticated means of combating fraud. Our systems for detecting and investigating fraud are mature and much more robust than those in other developed nations.”

Although I agree with the Coalition that the ability to detect and investigate fraud is as useful as an arrest without a conviction. Detecting and investigating fraud is merely the beginning of the process. If the fraud investigators are not sufficiently trained about insurance, insurance contract interpretation, and civil defenses to attempts at insurance fraud it does not matter how robust and mature the ability to investigate and detect fraud. The mature and robust talents must be joined with civil defenses to fraud and the criminal prosecution of the perpetrators.

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Marketing expert witness Gabriele Goldaper writes that there are BIG BUCKS IN STRIPES! She represented a leading sports apparel manufacturer which sought a declaratory judgment to allow them to continue to use stripes on their athletic apparel. The defendant took the position that stripes were a part of their trademarked logo and could not be used on any other sports apparel.

My position was that striping is used as an element of design to indicate motion and action and no one can “own” the rights to an “element of design.” Among the elements of design are: “shape”, the outline of the garment, “line”, indicating the direction of visual interest, straight lines are used to create moods and feelings and angled lines are used to suggest motion, “repetition” to create a sense of movement. A successful design is achieved when all the elements work together harmoniously. It was my opinion, supported, with documentation, that stripes, in the past and still today, are used to signal to consumers that a garment is for athletes or those wanting to look like athletes. Stripes have acquired this communicative function.

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The Vancouver Sun reports:

neurosurgery expert witness Dr. George Stuart Cameron testified Thursday that whatever happened to brain-damaged Thomas McKay while in police cells was more than just a fall. “I would expect his head was traveling at a higher velocity than just a simple fall,” said the expert.

McKay had a skull fracture over his left eye, extending across the top of his head. Cameron performed surgery to remove a blood clot formed underneath McKay’s skull lying against his brain, part of an injury he agreed was life-threatening. McKay and his family say Victoria Police Constable Greg Smith pushed McKay while his hands were cuffed behind his back so that his head struck the concrete floor.

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Marketing expert witness Gabriele Goldaper writes that there are BIG BUCKS IN STRIPES! She represented a leading sports apparel manufacturer which sought a declaratory judgment to allow them to continue to use stripes on their athletic apparel. The defendant took the position that stripes were a part of their trademarked logo and could not be used on any other sports apparel. The particular logo at issue had three stripes, spaced evenly apart. The apparel maker for whom she was rendering an opinion was using stripes, not three stripes and not similarly evenly spaced apart for their line of athletic wear.

Goldaper argued that stripes have been used well before manufacturers were making sports related apparel. As an example we saw early in our history, slaves and prisoners clothed in garments with lots of horizontal stripes. She provided extensive information and documentation of examples to support her opinion that the use of stripes has been associated with sports and athletic apparel since the development of this category of clothing. In the Olympic games in the early twentieth century we saw runners and hurdlers, males and females, wearing shorts and tops with stripes on them. The use of stripes in athletic sportswear was seen well before either the plaintiff or defendants started to produce this category of clothing.

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In Life-Care Planners Can Help Simplify Damages For The Jury, vocational evaluation expert witness and life care planner Ronald T Smolarski writes on to determine what care and how much money a chronically or catastrophically disabled individual will need for the rest of his or her life.

..based on current medical knowledge, the rehabilitation consultant strives to itemize everything the disabled person might need during his or her lifetime and to make the plan specific so the individual’s needs are met. Cost is established using a two-step process. In the first step, a monetary sum that will compensate for actual loss and encompass all foreseeable expenses is determined in current dollars.

In the second step, a rehabilitation consultant qualified in economic damages evaluation determines present and future values of damages. To do this, cost is given in current dollars. Through this process, future cost increases can be more easily seen, understood and met.

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ChannelWeb reports:

Attorneys for Cisco (NSDQ:CSCO) and one of its solution providers on Friday presented closing arguments to the jury in the breech of contract lawsuit between the two, with the solution provider’s attorney characterizing Cisco as purposely throwing its partner overboard and destroying its business and Cisco’s attorney claiming the vendor is really the victim.

Infra-Comm, a San Juan Capistrano, Calif.-based solution, alleges Cisco breached its Indirect Channel Partner Agreement (ICPA) and the terms of its deal registration program by passing a potential large deal with the Irvine Company, a property development company, toAT&T (NYSE: T). Networking and IP telephony vendor Cisco, in return, is accusing Infra-Comm of harming Cisco’s business and misusing its brand name….

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In Life-Care Planners Can Help Simplify Damages For The Jury, vocational evaluation expert witness and life care planner Ronald T Smolarski writes on to determine what care and how much money a chronically or catastrophically disabled individual will need for the rest of his or her life.

Some attorneys representing either the plaintiff or the defendant in such cases are now getting the expert help they need from specially trained rehabilitation consultants called “life care planners”. Life care planners do exactly what the name implies: they formulate life care plans – detailed descriptions of special damages the disabled individual suffered, what progressive disablement can be anticipated and, most importantly, the present and future monetary costs of all necessary care.

In doing this, the life care planner deals in actual dollar figures, not “guesstimates”. This allows the jury to understand what the disabled person needs, currently and in the future, and why. As a result, the specialized training of a life care planner can simplify the plaintiff attorney’s job, strengthen the case and make the settlement more realistic in terms of future needs. For the defense attorney, the life care planner can point out case weaknesses, exaggerations and unnecessary costs.

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Steve Roensch, President of Roensch & Associates and metallurgy expert witness, discusses Finite Element Analysis:

FEA is applied to many types of problems, such as temperatures in consumer electronics, airflow around aircraft, and magnetic fields in electric motors. By far the most common application is structural FEA — determining how a solid body responds to various forces.

The structural problem amounts to writing down some “governing equations” that describe the material and how it behaves, and then solving those equations for the physical part being analyzed subject to how it is held and loaded. This can be done on paper for some simple part shapes. The resulting “closed form solution” is another equation that provides the answer in terms of the basic variables, such as the part’s dimensions.

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In FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS: Post-processing, Steve Roensch, President of Roensch & Associates and failure analysis expert witness, discusses FEA:

The finite element method is a relatively recent discipline that has quickly become a mature method, especially for structural and thermal analysis. The costs of applying this technology to everyday design tasks have been dropping, while the capabilities delivered by the method expand constantly. With education in the technique and in the commercial software packages becoming more and more available, the question has moved from “Why apply FEA?” to “Why not?”. The method is fully capable of delivering higher quality products in a shorter design cycle with a reduced chance of field failure, provided it is applied by a capable analyst. It is also a valid indication of thorough design practices, should an unexpected litigation crop up. The time is now for industry to make greater use of this and other analysis techniques.

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Steve Roensch, President of Roensch & Associates and metallurgy expert witness, discusses Finite Element Analysis:

Many legal professionals are exposed to Finite Element Analysis (FEA) in the courtroom and hire metallurgists to study failures across many industries..Finite element analysis is regularly applied to a vast array of products when something bending or breaking is an issue. FEA is applied to many types of problems, such as temperatures in consumer electronics, airflow around aircraft, and magnetic fields in electric motors. By far the most common application is structural FEA — determining how a solid body responds to various forces.

Having a fundamental understanding of how the method works can help an attorney (i) recognize when FEA can strengthen a case, (ii) choose a capable expert and (iii) develop meaningful challenges to the opposition’s expert. As discussed in the last issue of Courtroom FEA, if a loss, injury or death is due to something bending or breaking, FEA can help identify the cause of failure and hence the responsible party.

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