Expert witness…
Several months ago I was retained as an expert witness on a fascinating, yet incredibly convoluted litigation. My role is to be the expert witness for one of the defendants, yet to get the holistic view of what transpired I must look at evidence relating to all the parties involved. It’s fascinating stuff, with a lot of moving parts.
It highlights that, in the United States, you can sue anyone/anything for any reason whatsoever. This case would never happen in Italy. First of all, no avvocato would take this case, and even if they did, the courts here would refuse to hear it. European law is much more practical in that respect.
One difficult adjustment has been the concept of billing by the minute. If I take a phone call regarding the case, I literally have to start a timer and enter each task separately. So if I reviewed patent documents from 6:00 until 6:47 pm, that gets an entry into the timesheet portal “Review documents re patent,” 47 minutes. I just had a 6 minute discussion with one of the attorneys, and had to document and enter that! Think about your day and if you had to time and isolate each task. It just seems needlessly complicated to me, but I guess that’s law!
wow sounds pretty interesting!
Warning Comment
Have you ever been an expert witness and got railroaded by the other side?
@jaythesmartone This is my 5th time as an expert witness. Three times the case went to trial and the party I was engaged to support won. One was settled out of court, so I can’t say how it would have turned out. So I haven’t had any issues with my testimony, but it really is more about who had the better legal team, I think. All I can provide are facts and expert opinion.
@bedlamhillfarm
Has any one ever told you that the facts are not proven like when DNA first came out?
@jaythesmartone No, I deal more with medical malpractice or negligence cases. It’s nothing like those crime shows.
@bedlamhillfarm
Oh okay thanks for the info….
@jaythesmartone believe me, it’s a lot more tedious than it sounds. Nothing like what you see on courtroom dramas ever happened.
@bedlamhillfarm
Question? What kind of Doctor are you? A specialist of some exotic disease?
@jaythesmartone I’m a specialist in neuro-oncology.
Warning Comment
Well I know you can’t give details, but I’m so curious! It’s my claims adjuster background, + forensic anthropology background — I would love to be able to hear about the case. Yes, we are so litigious here, it would be laughable if the consequences weren’t so disastrous. Prices higher because companies have to go to such lengths to protect themselves from what should be frivolous suits & the poor medical profession! Nice to know other countries aren’t similarly afflicted.
@ghostdancer Yes, can’t discuss this one. But a previous one was definitely surreal/amusing. The plaintiff was a woman suing the manufacturer of the headsets used in the call center where her deceased husband was employed. (She was also suing the call center.) The patient had been referred to a specialist when he started having vision issues, and they found a brain tumor. He wasn’t of the age where GBMs and other brain tumors are common, so they did a full-body PET/CT and found he also had aggressive prostate cancer. The tumor in the brain was actually metastatic prostate cancer, not a brain tumor. Their claim was that the headsets caused the brain tumor. I had to testify that brain metastasis from prostate cancer, while not a very common phenomenon, is well-documented. All the clinical evidence (pathology, tumor genetics) proved that the brain tumor started in the prostate. The pity was that she was offered something like a $20,000 settlement to just go away, and ended up with nothing. I suspect she was motivated more by greed than any sense of justice.
@bedlamhillfarm She musn’t have had good lawyers. Any attorney worth his/her salt would have done the research, known about the metastasis factor, & advised her to grab the $20K & run. Greed (at least on the lawyer’s part) (didn’t the attorney find out through discovery the results of the pathology & tumor genetics?) and possibly grief (if not greed) on hers. Of course if he died without any financial assets to leave her, she may have been just trying to get what she could so she could survive. If the husband had life or medical insurance, surely that insurance co. would have been backing the suit if there was any medical evidence of the claim. I’m betting either or both insurance cos. were conspicuous by their absence.
Yep, definitely surreal/amusing!
Warning Comment
I was involved peripherally in the Accutane lawsuits. I went to the FDA hearings as an observer in order to support the Canadian company when they went to HPB. I was amazed at the quality of the US lawyers on this case (not in a good way) and the alleged victims. I couldn’t discuss it at the time but it is now many years later and I am no longer working. So now I can mention that the real reason that the depression issue emerged was because of the anti abortion lobby. When they were unsuccessful in banning Accutane because of the risk of birth defects which usually lead to an abortion, they tried to drive concerns about suicide and depression. There were 2 individuals in the FDA who were anti-abortion activists, so there was a conflict within the agency itself on the issue. The consequent series of Increasingly stringent risk mitigation strategies which cost everyone a lot of extra money (the company, insurance companies, patients, and the public) actually made no difference in the pregnancy/abortion data. I represented the company medical department at the HPB hearings on this subject and the end result was that Health Canada decided against setting up a similar registration type system to the US. It should be noted that the Accutane Canadian pregnancy/abortion data remained significantly lower than the US, despite the rigorous US requirements.
Warning Comment