The ones I found hard to believe were those when the opposition, knowing the
other side would have an expert on the stand, would show with no expert,
hoping either to keep me from qualifying (never happened) or I'd antagonize
either judge or jury (a rarity) especially during cross. Never ever
happened.
And the manufacturers during product-liability cases who used their own
employees as their experts! If they didn't admit they themselves weren't
responsible for junk cross-exam blew them away. You'd think lawyers would
show a little common sense - until you sat through a few trials.
My very best idiot case was in Philadelphia. Merits of the case don't
matter - "my" lawer asked me a question on direct and before I could open my
mouth hiz honor said "I know the answer to that. it's ...."
At lunch (I was still on the stand) "my" lawyer asked me about my tesimony -
and of course I said nothing, not wanting to spend a night in jail for
contempt. After I stepped down she asked me if I'd agreed with hizhonor -
NO - why didn't I say so then! As if I'm going to say from the stand,
"pardon me your honor but I think you're full of shit." I still don't think
she understood.
And how often the hiring lawyer will go after me for agreeing with so many
statements made by the other side's witness. "Unfortunately we both
subscribe to the same laws of physics."
The bulk of my work was for insurance companies, and most of that on
subrogation cases. Many of the best companies had very competent legal
help. Very easy to work with. Virtually always had clear wins. Dave K3TX
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dr. Gerald N. Johnson" <geraldj@weather.net>
To: <tentec@contesting.com>
Sent: Friday, February 19, 2010 6:46 PM
Subject: Re: [TenTec] Electric safety
> On Fri, 2010-02-19 at 01:17 -0500, DAVID HELLER wrote:
>> I guess many of us working around varied voltages have made contact
>> somewhere along the line. Just before my draft number came up I didn't
>> start the last term in school and took a job in an electronics factory.
>> By
>> virtue of a few years EE undergraduate and some radio experience I
>> started
>> as final inspector, duties being to make sure the things were working,
>> correct any mis-wiring, replace any new-defective components, make final
>> alignment and test. Only once did I get hit, and it was with about 600
>> vdc.
>> I pulled a metal tube out of a chassis not knowing that some girl on the
>> line had wired a B+ line to pin 1 (always ground in an octal receiving
>> tube). I didn't manage to get the tube out; the entire unit, about 100
>> lbs,
>> left the bench for the floor about where I had landed. No real damage to
>> the
>> radio or me, but I did take a short break. Put it back on the bench,
>> corrected the wiring, got it ready to ship and just kept going. I was
>> more
>> resilient those days than I am now.
>>
>> Separate grounding wire in metal conduit? Absolutely. NEC allows a lot
>> of
>> things that bother me, and leaves a few things out that bother me.
>>
>> I get the impression that you've had the same exerience as I - most cases
>> are settled after deposition, the negligence being so evident. The real
>> fun
>> came from the cases where some lawyer thought he could show me up on
>> cross-examination. Not once did the lawyer win. Dave, K3TX
>
> I had several never get to the deposition stage. Those were the ones
> where my report was a quarter page with a simple wiring diagram
> attached. Though one widow did grumble mightily about paying so much
> money per word of my report. It took all summer to find the permuted
> connections, some were buried 9' deep as if someone wished them to be
> hard to find.
>
> When I began as an expert witness, defense attorneys (as an independent
> I tended to be hired by the injured parties or their survivors) and
> judges respected technical experts. As time went on more "experts"
> showed up willing to testify to any cause for a price (I've told more
> than one potential client, "You don't want me in that trial because I
> think you don't have a case", "I know your product, your product is
> indeed junk.") and that has hurt the reputations of the expert
> witnesses. And in the early days the defense attorneys would be decently
> schooled in the technology by their expert so they could (temporarily)
> ask decent questions. But someone wrote a book on cross examining the
> expert witness and suggested the testimony could be destroyed by making
> the witness loose his cool so cross turned into a personal attack on the
> witness, not his technical testimony. I'm happy to no longer be subject
> to such abuse.
>
> Some of my best witnesses where the factory engineers who admitted that
> the product sample shown them was junk and should have never passed
> inspection or left the factory. That and the fact that they were not
> used to the courtroom and testified to their attorney, not to the jury.
> There is an art to good testimony to the jury. The amateur witness
> doesn't know that. Many an attorney beat on me to get me trained to
> testify to the jurors.
>
> 73, Jerry, K0CQ
>
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