#30 It’s Easy To Demolish A Terrible Defense
I was a second-year associate and handling my first trial. I represented the plaintiff. The defendant had an expert witness who had testified previously in about 40 similar cases. This expert came out to my client’s property and did a completely nonsense examination of the issue. His expert report was equally bad. For those of you that don’t know, an expert testimony needs to meet a certain standard (the Daubert standard, at least in my state) in order to be admissible.
This guy basically took some photos and put a ruler on the ground a few times to make his “report” seem legit. The partners at my firm told me it wasn’t worth trying to file a Daubert motion to strike his testimony because the case was of low value (under $100,000) and those types of motions can be very complex. I was so angry that this guy was being deemed an “expert” that I came in on a weekend, on my own time, and drafted a 20-page motion to strike his testimony.
I didn’t bill the client a dime. The defendant didn’t file a response to my Daubert motion to strike. Instead, they waited until right before the expert was set to testify (he had been sitting in court racking up fees for two full days beforehand). The judge had the jury leave the room, told the expert to go to the stand, and allowed the defendant to do a direct examination of their expert. The defendant’s attorney, not taking my motion seriously, had their inexperienced associate do the examination.
It was incredibly basic and didn’t respond to any of the points in my motion. I was in charge of doing his cross-exam (it was my first cross-exam of a witness, ever). I tore the guy, a seasoned expert witness, on the stand. I got his entire testimony and report struck. They also had a second expert witness, who was pretty terrible but not quite as terrible. I also did his cross exam. Realizing that they were in serious trouble without their primary expert, and their second expert at risk of getting struck, the lead counsel for the defendant (a named partner at a well-known firm) did the direct exam for the second expert. I again did the cross. I got the second expert’s testimony struck except for one very, very tiny area. So essentially he was forced to testify with both hands tied behind his back. It was the most gratifying moment of my legal career so far.
Credit: this_is_not_the_cia
