Expert Witnesses

(H/t Indiana Law Blog) The New York Times has a fairly good article on some troublesome aspects of the use of expert witnesses in litigation.

Basically, there is a tendency for experts to be hired guns who spout opinions favorable to the side that hires them:

“To put it bluntly, in many professions, service as an expert witness is not considered honest work,” Samuel R. Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan, wrote in the Wisconsin Law Review. “The contempt of lawyers and judges for experts is famous. They regularly describe expert witnesses as prostitutes.”

Melvin Belli, the famed trial lawyer, endorsed this view. “If I got myself an impartial witness,” he once said, “I’d think I was wasting my money.”

At the end of the day, it tends to be an expensive and not very useful sidetrack in the legal process. If one side has an expert, the other side tends to feel a need to get one as well. The two will often cancel each other out, and the two sides have just spend several thousand dollars to stand still.