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Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

I went to one day of the Apple - Samsung trial in San Jose in front of Judge Lucy Koh. Google indemnifies Android manufacturers against stuff like this, so we were heavily involved.

Samsung put up three expert witnesses the day I was there. Amber Heard's lawyer is incompetent, because she should have asked what they got paid per hour, not the total. They have to know that.

The first guy said he got $450 / hour. The second guy, a very experienced and articulate professor from MIT, got $850 / hour. They asked him how many hours he put in, and he said 900.

Q: So that's a lot of money, huh?

A: It was a lot of work

The last guy was a professor from a university in western Canada (Manitoba maybe). He said he got $350 / hour.

I probably wasn't the only one in the court thinking "Loser!"

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Do "expert witnesses" really put 6 months of work into their testimony?

That kind of confuses me. It seems like if someone puts that much work into something they are more like a Detective on a case, than an outside resource.

Does that make sense? Like isn't that way too much time to assume they are unbiased?

Yes, they do.

It probably won't surprise anyone that their "declaration" is written by the lawyers, and then they go over it, line by line, making sure it's something they would have said.

The check that they are "unbiased" is that the other side asks them "does your compensation depend in any way on the outcome of this trial?" Of course it doesn't, officially.

my wife works as an expert witness. she and her non-lawyer assistant write everything themselves.

the lawyers can request changes. sometimes she’ll make them. that doesn’t lose her any business.

If it involves substantial code review of a huge codebase (think, all of Android) it sure does take a lot of hours. The opposing counsel will often make it even less efficient by tightly limiting the tools that can be installed on a given workstation. Source: I've done this work in the past, but don't now.

there’s a lot of time spent reviewing material and then explaining it to the lawyers. the bigger the case the more lawyers there are to explain it to.

then you review everything from the other side. and your fellow experts. and write a bunch of stuff. explain that to the lawyers.

fly across country to go to motions hearings, hearing is rescheduled, go home, fly back, listen to the other side’s experts. provide rebuttal testimony, etc.

There are often written reports in addition to testimony. I don't remember the exact timeframe as it was a long time ago but the report we created was something like 150 pages and was probably roughly halftime+ work for two people for a few months spread somewhat over a longer period.

Honestly, we had a perspective going in--which we had already written about publicly. Facts and conclusions were extensively footnoted. Someone could certainly choose to disagree with us but the fact that we worked on it for quite a bit of time (for which we were well-paid) didn't increase any bias. Indeed, we absolutely would not have taken the case from the other side.

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