by tzs | 2025-09-25 01:41:14+00:00
I once worked at a company that got in a patent dispute with another company. As part of this I had to work with the patent lawyers and litigators, and also attend the trial.

After seeing at the trial that the expert witness testimony from both sides included some things that I could not imagine any engineer with their levels of expertise and experience saying--things that would completely destroy my credibility with colleagues if I had said them--I asked the lawyers what the heck was going on.

For example, if something specifies that some data is to be stored in a computer's "RAM cache", does it count if it is stored on a hard disk on that computer rather than the kind semiconductor memory that is connected to and addressed by the CPUs address bus?

I watched an expert witness who was a retired electrical engineer who was a member of the National Academy of Engineering and recipient of their Lifetime Achievement Award, had been the found of the computer science/computer engineering program at one of the top computer engineering schools in the US and was a professor emeritus from there, had numerous patents on some of the most important early work on modern computers and had published some of the most important early research papers in the field testify that it was common usage and commonly understood by almost all programmers and engineers that "RAM cache" included caches that were solely on hard disk because "RAM" means "Random Access Memory" and hard disks are both memory and random access.

They explained the expert witness gig to me, and it was eye opening.

Lawyers pay you a boatload of money to write a report that supports their case, then come to the trial (all expenses paid) where you spend an hour on the stand being examined and cross examined about the report and also trying to blow holes in the other side's expert report.

If you have to stretch the truth a bit (or a lot...) in your report to better help the case, it won't harm your reputation with colleagues because they all know about these expert witness jobs. So if they hear that Professor Emeritus Jones said something ridiculous as an expert witness they don't think, "Oh that's too bad...looks like he's getting senile". They think something like "Oh, that's right. I heard that he and his wife wanted to buy a $100k RV and take a road trip around the country this summer. I guess that's how he's paying for it".

I asked one of the experts on our side what he was using his expert witness money for. He was using it for a Tesla Roadster.

It should probably be noted that there are a couple of different kinds of experts. The kind I'm talking about I'll call a "general expert" because I don't actually know what if any term is used for them. They are experts in some field relevant to the case, and are there to explain that field to the court. They don't have to know much about the actual case. They just need to know what parts of their field the lawyers want them to educate the court and jury on and what the lawyers want the court and jury to believe about that field.

Their report is basically a big popular science article on the field that just concentrates on the parts the lawyers want emphasized. It is not really a lot of work to write it. They are making a totally ridiculous effective hourly rate for the gig.

There's another kind of expert that has to know a lot more about the case. For example if the case involves computer source code on both sides each side will have an expert who is given access to the other side's code and their job is to read it and understand it, and then produce a report explaining how that fits in with whatever legal theory their side is advancing. That can be a whole lot of work and so while they do make a good amount of money from this the hourly rate is much lower than that of those general experts.