Opinion ID: 4551037
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Exclusion of Plaintiﬀs’ Experts

Text: We apply two layers of review to a district court’s decision to exclude expert evidence under Federal Rule of Evidence 702. First, we review de novo a district court’s application of the legal framework. Second, if the court applied the correct legal analysis, we review its decision to admit or exclude ex‐ pert testimony for abuse of discretion. C.W. v. Textron, Inc., 807 F.3d 827, 835 (7th Cir. 2015), discussing Rule 702 and Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharm., Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993). Plain‐ tiffs imply that it was improper for the district court to ana‐ lyze the admissibility of their expert evidence sua sponte, without adversarial briefing. Defendants raised the issue in an irregular way, in their sur‐reply on their motion for sum‐ mary judgment. The procedural irregularity does not affect No. 19‐2984 7 our decision here. A district court is entitled to rule on expert admissibility sua sponte. See Lewis, 561 F.3d at 704, citing Kirstein v. Parks Corp., 159 F.3d 1065, 1067 (7th Cir. 1998); O’Conner v. Commonwealth Edison Co., 13 F.3d 1090, 1094, 1107 (7th Cir. 1994). As long as the district court has given the par‐ ties an opportunity to be heard and applies the correct legal framework under Rule 702, we are satisfied. See Gopalratnam v. Hewlett‐Packard Co., 877 F.3d 771, 782 (7th Cir. 2017). Before the district court, defendants K & B and Wharton argued that the opinions of plaintiffs’ experts Mike DiTallo and Adam Grill were speculative conclusions not based on the facts of the case. Citing Federal Rule of Evidence 702, which requires that the expert testimony be “based on suffi‐ cient facts or data” and “the product of reliable principles and methods,” the district court agreed. In particular, the district court was concerned that Grill’s report cited barely any case‐ specific evidence and failed to explain the method he used, and that when he was asked about these same issues at his deposition, he did not provide any further detail. We find no abuse of discretion here; the district court clearly applied Rule 702 and excluded Grill’s report on the basis of specific, iden‐ tifiable problems with regard to relevant factors. The district court’s exclusion of the DiTallo report is a closer call, but we find no abuse of discretion. DiTallo cau‐ tioned that “there is not enough data to perform a detailed crash reconstruction in this matter,” such that he could not say for certain whether the accident happened as Perez testi‐ fied it did. Based on the limited data available to him, though, DiTallo opined that Perez’s version of events was possible but Wharton’s was not physically possible. In particular, he relied 8 No. 19‐2984 on photographic evidence of the site of impact on Perez’s ve‐ hicle to conclude that Perez could not have been coming from the left shoulder at the time of the collision. In DiTallo’s view, the site of impact, the right rear of the car, is consistent with Perez’s version of events but not Wharton’s (in which the trac‐ tor‐trailer would have hit the car’s side). Plaintiffs argue on appeal that DiTallo’s limited conclu‐ sions were appropriate and reliable in relation to the limited evidence available to him. Though the district court was not specific in its reason for excluding DiTallo’s report, it appears that the court found it too indeterminate and, as the court wrote, not “sufficiently grounded in the facts of this case,” de‐ spite its modest conclusions. On abuse‐of‐discretion review, we cannot overturn this ruling. Nonetheless, genuine issues of material fact remain even after the exclusion of Grill’s and DiTallo’s reports.