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OSHA has inspected the Cowboys indoor practice facility that collapsed Saturday and has up to six months to conclude an investigation. Summit Structures LLC of Allentown, Pa., built the $4 million facility in 2003. A Pennsylvania court ruled in 2007 that Summit was negligent in the design and construction of a membrane-covered warehouse that collapsed when a major snowstorm struck Philadelphia in 2003.

The building was constructed for the Philadelphia Regional Port Authority, which brought the lawsuit. In his ruling, Judge Allan Tereshko wrote that structure came down “under the weight of the (year’s) first significant snowfall.” Those conditions, Tereshko wrote, “would have been easily tolerated by the building had it been properly designed and constructed.” Pennsylvania-based structural engineering expert witness Charles Timbie testified that the reasons for the collapse included miscalculating how much snow the roof could hold and a failure to install the required number of “king pins.”

Excerpted from MySACowboys.com.

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Bills seeking to reform expert witness standards and prevent “venue shopping” will be heard today at a joint hearing of the Illinois General Assembly’s Senate and House Judiciary Committees. The expert witness bill would align Illinois’ expert witness qualifications with those used in the federal court systems. These rules are tighter than those the state currently applies.

Under the venue reform bill, plaintiffs would no longer be able to sue companies that do business in a county but who don’t have an office there. If the bill passed out of committee as is and became law, plaintiffs would no longer be able to sue a company in Illinois unless at least one defendant has an office or headquarters in that county. “If we are going to attract new jobs and opportunities, then we need to make reforming our legal system a priority,” said Travis Akin, executive director of Illinois Lawsuit Abuse Watch. “It is time we put the brakes on out-of-state personal injury lawyers from targeting Illinois as a great place to file their junk lawsuits.”

For more, see MadisonRecord.com.

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A military forensic expert witness testified at a recent court-martial that kits used by the military to collect evidence in sexual assault cases do not have enough equipment or the necessary paperwork for investigators. Furthermore, those using the kits might not be receiving the proper training, she said. Navy Cmdr. Lovett Robinson, senior sexual assault forensic examiner for the National Naval Medical Center, was called to testify as a sexual abuse expert witness at the recent court-martial of Sgt. Vince Jahalal.

During questioning from Jahalal’s defense attorney, Robinson testified that she believes the three pages of paperwork included in the kits don’t supply enough information on the evidence collected and circumstances surrounding the case.

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viralMeme writes that the Minnesota Supreme Court has upheld the right of drunk-driving defendants to request the source code for the breathalyzer machines used as evidence against them, but only when the defendant provides sufficient arguments to suggest that a review of the code may have an impact on the case.

Defendant Timothy Brunner “submitted a memorandum and nine exhibits to support his request for the source code,” which included testimony from a computer expert witness about the usefulness of source code in finding voting machine defects, and a report about a similar case in New Jersey where defects were found in the breathalyzer’s source code. This was enough for the Supreme Court to acknowledge that an examination of the code could “relate to Brunner’s guilt or innocence.”

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In THE PERFECT STORM: The Science Behind Subrogating Catastrophic Flood Losses, hydrology expert witness Richard Van Bruggen writes on the 100-Year Storm versus the 100-Year Flood:

Two sets of terminologies which are confused more than any other involve confusing the 100-year storm with the 100-year flood. These are two distinct and different events. Floods are classified according to their frequency and depth. For instance, there are 10-year, 25-year, 50-year, 100-year, and 500-year floods. A 100-year flood occurs less frequently than a 10-year flood, but because it has a larger volume and greater depth of water, it has far more destructive power, causes more damage, and is a more serious threat to human safety. We do not necessarily get a 100-year flood from a 100-year rainfall. This is where man comes into play. God may send a 10-year rainfall, but it is man that transforms it into the 100-year flood. Whether or not a 100-year rainfall causes a 100-year flood depends on the “time of concentration,” of the watershed, which itself, depends on watershed size, runoff characteristics, and other geological conditions.

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An addiction expert witness testified Wednesday in Noblesville, IN, that Chad Cottrell was addicted to methamphetamine at the time he killed Trisha Cottrell, 29, and her two daughters from a previous marriage, Brittany Williams, 12, and Victoria “Tori” Williams, 10. Dr. Joseph Wu, an expert in PET scan brain imagining, said Cottrell’s brain showed signs of “abnormalities” in areas that normally regulate social behavior and “impulse” control.

Defense attorney Eric Koselke also called Robert Lee Smith, a psychology expert witness who testified that Cottrell showed signs of possible brain damage, paranoia, and suffered from a “borderline personality disorder.” “The combination of those factors led him not to be able to control his impulse” to commit the violent crimes, Smith said.

Excerpted from TribStar.com.

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In THE PERFECT STORM: The Science Behind Subrogating Catastrophic Flood Losses, hydrology expert witness Richard Van Bruggen writes:

The term “100-year flood” still seems to cause confusion among public lenders, professionals, and insurance companies. Many continue to believe it is a description of a flood that occurs only once every 100 years. In truth, the term “100-year flood” is an abbreviated way of describing the magnitude of a rainfall and subsequent flood event that has a one percent chance of occurring. It is important to note that the same statistical chances apply for any storm at any time and any given year. The “return period” (or recurrence interval) of an annual maximum flood event has a return period of X years if its magnitude is equaled or exceeded once, on the average, every X years. A reciprocal of X (1/X) is the exceedance probability of the event, meaning the probability that the event is equaled or exceeded in any one year. As an example, a 100-year return period (1/100) means that there is a 1% probability of an occurrence in any one year. A 10-year return period (1/10) means that there is a 10% probability of an occurrence in any one year. A 500-year return period (1/500) means that there is a 0.2% probability of such an occurrence in any one year. This is why many hydrologists have tried to change the terminology from “100-year flood” to a “1 percent flood”.

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Software expert witness Robert Schumann testified yesterday for a group of Hollywood studios in the case against RealNetworks. Plaintiffs allege that Real identified and actively worked to remove the copy protections from DVD discs with its software product, RealDVD. The expert stated that he was able to copy seven movies to a thumb drive that was completely unprotected and lacked the device key that a DVD drive included. Plaintiff’s attorney Rohit Singla implied that RealDVD had circumvented the device key. PCMag.com reports:

Singla tried to make the point that DVDs contain several copy-protection mechanisms, which RealNetworks allegedly methodically identified and worked to supercede. The protections included both device and bus encryption, part of the Content Scrambling System (CSS) code that must be included with every DVD. But Singla also attempted to point out that many DVDs come with two third-party pieces of copy-protection software licensed by Macrovision and Sony DADC, called ARccOS and RipGuard, which have been placed on DVDs to give them additional copy protection.

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In THE PERFECT STORM: The Science Behind Subrogating Catastrophic Flood Losses, hydrology expert witness Richard Van Bruggen writes:

Natural disasters, especially major flood losses, remain the nemesis of most insurance carriers. The damages can be astronomical and the chances of subrogation appear slim when everyone has suffered similar damage. However, when it seems that only God is responsible for sending devastation of such magnitude, it is time for subrogation professionals to roll up their sleeves and get to work. It is also time to hire an expert in hydrology or hydraulics. With the help of a hydrology expert, Matthiesen, Wickert & Lehrer recovered more than $7 million for Lloyds of London in the Great U.S.A. Flood of 1993. Five years later, with the help of expert, Rick Van Bruggen, Matthiesen, Wickert & Lehrer recovered more than $2.5 million for Transportation Insurance Company after the Great California Flood. With perfect storms such as these, subrogation recovery almost always seems impossible. In reality, however, quite the contrary is true. Flood waters, just like pieces on a chess board, never lie. The subrogation professional’s distinct advantage is that while God may send the rain, what happens to the flood waters once they reach Earth is almost always affected by man.

The behavior of water is predictable. It is affected by gravity, seeks its own level, and follows the contour of the Earth’s surface – whether natural or man-made. As a result, with the use of a qualified hydrologist, subrogation counsel can accurately map, mimic, and image the exact behavior of the flood waters, before, during and after the flood event. This ability to prove what happened to the water means that we can accurately point to the effect that man-made objects, construction projects, barriers, and other obstacles had on the water, and show precisely how the specific flood damage being subrogated was affected or caused by these man-made conditions. It is, therefore, critical that the subrogation professional have a working knowledge of and understand the behavior of water and the science behind hydrology.

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Dr. Martin Williams has twenty years experience as an expert witness on the standard of care in therapist-patient sex and other ethics matters involving psychologists, clinical social workers, marriage and family therapists, and psychiatrists. In Therapist-Patient Sex Twenty Years Later: A View From the Courtroom, the psychology expert witness writes:

A conservative, risk management backlash against unethical psychotherapists has developed. Because of the increased number of lawsuits against psychotherapists over the past twenty years, malpractice insurance companies have led the charge to bring continuing education on ethics and risk-management to all psychotherapists. Numerous such courses are offered, some resulting in a discount on the therapist’s malpractice policy and some required for state license renewal. This represents a substantial change from the approach to ethics in the earlier era. Many psychotherapists of the Baby Boom generation, who trained in the nineteen sixties and seventies, had never even been exposed to a course on ethics, let alone risk management, as part of their professional training. The insurance companies support today’s continuing education courses, or even sponsor them themselves, in the hope that those who complete such courses will engage fewer of the behaviors that resulted in lawsuits and insurance payouts.

Risk management training is somewhat different from ethics education. Ethics, briefly, is about doing what is right. Risk management is about avoiding doing that which is risky-meaning that which is likely to provoke a lawsuit. Risky behavior by a psychotherapist is not necessarily unethical. Indeed, under certain circumstances, risky behavior may be the most ethical course of action. (See the recent book by Ken Pope and Melba Vasquez, “Ethics in Psychotherapy and Counseling: A Practical Guide,” Jossey-Bass, 2007, for a more complete discussion of the interplay between ethics and risk management.)

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