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The licensing expert witness opines in cases regarding the multi-billion dollar intellectual property market. In Licensing Overview, Justia.com describes trademark licensing:

Trademarks are also protected intellectual property, generally in the form of a word, symbol, shape, or any sign, that is affixed to a product to indicate its source and distinguish it from other goods. A trademark holder can license that trademark, often referred to as a mark, to an individual or entity, who may then distribute products under that mark. Without a licensing agreement between those parties, anyone using a mark protected as the property of another would be subject to penalties for trademark infringement.

Intellectual property recognizes trademark rights in part to protect the public, as people come to associate a trademark with certain products and can then rely on the fact that goods bearing that mark will be consistently of the same origin and quality when they make purchasing decisions. Therefore, trademark holders must enforce their right to use the mark, and if they fail to do so, may be found to have abandoned the trademark, leaving it open to use by anyone.

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In Clinical Standards in Medicine medical expert witness Barry E. Gustin, MD, MPH, FAAEM, writes:

Potential limitations should be recognized and dealt with such as the possibility that a particular standard becomes obsolete because of new discoveries or advances; or situations where environmental factors such as disaster, overcrowding, or multiple high acuity emergencies negate the applicability of standard clinical policies. Likewise, policy standards can never supersede the physician’s clinical judgement which must be taken as the final word in making patient care decisions. This is because of the immense number of clinical variables and continually changing circumstances in both stable and unstable patients with complex multifactorial systemic medical problems.

For maximum effectiveness and utility, it is clear that standards should be developed in the areas that place the patient at highest risk for death or debility. For the physician, these are often the areas of greatest liability. Also, it is important that standards are developed for common presenting complaints rather than for obscure uncommon entities. Finally, because cost-containment has become a central issue, clinical standards should also target those conditions or situations that may result in high charges.

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The licensing expert witness opines in cases regarding the multi-billion dollar intellectual property market. In Licensing Overview, Justia.com explains:

A company or person with intellectual property protected by law who wishes to license that property enters into a licensing agreement with a user, and that agreement becomes a contract, governed by applicable contract laws, which can vary from state to state. International licensing agreements also may be subject to additional regulations, depending upon what is being licensed and how it will be used.

An intellectual property license also varies with what is being licensed, but generally has several common components, including a specified length of time, agreement as to where the license is valid, provision for renewal, and any limitations the licensor deems important to the agreement. Sometimes, other laws will limit what limitations may be imposed in a licensing agreement. In most licensing agreements, the licensee pays a fee to the licensor in order to use his or her intellectual property for financial gain.

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In Clinical Standards in Medicine medical expert witness Barry E. Gustin, MD, MPH, FAAEM, writes:

The existence of clinical standards would enable malpractice litigators to be more selective in their choice of cases. In situations where a clinical standard was followed but where there was an adverse patient outcome, litigators would be less inclined to pursue the matter. In situations where deviation from clinical standards, the litigation process would still allow physicians to explain their reasoning and, in and of itself, is not de facto proof of negligence.

The actual development of clinical standards is complex, time consuming and expensive. In general, these standards should be developed by physician organizations, particularly the specialty societies utilizing appropriate ancillary input from administrators, economists, etc. They should be based on current information and clinical experience and be as comprehensive and specific as possible. They should be periodically reviewed and revised and widely disseminated.

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W. R. Grace along with five individual defendants, filed a motion Sunday to exclude the toxicology expert witness testimony of Dr. Aubrey Miller. Dr. Miller, an investigator with the EPA, is the prosecution’s key witness. WRG was successful in an earlier attempt to limit the testimony of another key witness, Paul Peronard, who served as the EPA’s on-site coordinator in Libby after the town’s asbestos contamination first made headlines ten years ago. The Mesothelioma & Asbestos Awareness Center also reports:

The company and five one-time Grace officials are charged with a federal conspiracy involving Clean Air Act violations and obstruction of justice. The jury must find whether the company and its top employees knew they were endangering the community of Libby by mining the asbestos-laced ore and whether they were violating federal law as they did so.

Thousands of Libby residents have been diagnosed with asbestos-related illnesses, including asbestosis and pleural mesothelioma cancer. Previous testimony from another doctor revealed that approximately one new case of asbestos-caused disease is diagnosed per week in Libby.

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McClatchy Company, the third largest newspaper company in the US, reports that America’s five largest banks, which already have received $145 billion in taxpayer bailout dollars, still face potentially catastrophic losses from exotic investments if economic conditions substantially worsen, their latest financial reports show.

Corporate governance expert witness and president of Everest Management Gary Kopff has scrutinized the big banks’ financial reports. He noted that Citibank now lists 60 percent of its $301 billion in potential losses from its wheeling and dealing in derivatives in the highest-risk category, up from 40 percent in early 2007. Citibank is a unit of New York-based Citigroup. In Monday trading on the New York Stock Exchange, Citigroup shares closed at $1.05.

McClatchy.com writes:

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In Clinical Standards in Medicine medical expert witness Barry E. Gustin, MD, MPH, FAAEM, writes:

Forces both inside and outside of medicine are responsible for the trend towards the development of clinical standards. Physicians have been motivated by their desire to establish acceptable levels of care within the various specialties. This ultimately homogenizes and standardizes the basic approach to patient’s problems, is patient-centered, allows for the development of quality assurance and improvement programs, and demonstrates to the public that physicians as a group are concerned about the quality of care they provide to their patients.

Forces outside of medicine, however, are probably more potent than these internal forces at bringing increasing pressure to the issue of standards development. Malpractice carriers see the creation of widely-accepted clinical standards as one route towards reduced malpractice losses. Ditto for several states, including Maine and New Jersey, which have mandated the development of clinical standards because of their involvement in underwriting malpractice insurance plans.

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In Discussion of Insurance Capital as a Shared Asset, actuarial expert witness Robert Bear discusses what he describes as Donald Mango’s ground breaking work Insurance Capital as a Shared Asset:

Mr. Mango differentiates between consumptive and non-consumptive use of an asset. A consumptive use involves the transfer of a portion or share of the asset from the communal asset to an individual, such as in the reservoir water usage and fishery examples. Nonconsumptive use involves temporary, limited transfer of control which is intended to be non-depletive in that it is left intact for subsequent users. Examples of non-consumptive use indude boating on a reservoir, playing on a golf course or renting a hotel room.

While shared assets are typically used in only one of the two manners, some shared assets can be used in either a consumptive or non-consumptive manner, depending on the situation. Mr. Mango gives the example of renting a hotel room. While the intended use is benign occupancy (non-consumptive), there is the risk that a guest may fall asleep with a lit cigarette and burn down a wing of the hotel (clearly consumptive).

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Pennsylvania prosecutors have questioned the admissibility of criminology expert witness Allison Redlich’s testimony in the homicide trial of Frederick Anthony Robinson. Redlich testified Wednesday by phone about her educational background and the methodology of her research of false confessions. She is currently an assistant professor in the school of criminal justice at the Albany, N.Y. branch of the State University of New York.

Robinson’s attorneys have said the jury’s understanding of the pathology of a false confession is integral to their defense. “This is a topic where there is extensive, lengthy research,” Redlich stated. The expert witness would testify during the trial about the generalities of false confessions and common characteristics but prosecutors believe her testimony should be inadmissible in the trial scheduled to begin next week.

For more, see Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

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In Discussion of Insurance Capital as a Shared Asset, actuarial expert witness Robert Bear discusses what he describes as Donald Mango’s ground breaking work Insurance Capital as a Shared Asset:

Actuaries frequently allocate capital to line of business or individual risk in an effort to calculate risk loads or evaluate profitability by calculating a risk adjusted return in the form of a return on equity (ROE) metric. Concerns have been expressed about ROE methods, especially the fact that the value inherent in the unallocated surplus is ignored (the entire surplus supports each and every risk). In 2005 ASTIN Donald Mango’s paper on “Insurance Capital as a Shared Asset” has introduced a method that eliminates the need for allocation of capital which he believes is more grounded in insurer realities.

Donald Mango treats insurance capital as a shared asset, with the insurance contracts having simultaneous rights to access potentially all of that shared capital. Shared assets can be scarce and essential public entities (e.g., reservoirs, fisheries, national forests), or desirable private entities (e.g., hotels, golf courses, beach houses). The access to and use of the assets is controlled and regulated by their owners; this control and regulation is essential to preserve the asset for future use. The aggregation risk is a common characteristic of shared asset usage, since shared assets typically have more members who could potentially use the asset than the asset can safely bear.

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