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Even if you’ve been lucky and avoided tickets for years, being pulled over for speeding or drunken driving could cost you plenty. Fines, legal fees, and hiring an expert witness can add up to a “financial mugging.” In First-time driving offenders don’t get off easy , AOLautos writes:

Speeding fines and penalties are, excuse the expression, all over the map; how fast you were going or where you were speeding (school zone or construction zone for example) and whether you are a first-time offender all factor in. More than half the states use a points system to record driver infraction data — the more points, the higher the fines and possible jail terms.

Although Forbes Magazine reports that the national median for a first-time offender’s fine is $200, many states are quite entrepreneurial in their penalties for first-time speeding-related offenses:

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Marketing expert witness Gabriele Goldaper describes a case she worked on and questions, “WHY DID THEY SETTLE?”

My first case was regarding a small clothing company who sued their bank claiming that when the bank did not agree to extend additional credit, the bank was responsible for the clothing company going out of business. My defense, in representing the bank, was that analyzing the books and financial history of the clothing company gave me enough evidence to state that the clothing company was already on the way out. The clothing company was not assigning appropriate markups when determining their wholesale selling prices. In addition, the company had not set any quality standards for their production contractors and thus received a lot of returns from the stores/customers, because of quality related issues.

These returns could not be resold so there was a direct hit to their profit margins. The selling and marketing expenses were far above the standards for the apparel industry. Furthermore, there had not been enough attention paid to their too high payroll and associated expenses and no attempt had been made to bring these costs to a more realistic level. Management appeared to be lacking at every level. I agreed with the bank that further loans would have been extra risky. The bank had no quantifiable information or assurance of any kind enabling them to extend additional credit.

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Opening arguments began last week in federal court in San Francisco in the landmark human rights case of Bowoto v. Chevron. In its seventh year of litigation, the case raises important issues regarding liability of multinational corporations in U.S. courts. Survivor Larry Bowoto and eighteen other plaintiffs are accusing Chevron of collaboration with Nigerian military in brutal suppression of a protest by unarmed villagers on a Chevron offshore oil platform in the Niger Delta in 1998. Bowoto was shot during the protest; two other protesters were killed. International business expert Michael Watts, professor at the University of California at Berkeley, is among the expert witnesses testifying in the case.

For more see: AllAfrica.com

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Consumer products expert witness Gabriele Goldaper describes a case she worked on regarding a “needle in a stack.”

I was engaged by a plaintiff, who purchased several pairs of pants from a leading upscale sportswear retailer. At home, while trying on one of the pants and sitting down, he suffered severe, medically documented, injuries in a very sensitive area of his body, from a needle which was apparently still in the seam of the crotch area of the pants. My role was to testify about the manufacturing process and standard quality control needed in the production cycle of men’s pants.

To support my opinion that not enough necessary action was taken to avoid this unpleasant accident, I was able to find evidence of the lack of good quality control when reading the depositions of the various production managers and the records they kept. Product safety dictates that at each step of the production cycle inspections take place. In this case, there were not enough, satisfactory or detailed records to indicate that procedures where in place to assure the safety of the product. Typically a basic check at the finish line of production is to use a mechanism, much like a metal detector, to see if any metal, like a needle point, is lodged in any area of the garment. No record of such basic final inspection could be found.

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Insurance expert witness Barry Zalma and principal of Zalma Insurance Consultants writes that It is Necessary to Know Insurance to Fight Insurance Fraud.

Insurance fraud is a multi-billion dollar, complex, multi-faceted problem.Those charged with investigating and detecting insurance fraud must institute a serious and detailed training program for its fraud investigators to make them knowledgeable, at the very least, about:

* How to read and interpret an insurance policy

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In Five Imperatives for Expert Witnesses, SynchronicsGroup Trial Consultants, one of the oldest jury and trial consulting firms in the country, writes on “Are good experts born, or can they be trained? In this excerpt, they write on addressing the jurors ‘heart to heart.”

A third visual sign of a cooperative attitude is body orientation. A frontal orientation, where people face each other squarely, communicates interest in the interaction and a willingness to interact ‘heart to heart.’ A sideways orientation, when people literally “turn a cold shoulder” to others, indicates indifference or disinterest. And finally, when people leave the interaction, they literally “turn their back” on it, communicating their lack of interest in the other person.

Experts need to communicate clearly that they are involved in the courtroom interactions, so they will want to go out of their way to give a frontal orientation to those who address them. For instance, when addressed by the judge, it is preferable to actually turn in the chair in order to give a frontal orientation to answer the judge, instead of simply turning one’s head. When attorney clients address their experts, the experts will want to give the same frontal orientation. And even with opposing counsel, a frontal orientation is desirable because it communicates a sense of fairness and cooperation in seeking justice.

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Insurance expert witness Barry Zalma and principal of Zalma Insurance Consultants writes that It is Necessary to Know Insurance to Fight Insurance Fraud.

According to the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud: “When it comes to insurance fraud, the United States is a world leader. We arguably have the most severe problem on the planet. But we also have the most sophisticated means of combating fraud. Our systems for detecting and investigating fraud are mature and much more robust than those in other developed nations.”

Although I agree with the Coalition that the ability to detect and investigate fraud is as useful as an arrest without a conviction. Detecting and investigating fraud is merely the beginning of the process. If the fraud investigators are not sufficiently trained about insurance, insurance contract interpretation, and civil defenses to attempts at insurance fraud it does not matter how robust and mature the ability to investigate and detect fraud. The mature and robust talents must be joined with civil defenses to fraud and the criminal prosecution of the perpetrators.

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Marketing expert witness Gabriele Goldaper writes that there are BIG BUCKS IN STRIPES! She represented a leading sports apparel manufacturer which sought a declaratory judgment to allow them to continue to use stripes on their athletic apparel. The defendant took the position that stripes were a part of their trademarked logo and could not be used on any other sports apparel.

My position was that striping is used as an element of design to indicate motion and action and no one can “own” the rights to an “element of design.” Among the elements of design are: “shape”, the outline of the garment, “line”, indicating the direction of visual interest, straight lines are used to create moods and feelings and angled lines are used to suggest motion, “repetition” to create a sense of movement. A successful design is achieved when all the elements work together harmoniously. It was my opinion, supported, with documentation, that stripes, in the past and still today, are used to signal to consumers that a garment is for athletes or those wanting to look like athletes. Stripes have acquired this communicative function.

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The Vancouver Sun reports:

neurosurgery expert witness Dr. George Stuart Cameron testified Thursday that whatever happened to brain-damaged Thomas McKay while in police cells was more than just a fall. “I would expect his head was traveling at a higher velocity than just a simple fall,” said the expert.

McKay had a skull fracture over his left eye, extending across the top of his head. Cameron performed surgery to remove a blood clot formed underneath McKay’s skull lying against his brain, part of an injury he agreed was life-threatening. McKay and his family say Victoria Police Constable Greg Smith pushed McKay while his hands were cuffed behind his back so that his head struck the concrete floor.

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Marketing expert witness Gabriele Goldaper writes that there are BIG BUCKS IN STRIPES! She represented a leading sports apparel manufacturer which sought a declaratory judgment to allow them to continue to use stripes on their athletic apparel. The defendant took the position that stripes were a part of their trademarked logo and could not be used on any other sports apparel. The particular logo at issue had three stripes, spaced evenly apart. The apparel maker for whom she was rendering an opinion was using stripes, not three stripes and not similarly evenly spaced apart for their line of athletic wear.

Goldaper argued that stripes have been used well before manufacturers were making sports related apparel. As an example we saw early in our history, slaves and prisoners clothed in garments with lots of horizontal stripes. She provided extensive information and documentation of examples to support her opinion that the use of stripes has been associated with sports and athletic apparel since the development of this category of clothing. In the Olympic games in the early twentieth century we saw runners and hurdlers, males and females, wearing shorts and tops with stripes on them. The use of stripes in athletic sportswear was seen well before either the plaintiff or defendants started to produce this category of clothing.