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Comment by GCA10 | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot more going on here than the initial story reports.

For more than a few academics, making big $$$ as an expert witness is a magnificent source of side income. (Fees of $1,000/hour, including lots of open-ended prep time, can be found.) That begs the question: Did the research lead to the desire to be an expert witness? Or did the desire to be an expert witness define the nature of the research project?

We'd need to know a lot more about the origins of this project before being able to referee this one. But if the state of California is worried about litigants using "researchers" to find and filter data that ordinarily would be available only through legal discovery processes, that's not a crazy worry.

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I went to the Apple v. Samsung trial in 2016 or so, and the highest paid expert witness that day was $850. The other two were $450 and $350. Where are you getting this number?

The prep time is included in your hours. The $850 guy said he'd put in 900 hours.

(btw, it IS excruciatingly boring work. But of course, the money.)

So the $850 guy got $850×900? So $765k? How many months were the 900 hours split over? This sounds absolutely ridiculous

It's great pay if you can get it, and I'm sure it wasn't enough to be noticed in the legal costs of that case.

Just for frame of reference, there are 2080 work hours in a year assuming 40hrs/week. So imagine making 765k for like 5 months of work.

They need to be able to have 5 months where they can clear the calendars and just work on that. It's still a lot for 5 months, but I imagine there's a lot of downtime too. Are they getting 5+ months every year?

>hey need to be able to have 5 months where they can clear the calendars and just work on that

Otherwise known as "having a job"

Yeah. Having a job seems like it could keep you from regularly being able to stop everything for 5 months of high paid work. Maybe the money is enough from the few months that they're fine with it (and maybe it's easy for them to get a new job after or go back somewhere they've worked before). I'm genuinely curious. It seems like a lot to make for 5 months, but what do their earnings look like over a 5 or 10 year period?

I suppose its actually spread out over a long period of time

Go look at what partners at the biggest white-shoe law firms make. Over $1,000/hr.

Is that what they make or what they BILL. IT, Admin staff, paralegal, Jr lawyers, building, pro Bono and other marketing activities etc. It's paid for somehow.

believe it or not, they make more! they make money off of what the associates and junior partners bill, too. but yes, that figure is what they bill.

I believe paralegals and junior lawyers bill for their time, too, also at eye-watering rates.

The witness actually got that $850 an hour. The other stuff you mentioned was absorbed by the law firm and billed to the client(s).

are they being called in as expert witnesses?

The discussion was whether billing over $800/hr was "ridiculous." It's actually common for credentialed professionals who are at the very top of very specific fields.

Not for Samsung. Or Google.

Apple's damages expert got paid $2 million.

One month of work for $765k. I was expecting one or two orders of magnitude lower payouts for a single expert witness in a single case. Who can afford to pay this?

I’d love to hire people that can work 900 hours in a single month. Just tell me where to find them. Or, wait, maybe they work in higher dimensions. Drat.

Where are you getting this "single month" stuff?

The person they're replying to who said "one month".

One is singular.

I didn't say that, though.

They weren't replying to you, they were replying to neurocline.

then they should have replied directly to neurocline, who didn't say anything about 900 hours.

Sorry, that was neurocline responding directly to vasco. Either way, they weren't responding directly to you.

vasco was the one responding to you.

What you can work and what you can bill are two different things. I know of a few people that charge their rate from the minute they leave on a trip which is basically the min they put down their phone after accepting the contract to the minute they get back. However, they are all doing emergency, the company is losing tens of thousands per hour on the low end until this is fixed, kind of things.

In practice it’s equivalent to charging a higher hourly rate, but it makes billing simpler for these kinds of contracts.

> One month of work for $765k.

900 hours is a bit more than one month. Even if he only worked 24x7 that's over 5 weeks. Assuming 10 hour days and 5 days a week that's 18 weeks, just shy of 13 weeks if 10 hours a day and 7 days a week.

Apple and/or Samsung

There aren't even 900 hours in a month. That's 765k for 900 billed hours, and you have to imagine that a good chunk of unbilled hours also occurred. So maybe that's for the equivalent of 8 months of boring work. Not continuous 8 months either, you have to schedule other things between prepping. A lot of money. But not for a billion dollar lawsuit.

As for "who can afford this" is a company worth tens of billions suing over a major product line vs a trillion dollar company.

> and you have to imagine that a good chunk of unbilled hours also occurred

No, I don’t have to imagine that expert witnesses do an hourly-billed contract gig but are bad billing hours.

Once they get the contract. I guarantee that the recruitment process and negotiation process was more involved than a phone call. And there could be work specifically excluded as "billable hours" that is still work. For instance, is the time to fly out compensated?

All work that an expert does for a case is billable, including travel time. However, experts will frequently provide discounted or even unbilled work for individuals in certain circumstances (like criminal cases where the expert is testing in a forensic capacity to counter improper forensic analysis presented by a prosecution expert).

Some experts charge for their time at a reduced rate (e.g. 50%) for travel, some a predetermined amount (taking the risk of delays on themselves), some only for the cost of the tickets, hotels, meals, etc.

There is, AFAIK and based on what I can Google, no universal answer.

> I guarantee that the recruitment process and negotiation process was more involved than a phone call.

I suppose, but do you think that was more than 9 hours? Because 9 hours is only 1% of their time.

It could easily be more than 9 hours. How many people spend longer than that interviewing for a technical position across five rounds? And this is for one of the few experts Samsung will put up to defend a $xxx million suit.

Plus, he works for MIT. He probably needs to clear his consulting work, which could be quick or not. MIT might have wanted a percentage. And if he wanted to use a grad student to assist him in prep work, negotiating that can add up too.

There are other ways to add to the precontract numbers, but that should be enough.

Nine hours per round times five rounds plus another nine hours to get clearance is still only 6%

And that's a huge number of hours for each round.

It's really hard to reach "a good chunk" when compared to 900 hours. I was considering saying 90 hours in my first post.

If MIT wants a cut that's a different issue, and I doubt negotiating that will take particularly long.

Specialized attorneys with subject matter expertise are billing them $1500/hr, so $850 is kind of a bargain.

He was an MIT professor of CS.

Who said "one month"?

not sure if $850 is an hourly, but $850 after 2016->2023 inflation is $1095 per hour

The witness you are talking about was Martin Rinard.

Inflation easily puts $850 over the $1k mark today.

So you're ignoring two of the numbers and just taking the third?

That guy was a star.

I litigated mesothelioma cases and our experts were paid $600-$1,100/hr, depending on the expert. $1,000 is high but not unheard of. What’s really wild is, in addition to prep time, they get paid that from the second they cross the threshold of their front door through when the return; many of our experts were flown in from the middle of the country to Oregon so they sure pocketed hefty sums.

I think there are cost maximizing lawsuits (like mesothelioma) and then lawsuits that aren’t seeking to recover damages. And they pay their expert witnesses very differently.

I also think there are many academics unwilling to serve as expert witnesses for tort lawsuits and they are different from “professional” expert witnesses.

Good point. I doubt there's much money involved in this Stanford thing.

I worked on that trial! Maybe I saw you there :)

What was your role in the trial? Was there anything from your experience that stood out as particularly surprising or interesting?

spectator. I added a top-level comment about this.

Attorney for Samsung.

My main recollection was that the opening statements from the lead Samsung attorney weren't that charismatic or convincing to me. I was surprised it just wasn't that... Good.

Years later I suspect the strategy of Samsung (which certainly worked, if it was the approach) was to build a good case for appeal, rather than to focus on winning the trial itself. As it turned out, apple won the trial but Samsung won the appeals.

a friend of my is a full time expert witness. he went to school for an engineering degree and did 1 year of industry work. he now provides expert testimony on technical cases all over the country. they fly him out to nice hotels with a generous per diem. he gets paid very well. they give him the materials to present in court. it’s a very well paying position

850 in 2016 dollars is almost 1100 in 2023 dollars.

The main point of the article is that the CDE is preventing those who partner with them from testifying about anything, even what's unrelated to the data CDE provides - 'Viewpoint discrimination'.

> That begs the question: Did the research lead to the desire to be an expert witness? Or did the desire to be an expert witness define the nature of the research project?

I don't think these questions are productive. You can't truly know why someone does what they do. And making the suggestion that the researchers tainted their research because of the money is purely speculative and unfair.

Is there a reason not to take TFA at it's word, which says that the litigation in progress (for which expert testimony was requested) does not relate to the research those experts were conducting through agreements signed with CDE?

The whole problem here is that as a soon as a researcher signs the contract, they are barred from participating in any litigation against the department even if it doesn't involve the private data they were working with. So you have a large population of experts removed from the pool, because all the experts are likely to be involved in some type of research.

It's not a "crazy worry" but defendants in civil suits have all kinds of worries. Regarding impugning Stanford researchers (N.b. no scare quotes) as being motivated by a consulting fee, that's what those fees are for: to get the best possible expert witnesses.

I don't begrudge a good defense attempting to block a litigant's experts, either. However, everyone is better off for expert witnesses being motivated by fees to provide the best expert testimony. If there was something untoward about their motivation, it would be Stanford's problem.

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