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When is a Treating Physician Not a Treating Physician?

December 25th, 2014

When the so-called treating physician is handpicked by an attorney to advance his client’s lawsuit. See Daniel E. Cummins, “Did Your Attorney Refer You to that Doctor?” (Dec. 17, 2014).

Treating physicians are a powerful weapon in health-effects litigation because they can deliver what appears to opinions untainted by “litigation bias.” Jurors and judges, challenged by difficult medical causation issues, find the caring attitude of treating physicians as a powerful proxy for the truth, which alleviates the need to think critically and carefully about epidemiology, statistics, toxicology, and the like. Of course, some treating physicians are biased by their care and treatment of the patient, especially when their treatment did not go so well. Physicians who were not able to cure or ameliorate their patients’ conditions may welcome the opportunity to advocate for their patients to give them, or their survivors, to make up for their failure to help through the healing arts. Patient-advocacy bias, however, is more difficult to appreciate than hired-expert witness bias.

Plaintiffs’ counsel often base their litigation strategy upon using treating physicians on causation or damages issues to take advantage of jurors’ and judges’ perceptions of treating physicians as motivated by beneficence rather than lucre[1]. Of course, there are dangers in these tactics. For one thing, the treating physicians, as in Tamraz v. Lincoln Elec. Co., may not really be up to the task of delivering a causation opinion, and the plaintiffs’ counsel’s cynical tactic will make a weaker case weaker still in the eyes of the jury. And then the treating physician may not subscribe fully to the plaintiffs’ lawyer’s litigation goals and theories[2]. See “Politics of Expert Witnesses – The Treating Physician” (June 7, 2012).

Plaintiffs’ counsel may attempt to avoid the weaknesses of their treating physician strategy by selecting a carefully screened physician, ready to endorse plaintiffs’ litigation theories, and then to refer the claimant to this physician under cover of an asserted attorney-client privilege. A recent trial court in Pennsylvania, however, dealt a serious blow to this covert strategy by holding that the lawyer’s directing of his client’s medical care is not within the scope of the attorney-client relationship, and thus not a privileged communication. English v. Stepchin, No. CP-23-CV-786-2014, 101 Del. 424 (C.P. Del. Cty. Nov. 12, 2014 Kenney, P.J.). In English, plaintiff’s counsel asserted the privilege and objected to defense counsel’s deposition question whether plaintiff’s counsel had referred plaintiff to her treating physician.

On motion to compel discovery, Delaware County President Judge Chad F. Kenney overruled the objection, and held that “whether counsel referred Plaintiff to her treating physicians does not constitute legal assistance so as to justify properly invoking the attorney-client privilege.” As Judge Kenney explained:

“Clearly, whether counsel referred Plaintiff to her treating physicians is not a communication involved in either rendering a legal opinion or securing legal services. Furthermore, we conclude that the communication of such information does not constitute assistance in a legal matter so as to properly invoke the attorney-client privilege.

* * *

The disclosure of such information is not of a nature as would discourage trust or candid communication between a lawyer and a client and we are of the opinion that it does not outweigh the interest in the accessibility of material evidence to further the truth determining process.”

Id. at 425. The assertion of the attorney-client privilege was thus rejected, and the plaintiff was required to provide details as to how she came to go to her so-called treating physician.

The English decision represents a symmetrical paring of the attorney-client privilege to match the limitations imposed by other recent decisions on defense counsel. See, e.g., In re Vioxx Prods. Liab. Litig., 501 F. Supp. 2d 789, 800, 802 (E.D.La. 2007)(“We could not see the legal significance of these comments…” by in-house counsel on “scientific reports, articles accepted for publication in noted journals, and research proposals”); Weitz & Luxenberg P.C. v. Georgia-Pacific LLC, 2013 WL 2435565, 2013 NY Slip Op 04127 (June 6, 2013).

[1] See, e.g., Simmons v. Novartis Pharm. Corp., 2012 WL 2016246, *2, *7 (6th Cir. 2012) (affirming exclusion of retained expert witness, as well as a treating physician who relied solely upon a limited selection of medical studies given to him by plaintiffs’ counsel); Tamraz v. BOC Group Inc., No. 1:04-CV-18948, 2008 WL 2796726 (N.D.Ohio July 18, 2008)(denying Rule 702 challenge to treating physician’s causation opinion), rev’d sub nom. Tamraz v. Lincoln Elec. Co., 620 F.3d 665 (6th Cir. 2010) (carefully reviewing record of trial testimony of plaintiffs’ treating physician; reversing judgment for plaintiff based in substantial part upon treating physician’s speculative causal assessment created by plaintiffs’ counsel), cert. denied, 131 S. Ct. 2454 (2011).  See generally Robert Ambrogi, “A ‘Masterly’ Opinion on Expert Testimony,” Bullseye: October 2010; David Walk, “A masterly Daubert opinion” (Sept. 15, 2010);  Ellen Melville, “Comment, Gating the Gatekeeper: Tamraz v. Lincoln Electric Co. and the Expansion of Daubert Reviewing Authority,” 53 B.C. L. Rev. 195 (2012) (student review that mistakenly equates current Rule 702 law with the Supreme Court’s 1993 Daubert decision, while ignoring subsequent precedent and revision of Rule 702).

[2] In the welding fume litigation, inspired by the money and tactics of ex-convict Richard Scruggs, plaintiffs’ counsel adopted a dual strategy of co-opting a local treating physician, and alternatively, having their ready, willing, and able retained expert witness, Dr. Paul Nausieda, claim that he had created a physician-patient relationship with the claimant.

 

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More Case Report Mischief in the Gadolinium Litigation

November 28th, 2014

The Decker case is one curious decision, by the MDL trial court, and the Sixth Circuit. Decker v. GE Healthcare Inc., ___ F.3d ___, 2014 FED App. 0258P, 2014 U.S. App. LEXIS 20049 (6th Cir. Oct. 20, 2014). First, the Circuit went out of its way to emphasize that the trial court had discretion, not only in evaluating the evidence on a Rule 702 challenge, but also in devising the criteria of validity[1]. Second, the courts ignored the role and the weight being assigned to Federal Rule of Evidence 703, in winnowing the materials upon which the defense expert witnesses could rely. Third, the Circuit approved what appeared to be extremely asymmetric gatekeeping of plaintiffs’ and defendant’s expert witnesses. The asymmetrical standards probably were the basis for emphasizing the breadth of the trial court’s discretion to devise the criteria for assessing scientific validity[2].

In barring GEHC’s expert witnesses from testifying about gadolinium-naive nephrogenic systemic fibrosis (NSF) cases, Judge Dan Polster, the MDL judge, appeared to invoke a double standard. Plaintiffs could adduce any case report or adverse event report (AER) on the theory that the reports were relevant to “notice” of a “safety signal” between gadolinium-based contrast agents in MRI and NSF. Defendants’ expert witnesses, however, were held to the most exacting standards of clinical identity with the plaintiff’s particular presentation of NSP, biopsy-proven presence of Gd in affected tissue, and documentation of lack of GBCA-exposure, before case reports would be permitted as reliance materials to support the existence of gadolinium-naïve NSF.

A fourth issue with the Decker opinion is the latitude it permitted the district court to allow testimony from plaintiffs’ pharmacovigilance expert witness, Cheryl Blume, Ph.D., over objections, to testify about the “signal” created by the NSF AERs available to GEHC. Decker at *11. At the same trial, the MDL judge prohibited GEHC’s expert witness, Dr. Anthony Gaspari, to testify that the AERs described by Blume did not support a clinical diagnosis of NSF.

On a motion for reconsideration, Judge Polster reaffirmed his ruling on grounds that

(1) the AERs were too incomplete to rule in or rule out a diagnosis of NSF, although they were sufficient to create a “signal”;

(2) whether the AERs were actual cases of NSF was not relevant to their being safety signals;

(3) Dr. Gaspari was not an expert in pharmacovigilance, which studied “signals” as opposed to causation; and

(4) Dr. Gaspari’s conclusion that the AERs were not NSF was made without reviewing all the information available to GEHC at the time of the AERs.

Decker at *12.

The fallacy of this stingy approach to Dr. Gaspari’s testimony lies in the courts’ stubborn refusal to recognize that if an AER was not, as a matter of medical science, a case of NSF, then it could not be a “signal” of a possible causal relationship between GBCA and NSF. Pharmacovigilance does not end with ascertaining signals; yet the courts privileged Blume’s opinions on signals even though she could not proceed to the next step and evaluate diagnostic accuracy and causality. This twisted logic makes a mockery of pharmacovigilance. It also led to the exclusion of Dr. Gaspari’s testimony on a key aspect of plaintiffs’ liability evidence.

The erroneous approach pioneered by Judge Polster was compounded by the district court’s refusal to give a jury instruction that AERs were only relevant to notice, and not to causation. Judge Polster offered his reasoning that “the instruction singles out one type of evidence, and adds, rather than minimizes, confusion.” Judge Polster cited the lack of any expert witness testimony that suggested that AERs showed causation and “besides, it doesn’t matter because those patients are not, are not the plaintiffs.” Decker at *17.

The lack of dispute about the meaning of AERs would have seemed all the more reason to control jury speculation about their import, and to give a binding instruction on AERs and their limited significance. As for the AER patients’ not being the plaintiffs, well, the case report patients were not the plaintiffs, either. This last reason is not even wrong[3]. The Circuit, in affirming, turned a blind eye to the district court’s exercise of discretion in a way that systematically increased the importance of Blume’s testimony on signals, while systematically hobbling the defendant’s expert witnesses.

[1] “THE STANDARD OF APPELLATE REVIEW FOR RULE 702 DECISIONS” (Nov. 12, 2014).

[2] “Gadolinium, Nephrogenic Systemic Fibrosis, and Case Reports” (Nov. 24, 2014).

[3] “Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig, es ist nicht einmal falsch!” The quote is attributed to Wolfgang Pauli in R. E. Peierls, “Wolfgang Ernst Pauli, 1900-1958,” 5 Biographical Memoirs Fellows Royal Soc’y 175, 186 (1960).

 

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Expert Witness Mining – Antic Proposals for Reform

November 4th, 2014

Law Reviews and Altered States of Reality

In 2008, Justice Breyer observed wryly that “there is evidence that law review articles have left terra firma to soar into outer space”; and Judge Posner has criticized law review articles for the “silly titles, the many opaque passages, the antic proposals, the rude polemics, [and] the myriad pretentious citations.” In 2010, Justice Scalia, who was a law-review-producing law professor for the University of Virginia for several years, responded to a lawyer’s oral argument, in McDonald v. City of Chicago, by suggesting that the argument had no support in Supreme Court precedent, but the unsupported argument would make the lawyer the “the darling of the professoriate.” At the June 2011 Fourth Circuit Judicial Conference, Chief Justice Roberts opined that law reviews are generally not “particularly helpful for practitioners and judges.”  In his words:

“Pick up a copy of any law review that you see and the first article is likely to be, you know, the influence of Immanuel Kant on evidentiary approaches in 18th-century Bulgaria, or something, which I’m sure was of great interest to the academic that wrote it, but isn’t of much help to the bar.”

See Debra Cassens Weiss, “Law Prof Responds After Chief Justice Roberts Disses Legal Scholarship” Am. Bar Ass’n J. (July 07, 2011). Lawyers would think the Justices view law review scholarship as a useless but generally harmless activity. Sometimes, however, law review articles can actually be harmful.

Selection Effects in the Retention and Presentation of Expert Witnesses

The complaints about law review scholarship are obviously based upon extremes and travesties. Interestingly, Judge Posner himself has been no slacker when it comes to producing law review articles with “antic proposals.” See, e.g., Richard A. Posner, “An Economic Approach to the Law of Evidence,” 51 Stan. L. Rev. 1477, 1541–42 (1999). In the tradition of non-traditional, rationalist proposals that ignore experience and make up something completely untested, Judge Richard Posner has advocated rule changes that would require lawyers

“to disclose the name of all the experts whom they approached as possible witnesses before settling on the one testifying. This would alert the jury to the problem of ‘witness shopping’.”

Posner, 51 Stan. L. Rev. at 1541. The point of Judge Posner’s radical reform is to alert triers of fact to whether the expert witness testifying is the first, or the umpteenth expert witness interviewed before a suitable opinion had been “procured,” so that the fact finder can draw the“ reasonable inference” that the case must be weaker than presented if the party went through so many expert witnesses before coming up with one who would testify in the case. If one party disclosed but one expert witness, the one that actually testified, and the other party disclosed X such witnesses (where X >1), then the fact finder could find in favor of the first party upon the basis of the so-called reasonable inference.

Posner’s proposal is at best a proxy for accuracy and validity in expert witness opinion testimony, and one for which Posner presents no evidence to support his hoped-for improvement in juridical accuracy. Not only does Judge Posner present no evidence that his proposed reform and suggested inference would be in the least bit reasonable and probative of the truth, he fails to address the obvious incentives that would be created by his proposal. Fearing the prejudicial inference from having consulted with “too many” expert witnesses, lawyers, operating under the Posner Rule, would have strong incentives to go to the expert witness “one-stop-shopping” mall, where they know they can obtain expert witnesses guaranteed to align themselves with the needed litigation positions and claims. The Posner Rule would also give a strong advantage to lawyers more skilled in vetting and selecting expert witnesses, to the detriment of less experienced lawyers. Of course, lawyers who are willing to go shopping at the meretricious mall or to employ a “cleaner” who brokers the selection without footprints might escape the bite of the Posner adverse inference.

Posner’s proposed rule ignores what is at the heart of identifying and selecting expert witnesses to testify. Obviously lawyers must identify potential witnesses with suitable expertise to address the issues raised by the litigation. Database searches, such as PubMed and Google Scholar searches for bio-medical experts, can go a long way towards identifying candidates, but interviews are important as well. Posner would chill lawyers’ effective representation by placing an adverse inference upon their diligence in any contact with the person other than the “one” who will be anointed to be the party’s designated testifier.

Meetings and interviews with prospective expert witnesses to ascertain whether the witness candidate has sufficient time and interest in fulfill the litigation assignment. Expertise in the area is hardly a guarantee that the candidate will be interested in answering the specific questions that are contested in the litigation. The lawyers must also ascertain whether the witness candidate has the stamina, patience, and aptitude for the litigation context. Not all real experts do, and the consequences of engaging an expert who does not have the qualities to make a good expert witness can be disastrous. Witness candidates must also be screened for their communication skills, their appearance, and even basic hygiene. The most brilliant expert who mumbles, or who is unkempt, is useless in litigation.

Lawyers must evaluate witness candidates for conflicts of interest, many of which are unknowable until there is a face-to-face meeting. Does the witness candidate have a significant other or child who works for the litigation industry (plaintiffs’ bar) or for the defendant industry under assault in the litigation at hand? Either way, the candidate may be compromised. Was the candidate mentored by an expert witness on the other side? Is the candidate on an editorial board with the adversary’s witnesses? Is the candidate close personal friends of the adversaries or their witnesses, such that he will be less than enthusiastic in showing the infirmities of the other side’s positions? Any of these questions could lead to answers that practically disqualify a witness candidate from consideration. Proceeding without such vetting could be catastrophic for the client and counsel. Burdening the vetting process with the threat of an adverse inference is deeply unfair to diligent counsel trying to represent and serve their clients.

And there are yet additional considerations that require exploration with any witness candidate. Expert witnesses are not equally able to deal with adverse authority in the form of a noted scientist who has taken a stand on the litigation issue, or a superficially appearing authoritative author who has published an adverse opinion. As well trained as they might be, some real experts are “sheep,” who are most comfortable following the herd, and not independent thinkers. Not all experts are willing or able to read studies as critically as needed for the litigation situation, which can sometimes be more demanding than the scientific arena. Lawyers charged with retaining expert witnesses must assess their clients’ positions and determine how well their expert witnesses will perform under all the circumstances of the case.

Professor Christopher Robertson proposes an even more radical reform of the law of expert witness by removing the selection and control of expert witnesses from parties and their counsel, completely. Robertson would somehow create a pool of expert witnesses on the issues in each case, and assign them to parties in a double-blinded randomized fashion. Christopher Tarver Robertson, “Blind Expertise,” 85 N.Y. Univ. L. Rev. 174, 211 (2010). Aside from depriving litigants of autonomy and control over their cases, this approach has even greater potential for generating false results. How do the expert witness come to be retained for this process? Any two expert witnesses may very well come to an incorrect analysis precisely because they do not have the benefit of each other’s report to develop the full range of data to be considered. What if the expert assigned to plaintiff concludes that there is no case, but the expert assigned to the defendant concludes that the plaintiff’s case is meritorious? Normally, plaintiffs’ expert witnesses must file their reports in advance of the defense witnesses, who then have the opportunity to rebut but also the benefit of all the data included. Simultaneous reports risk major omissions of data to be considered on both sides. The adversarial cauldron works to ensure completeness in what data and studies are considered.

Now comes Jonah Gelbach to attempt a probabilistic, theoretical defense of reforms in the Posner-Robertson mold. Jonah B. Gelbach, “Expert Mining and Required Disclosure,” 81 U. Chicago L. Rev. 131 (2014). Professor Gelbach is a well-trained economist, and a recently minted lawyer (Yale 2013), who is now an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Gelbach’s experience with the practice of law is limited to working as a law-school intern at David Rosen & Associates, in New Haven, Connecticut, before joining the Penn faculty. His proposals may need to be taken with a 100 grains of aspirin.

Although Gelbach disagrees with particulars of the Posner-Robertson proposals, Gelbach joins with them to opine that “[t]o the extent that additional fully disclosed expert testimony increases the fact finder’s information, we can expect a beneficial increase in accuracy.” Gelbach at 133. Gelbach’s dictum, however, is an ipse dixit, and he offers only a limited hypothetical case in which full disclosure of data should be required to solve the problem. And even in his hypothetical case, the disclosure of the identities of the testers is unnecessary to correct the error that Gelbach predicts. Gelbach’s call for the disclosure of consulting expert witnesses introduces only a collateral issue that has nothing to do with the accuracy of the scientific reasoning.

Gelbach analogizes “witness shopping” to data dredging and multiple testing, with a known inflation in the rate of false positive outcomes. If a party directs multiple to conduct single outcome measurements or tests, then that party can recreate the results of multiple testing without having to disclosure the number of independent tests. Gelbach’s argument is at its strongest for a simplistic model of a simple measurement, with errors normally distributed, with accuracy of the measurement tied to the outcome of the case. Gelbach at 136. Gelbach analogizes expert witness mining with data mining, and goes so far as to provide a calculation of false positive rates from multiple testing.

The sort of multiple testing Gelbach condemns is even more obvious when something other than random error is involved. Consider the need of litigants to have chest radiograph interpreted for the presence or absence of a pneumoconiosis in occupational dust disease litigation. Not only is there an intra-observer variability, there are potential or known subjective biases in radiograph interpretations. Gelbach need not worry about multiple testing because the need for economic efficiency already encourages many lawyers to employ radiologists who are must biased in favor of their clients’ positions. The bigger problem would be to encourage lawyers to obtain an honest second opinion, which might make them less strident about their litigation positions when discussing possible settlement.

Gelbach appears to believe that mandatory disclosure of the number of expert witnesses hired as well as the contents of the written and oral reports issued by the party’s nontestifying expert witnesses is needed to abate the potential harm from “expert mining.” By introducing the probabilistic modeling of Type I and Type II errors, however, Gelbach elevates proofiness over clear thinking about the issue. The simple solution to Gelbach’s soil measurement hypothetical is to require disclosure of all testing data, regardless whether conducted by expert witnesses designated as testifying or as consulting. All are agents of the party for purposes of creating data in the form of the hypothesized soil measurement. Indeed, Gelbach’s hypothetical envisions a technical laboratory that conducts such measurements, and the lab might not even be associated with a person designated to serve as an expert witness on the litigation issues.

Gelbach’s soil-measurement case is thus, for the most part, a straw-person case. In the vast majority of cases, multiple expert witness interviews leading up to selection and retention is, however, not at all like multiple testing, either in its ability to generate deliberate false positive or false negative opinions. The evidence remains what it is, and the parameter unchanged, whatever the qualitative judgments of the witness candidates. In most litigation contexts, the data upon which the expert witnesses will rely comes from published studies, and not from a single measurement under either side’s control and ability to resample many times through the agency of multiple expert witnesses. The Rules need to help the triers of fact discern the truth, not irrelevant proxies for the truth. If the triers of fact are incompetent to adjudge the actual evidence, then we may need to find triers who are competent.

The extension of the soil hypothetical to all of expert witness opinion testimony is unwarranted. Accuracy and validity of expert opinion is not “independent and identically distributed.” Truth and accuracy in scientific judgment as applied to litigation scientific questions are not random variables with known distributions.

A party may have to comb through dozens of potential expert witnesses before arriving at an expert witness with an appropriate, accurate answer to the litigation issue. When confronted with a pamphlet entitled “100 Authors against Einstein,” Albert Einstein quipped “if I were wrong, one would have been enough.”  See Remigio Russo, 18 Mathematical Problems in Elasticity 125 (1996) (quoting Einstein). Legal counsel should not have their clients’ cause compromised because they had the misfortune of consulting the “100 Authors” before arriving at Einstein’s door. The Posner-Robertson-Gelbach proposals all suffer the same flaw: they defer unduly to conformism and ignore the truth, validity, and accuracy of procured opinions.

Disputes in science are resolved with data, from high-quality, reproducible experimental or observational studies, not with appeals to the number of speakers. The number of expert witness candidates who were interviewed or who offered preliminary opinions is irrelevant to the task assigned to the finder of fact in a case involving scientific evidence. The final, proffered opinion of the testifying expert witness is only as good as the evidence and analysis upon which it rests, which under the current rules, should be fully disclosed.

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Can Expert Bias and Prejudice Disqualify a Witness From Testifying?

October 11th, 2014

The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) bills itself as a consumer advocate committed to research and education in sound science. The CSPI considers itself to be “one of the nation’s top consumer advocates,” which works to “ensure that science is used to promote the public welfare.”

You may wonder whether and why “science” turns out to promote the public welfare envisioned by the CSPI? According to the CSPI, you should just accept that it does. So sure is the CSPI that industry corrupts science that it features a web-based, open database of scientists with ties to industry. There is no database of scientists’ ties to the litigation industry (plaintiffs’ lawyers), to organized labor, or advocacy groups. No doubt, implicit in its choice, is the claim that all science done by scientists with “ties” to the plaintiffs’ bar, to labor, or to advocacy groups, is “in the public interest.”

The arrogance of the implicit claim is made even more clear by how the CSPI addresses supposed corruption and conflicts of interest in science. The CSPI features an Integrity in Science Project to ferret out corruption in science, but the Project concerns itself only with industry-sponsored and funded science. The Project is candid about its one-sided jihad against industry-based science:

“Although many have cheered partnerships between industry and the research community, it is also acknowledged that they entail conflicts of interest that may compromise the judgment of trusted professionals, the credibility of research institutions and scientific journals, the safety and transparency of human subjects research, the norms of free inquiry, and the legitimacy of science-based policy.

For example:

  • There is strong evidence that researchers’ financial ties to chemical, pharmaceutical, or tobacco manufacturers directly influence their published positions in supporting the benefit or downplaying the harm of the manufacturers’ product.
  • A growing body of evidence indicates that pharmaceutical industry gifts and inducements bias clinicians’ judgments and influence doctors’ prescribing practices.
  • There are well-known cases of industry seeking to discredit or prevent the publication of research results that are critical of its products.
  • Studies of life-science faculty indicate that researchers with industry funding are more likely to withhold research results in order to secure commercial advantage.
  • Increasingly, the same academic institutions that are responsible for oversight of scientific integrity and human subjects protection are entering financial relationships with the industries whose product-evaluations they oversee.

In response to the commercialization of science and the growing problem of conflicts of interest, the Integrity in Science Project seeks to:

  • raise awareness about the role that corporate funding and other corporate interests play in scientific research, oversight, and publication;

  • investigate and publicize conflicts of interest and other potentially destructive influences of industry-sponsored science;

  • advocate for full disclosure of funding sources by individuals, governmental and non-governmental organizations that conduct, regulate, or provide oversight of scientific investigation or promote specific scientific findings;

  • encourage policy-makers at all levels of government to seek balance on expert advisory committees and to provide public, web-based access to conflict-of-interest information collected in the course of committee formation;

  • encourage journalists to routinely ask scientists and others about their possible conflicts of interests and to provide this information to the public.”

The CSPI inquiry then is entirely one-sided, with no apparent or manifest interest in exploring and revealing conflicts created by scientists’ affiliations with advocacy groups, labor, or the litigation industry. The concern about conflicts of interests is, in my view, simply an attempt to disqualify industry-sponsored scientific studies from inclusion in policy discussions. To be sure, there are notorious examples of industry-sponsored, compromised studies. But there are similarly notorious examples of union and plaintiff-lawyer sponsored studies gone awry. Why then is there no concern at the CSPI about researchers’ ties with advocacy groups, labor unions, and most important, and the litigation industry? The obvious answer is that the CSPI is engaging in advocacy for certain conclusions. The CSPI wants to put its hand on one side of the balance, and do its best to ensure that scientific debates and discussions come out a certain way, a way that favors conclusions it desires. The CSPI wants to disqualify dissenters from the conversation. The so-called “Integrity” project thus appears to be a pretense, exactly the opposite of what it purports to be.

In 2004, the CSPI’s Integrity in Science Project sponsored a conference on, among other topics, Corporate and Government Suppression of Research. Actually, there was barely any discussion of governmental suppression; the speakers spoke almost entirely on corporate conduct.

One speaker on the panel presented about corporate conflicts of interest in the starkest Marxist terms. Corporations must cheat and lie because they are capable only of acting to maximize profits, and they will inevitably see safety as a dispensable cost. The speaker, who is a frequent testifier in mass tort litigation, held forth that the problem with corporations is not that there are some rotten apples, but that the entire barrel is rotten. Suppression of scientific research, according to this speaker is not an anomaly, but totally determined by the nature of the firm. Ethical companies cannot compete, and they go out of business; ergo, any company in business is unethical.

Of course, the same uncharitable determinist views can be applied to expert witnesses, to plaintiffs’ counsel, to labor unions, and to advocacy groups. Remarkably, this speaker acknowledged that is ideology is a much larger bias than money, and then confessed that

“My bias is ideological.”

This speaker testifies frequently for the litigation industry, and his zeal is so uncabined that he has been held in contempt and fined as part of his litigation activities. When one federal court judge excluded his testimony, he attacked the bona fides of the judge and sought to appeal his exclusion personally. And yet the Integrity project featured him as a speaker!

The CSPI and its cadre of anti-industry scientists brings me to the question du jour: Can an expert witness be too biased or prejudiced in a matter to serve as an expert witness? We exclude judges and jurors who have potential conflicts of interest. Surely there are fact or expert witnesses, who are so untrustworthy that they should not be allowed to testify. Consider whether an expert witnesses who, having demonstrated that they will violate court orders or other laws, want the court to qualify them as “expert witnesses” to give their opinions in a pending case. The trial court does not necessarily endorse the opinions proffered, but should the court give its imprimatur to the witnesses’ standing as having opinions that could be considered, relied upon to the exclusion of competing opinions, and form the basis for verdicts for the parties offering these suspect witnesses?

Just asking.

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Scientific Prestige, Reputation, Authority & The Creation of Scientific Dogmas

October 4th, 2014

Since 1663, the Royal Society has sported the motto:  “Nullius in verba,” on no one’s authority. The motto is a recognition that science, and indeed, all of knowledge turns on data properly collected, analyzed, and interpreted, and not on the prestige or authority of the speaker. In England today, there could be no better example of the disconnect between authority and knowledge than the pronouncements of Crown Prince Charles on science and medicine[1].

Although science should be about the data and methodology, the growing complexity and inaccessibility of modern science has fostered greater reliance upon reputation of researchers as a proxy for the correctness of factual statements. In some quarters, scientists are held up as shamans who are lionized and revered, at least when the scientists are advancing research and conclusions that are politically approved. When the scientists conduct research that threatens politically correct beliefs, then the scientists must be attacked, diminished, and discredited. Because the scientific claims at issue involve evidence and hard thought, the attackers and defenders seem to prefer proceed with ad hominem attacks on the personal standing and credibility of scientists whose work they embrace or distain.

The sad truth is that the persistence of interpreting science by personal charm, credibility, and political correctness of scientists’ personality remains as a legacy of our authority-based approach to knowledge. As a result, we have the spectacle of public intellectuals who complain about the demonization of scientists, while in the next breath, demonize scientists whose work threatens their political and personal preferences[2].

It would be lovely if we could ignore attacks on the personal credibility of researchers, but the sociology of knowledge and science requires us to acknowledge that reputation, prestige, and authority remain as determinants of belief. The more political and personal preferences are involved, and the greater the complexity of the underlying scientific analysis, the more we should expect people, historians, judges, and juries, to ignore the Royal Society’s Nullius in verba,” and to rely upon the largely irrelevant factors of reputation.

We would thus be on a fool’s errand not to pay attention to the social construction of reputation, both in terms of how reputations are created and how they are diminished. I have focused on Irving Selikoff, because he is such a difficult case. For virtually every advance in the scientific understanding of asbestos health effects, Selikoff did not have priority. Sir Richard Doll was ahead of Selikoff by a decade in reporting the epidemiologic association between asbestosis and lung cancer.[3] Christopher Wagner was ahead of Selikoff by several years in describing the association between amphibole asbestos and mesothelioma[4]. And the United States Navy was ahead of Selikoff in terms of detailing the difficulty in controlling confined-space asbestos lagging operations onboard ships, and the consequent asbestosis hazards[5].

Much of Selikoff’s asbestos work that was original was wrong. His advocacy of a connection between asbestos and extrapulmonary cancers, his claim that all asbestos varieties were equivalent in potency for causing mesothelioma, and his risk assessments of total attributable asbestos risks are just some examples of where Selikoff outran his scientific headlights. Still, the United States public owes Selikoff a debt of gratitude for having popularized and disseminated information about asbestos hazards at a crucial time in our history. Although Doll and Wagner had priority with respect to lung cancer and mesothelioma, they both wrote in foreign journals about exposures that were typical in the U.K. and South Africa. And while the Navy’s understanding of its own catastrophic neglect of safety in its shipyards came before Selikoff’s publications, the Navy’s coyness kept its information from being widely disseminated. Selikoff, in his 1964 publication[6], in an American journal, the Journal of the American Medical Association, thus incorporated a good amount of prior learning and showed that asbestos was a problem among asbestos insulators in the United States. At the time, insulators were often thought of as having relatively low-level asbestos exposure. Furthermore, Selikoff used his findings of asbestos-related disease among the union insulators to advance a political goal, the federalization of workplace safety and health regulation. That goal ultimately came to have bipartisan support in the United States, largely as a result of Selikoff’s advocacy.

Selikoff’s legitimate achievements should not be diminished, and historians McCulloch and Tweedale are correct to bemoan the ad hominem attacks on Selikoff, based upon ethnicity and personal characteristics. They are wrong, however, to claim that Selikoff’s training, scientific acumen, advocacy, and false positive claims are somehow off limits. Selikoff’s substantial contributions to public health by publicizing the dangers of high exposure, long-term exposure to exposure do not privilege every position he took.  Selikoff is a difficult case because he was wrong on many issues, and his reputation, authority and prestige ultimately became much greater than the evidence would ultimately support.

The labor historians and anti-asbestos zeolots are right to bristle and emote when historians and others challenge the reputation of Irving Selikoff. Like Rachel Carson and Wilhelm Heuper, Selikoff is one of the icons of the environmental and occupational safety movement. Environmentalists, labor leaders, and left-leaning politicians, have invested heavily in Selikoff’s reputation and authority to support legislation and regulations. Given Selikoff’s reputation and prestige in the field of asbestos health effects, and his role in helping pass the Williams-Steiger Act of 1969, we might wonder why no one has written a full-length biography. There are some hagiographic articles to be sure, but a full-length biography would raise questions not politely answerable.

Selikoff the Testifier

Selikoff may have been a media plodder in the mid-1950s, but his experience as a testifying witness made him particularly effective in advancing his advocacy on behalf of the asbestos and other unions in the 1960s and forward. See “Medical Horizons,” Broadcasting * Telecasting at 14 (Nov. 21, 1955) (describing Selikoff as a plodding presenter). Those who would lionize Selikoff, and privilege his claims from evidence-based scrutiny, are embarrassed by his frequent testifying. They are, however, wrong to distort Selikoff’s record of participating in the litigation process. He had an obligation to do so, to some extent. Many physicians gladly would avoid the courtroom confrontations that Dr. Selikoff undertook. Despite these feelings, physicians have an ethical obligation, by virtue of their special training and experience, to assist in the administration of justice[7]. Indeed, the Board of Trustees of the American Medical Association has recommended that the presentation of expert testimony should be considered part of the practice of medicine and thus subject to peer review[8]. Ultimately, the courtroom testimony should be judged for the validity of its conclusions just as any other scientific opinion would be.

Of course, frequent testifying can be undertaken for venal or political purposes, and the reputation makers behind Selikoff have been keen to protect him from charges of being a “frequent testifier.” Much of protection probably took place because Selikoff’s testifying took place in the past before electronic files of transcripts could circulate rapidly, and even minor cases were posted to internet databases. Thus, Judge Jack Weinstein, writing after the death of Dr. Selikoff, could incorrectly describe him as an “independent” scientist, who should not be coerced to testify when he preferred to publish his “results only in scientific journals.” Jack B. Weinstein, Individual Justice in Mass Tort Litigation:  The Effect of Class Actions, Consolidations, and other Multi-Party Devices 117 (1995).

Judge Weinstein was clearly wrong in his assessment that Selikoff preferred scholarly journals to the courtroom, but his assessment reflects the influence of the reputation that Selikoff and his followers worked so hard to create. Of course, Judge Weinstein was also wrong to suggest that Selikoff was “independent.” He had deep ties to unions, the plaintiffs’ bar, a cadre of plaintiffs’ expert witnesses, and to positions to which all these groups subscribed. The greatest art is that which conceals itself[9].

Selikoff’s participation in litigation proceedings has thus become a debating point between those who would acclaim and those who would detract from Selikoff’s reputation. Oxford University historian Peter Bartrip, for one, noted that Selikoff had testified frequently. Peter W.J. Bartrip, Beyond the Factory Gates: Asbestos and Health in Twentieth Century America 77 & n.4 (2006); Peter W.J. Bartrip, “Irving John Selikoff and the Strange Case of the Missing Medical Degrees,” 58 J. History Med. 3, 27 & n.88-92 (2003). Bartrip’s history has in turn been attacked by the Lobby of anti-asbestos zealots. Marxist historians Jock McCulloch and Geoffrey Tweedale, and others, have attacked Bartrip for serving as an apologist for industry, and have suggested, in their publications, that Selikoff testified infrequently:=

“[Selikoff] gave testimony in two of the early landmark legal cases, but thereafter avoided the drama of the courtroom and the role of the expert witness, not only because it would have been a drain on his time and made his confidential trade union medical files open to legal scrutiny, but also because he felt that antagonizing industry would not help his broader agenda.”

Jock McCulloch & Geoffrey Tweedale, Defending the Indefensible : The Global Asbestos Industry and its Fight for Survival: The Global Asbestos Industry and its Fight for Survival 95 & n.36 (2008).

Two and only two; or two and then some? What was McCulloch and Tweedale’s source? They cite a personal communication from one of Selikoff’s protégés and acolytes, Dr. Stephen Levin, who testified frequently on behalf of asbestos claimants in litigation, and who no doubt shared the authors’ desire to protect and enhance Dr. Selikoff’s reputation. Perhaps more interesting is Levin’s revelation that Selikoff wished to hide his “confidential” union files from scrutiny. See “The Selikoff – Castleman Conspiracy” (Mar. 13, 2011) (describing memorandum, dated November 5, 1979, from plaintiffs’ expert witness Barry Castleman to Selikoff urging resistance to lawful discovery attempts to obtain information about asbestos workers union).

Well, who is right? Did Selikoff testify frequently or not? On this point, McCulloch and Tweedale appear to be demonstrably wrong. I have previously pointed out some of Selikoff’s testimonial adventures[10]. See “Selikoff and the Mystery of the Disappearing Testimony” (Dec. 3, 2010).

There are other instances, however, of Selikoff’s medico-legal activities. According to Jon Gelman, a worker’s compensation lawyer in New Jersey, his father, also a New Jersey lawyer, employed Dr. Selikoff, in the early 1950s, as an expert witness in the “original 17” UNARCO (Union Asbestos and Rubber Co.) asbestos worker claims.  Gelman reports that these claims were successfully litigated with Selikoff’s examinations and services, in front of the New Jersey Division of Workers’ Compensation.  Jon L. Gelman, “Dr. Yasunosuke Suzuki, A Pioneer of Mesothelioma Medical Research” (Nov. 23, 2011); Jon L. Gelman, History of Asbestos and the Law (Jan. 02, 2001). See also Michael Nevins, Meanderings in New Jersey’s Medical History 146-47 (2011). Unfortunately, the reports and transcripts of the UNARCO 17 cases are not available.

For about two decades after the UNARCO 17,  Selikoff went on to have an active testimonial career, always testifying for the claimant, and against the employer or the supplier. In 1972, Andrew Haas, President of the asbestos workers union thanked Selikoff for his “frequent” expert witness testimony on behalf of union members. Andrew Haas, Comments from the General President, 18 Asbestos Worker (Nov. 1972)[11].

In addition to the cases cited in the footnotes, Selikoff testified or was involved as an expert witness in other cases. See, e.g., Babcock & Wilcox, Inc. v. Steiner, 258 Md. 468, 471, 265 A.2d 871 (1970) (affirming workman compensation award for asbestosis); Culp Industrial Insulation v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Workmen’s Compensation Appeal Board, 57 Pa. Commonwealth Ct. 599, 601-602 (1981). One of the earliest reported decisions in which Selikoff testified as a party expert witness was in a federal court admiralty case, in which a seaman sued the ship owner for injuries allegedly sustained as a result of a slip and fall accident. No pulmonary injury was involved. Barros v. United States, 147 F.Supp. 340, 343-44 (E.D.N.Y. 1957) (noting that Dr. Selikoff testified for seaman suing for maintenance and cure as a result of a slip and fall; finding for respondent against libelant).

Perhaps the most egregious testimonial adventure was Selikoff’s serving as an expert witness, in 1966, for a union worker who claimed that his colon cancer had been caused by asbestos. What was remarkable about this testimony was not that it was for the worker; Selikoff’s testimony seemed always to be for the claimant. What stands out is how weak and unreliable any scientific claim for colon cancer would have been in 1966 (and after for that matter). Despite the insufficiency of the evidence, and the dubious validity of the early study relied upon, Selikoff’s participation helped obtain a favorable outcome, which led to the asbestos union’s praise for his efforts:

“The research into health hazards of insulation workers developed by the members of Local No. 12 and Local No. 32 has resulted in widening the basis of compensation claims in New York State.

Until now, the courts have been reluctant to accept many of the conditions to which insulation workers are prone, as related to employment. However, facts produced during the research investigations of Dr. 1. J. Selikoff, Dr. J. Churg, and Dr. E. Cuvler Hammond of the Environmental Sciences Laboratory of the Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York are resulting in a changing of this picture.

A recent decision has widened the range of compensable diseases for insulation workers even further. A member of Local No. 12. unfortunately died of a cancer of the colon. Dr. Selikoff reported to the compensation court that his research showed that these cancers of the intestine were at least three times as common among the insulation workers as in men of the same age in the general population.

Based upon Dr. Selikoff’s testimony, the Referee gave the family a compensation award, holding that the exposure to many dusts during employment was responsible for the cancer. The insurance company appealed this decision. A special panel of the reviewed the matter and agreed with the Referee’s judgement and affirmed the compensation award. This was the first case in which a cancer of the colon was established as compensable and it is likely that this case will become an historical precedent.”

“Health Hazard Progress Notes: Compensation Advance Made in New York State,” 16(5) Asbestos Worker 13 (May 1966). See Viskovich v. Robert A. Keasbey Co., 36 A.D.2d 665 (3d Dep’t 1971)(affirming decision of the Compensation Board in awarding an asbestos insulator benefits for colon cancer; Selikoff’s case or perhaps a subsequent claim). Historians will search long, hard, and unsuccessfully for any disclosure of Selikoff’s consultancies or his testimonies on the issue of asbestos and colorectal cancer in any of his publications on the issue, or any other asbestos issue.

Even after Selikoff stopped participating directly in the litigation process, he continued his interest in the outcome of litigation. This interest was both intellectual and practical. For instance, at the fall meeting of the Medical History Society of New Jersey, Selikoff gave a presentation on “Nellie Keershaws [sic] and Frederick Legrand,” two of the bellwether asbestos litigants, in the U.K., and the U.S., respectively. Irving J. Selikoff, “Nellie Keershaws and Frederick Legrand,” at Fall Meeting, UMDNJ-New Jersey Medical School, Newark, N.J. (Saturday, Oct. 8, 1988). See 9(1) MHSNJ Newsletter (Jan. 1989).

Nellie Kershaw was diagnosed with asbestosis in the early 1920s, but her employer, Turner Brothers Asbestos, refused to pay her compensation for disability and her ultimate death. The investigation into her death gave rise to the first set of Asbestos Industry Regulations, in the United Kingdom, in 1931. Frederick LeGrande was one of the first plaintiffs in a civil action against Johns-Manville, for asbestos-related disease. Frederick LeGrande v. Johns-Manville Prods. Corp., No. 741-57 (D.N.J. filed in 1957, by William L. Brach, attorney for plaintiff).

As McCulloch and Tweedale note, Selikoff became too politically vulnerable to continue his direct participation in litigation, but he did not cease his involvement altogether. After asbestos litigation went viral in the late 1970s, Selikoff encouraged his juniors at Mt. Sinai Hospital to testify on behalf of union members and other asbestos claimants. The roster of physicians who trained at Mt. Sinai, in Selikoff’s department, read like a “Who’s Who” of asbestos plaintiffs’ expert witnesses[12]. Indeed, Selikoff trained a generation of testifying expert witnesses for the plaintiffs’ bar.

Another measure of Selikoff’s influence in the litigation arena was his attempt to influence the litigation process by conducting an ex parte seminar for key judges, with responsibility for important cases or large dockets. Plaintiffs’ lawyers, with the collaboration of Selikoff’s protégés as their “expert witnesses,” persuaded school districts and property owners that they should sue for the costs of asbestos removal and abatement. Selikoff and his acolytes then called a meeting, “The Third Wave conference,” to reflect their concern about the alleged danger of asbestos in place. Philip J. Landrigan & H. Kazemi, eds. “The Third Wave of Asbestos Disease: Exposure to Asbestos in Place – Public Health Control,” 643 Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. (1991). Under cover of support from the Collegium Ramazzini, and with the active support and participation of organized labor and plaintiffs’ asbestos bar, Selikoff invited judges to what was clearly a lopsided medical conference, dominated by his acolytes and plaintiffs’ expert witnesses in the very cases in which the invited judges presided. The corrupt affair led to the disqualification of Judge James McGirr Kelly, who attended the conference. In re School Asbestos Litigation, 977 F.2d 764 (3d Cir. 1992); see Cathleen M. Devlin, “Disqualification of Federal Judges – Third Circuit Orders District Judge James McGirr Kelly to Disqualify Himself so as to Preserve the Appearance of Justice under 28 U.S.C.§ 455,” 38 Vill. L. Rev. 1219 (1993); W.K.C. Morgan, “Asbestos and cancer: history and public policy,” 49 Br. J. Indus. Med. 451, 451 (1992); see also “Historians Should Verify Not Vilify or Abilify – The Difficult Case of Irving Selikoff” (Jan. 4, 2014).

Perhaps even more interesting than the public corruption is the scientific corruption that took place at the Third Wave Conference. McCulloch and Tweedale report that one scientist who attended, Dr. Bruce Case, was so upset about the nonsense spouted at the Conference that he wrote an angry letter to one of the leaders in occupational pulmonary medicine, Dr. J. Bernard L. Gee., to report that the conference was “a stage-managed piece of Broadway theater[13].” The controversy led to Julian Peto’s review of the Third Wave Conference papers, and writing to the President of Mt. Sinai Hospital Center to register his observation that many of the conference papers were scientifically “dubious” and systematically biased in favor of exaggerating the risks of asbestos in place[14].

McCulloch and Tweedale attempt to defend this (indefensible) incident in the history of asbestos litigation by claiming that Selikoff and his “team” of acolytes had not been invited to an earlier conference at Harvard, on the issue of asbestos property damage. Health Effects Institute, Asbestos in Public and Commercial Buildings: A Literature Review and Synthesis of Current Knowledge (1991); Jacqueline Karn Corn, Environmental Public Health Policy for Asbestos in Schools: Unintended Consequences at 115-16 (1999). Their complaint does not ring true, however. The so-called Harvard conference had the participation of a large group of independent experts[15] as well as some scientists from the inner sanctum of Mt. Sinai[16]. The world of science ultimately has not been kind to the Selikoff view of asbestos in place[17].

Historical perspective is much needed in considering Selikoff and his contributions, both good and bad. Even after his death, Selikoff remains an important player in the passion play of the American asbestos litigation and regulation[18], and any biographer who steps up to the task will have to confront all aspects of Selikoff’s long career, both scientific advances and missteps.

[1] See Steven Novella, “Prince Charles Alternative Medicine Charity Closes” Science-Based Medicine (May 16, 2012); Laura Donnelly, “Prince Charles makes plea on alternative medicine: Prince of Wales calls for alternative medicine to be treated fairly and for regulation to govern its use,” The Telegraph (Jan. 19, 2014).

[2] Compare Jock McCulloch & Geoffrey Tweedale, “Shooting the messenger: the vilification of Irving J. Selikoff,” 37 Internat’l J. Health Services 619, 619 (2007) (complaining that some historians have “demonized” Dr. Irving Selikoff as “a media zealot”); Jock McCulloch & Geoffrey Tweedale, “Science is not sufficient: Irving J. Selikoff and the asbestos tragedy,” 17 New Solutions 292 (2007); Jock McCulloch and Geoffrey Tweedale, Defending The Indefensible: The Global Asbestos Industry and its Fight for Survival (2008), with Geoffrey Tweedale, “Hero or Villain?—Sir Richard Doll and Occupational Cancer” 13 Internat’l J. Occup. Envt’l Health 233 (2007) (demonizing Sir Richard Doll for his affiliations and consultancies in the field of occupational cancer).

[3] Richard Doll, “Mortality from Lung Cancer in Asbestos Workers,”  12 Br. J. Indus. Med. 81 (1955).

[4] See J. Christopher Wagner, C.A. Sleggs, and Paul Marchand, “Diffuse pleural mesothelioma and asbestos exposure in the North Western Cape Province,” 17 Br. J. Indus. Med. 260 (1960); J. Christopher Wagner, “The discovery of the association between blue asbestos and mesotheliomas and the aftermath,” 48 Br. J. Indus. Med. 399 (1991).

[5] Capt. H.M. Robbins & William T. Marr, “Asbestosis,” 19 Safety Review 10 (1962) (noting that asbestos dust counts of 200 million particles per cubic foot were not uncommon during insulation ripouts onboard naval vessels, and the existence of asbestosis cases among workers).

[6] Irving J. Selikoff, Jacob Churg & E. Cuyler Hammond, “Asbestos Exposure and Neoplasia,” 188 J. Am. Med. Ass’n 22 (1964)

[7] American Medical Association Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs Current Opinion 9.07 on Medical Testimony (1989); Council of Medical Specialty Societies, Statement on Qualifications and Guidelines for the Physician Expert Witness, (Approved March 20,1989); American College of Physicians, Guidelines for the Physician Expert Witness. Ann Intern Med 113:789, 1990; Ethics Committee, American College of Chest Physicians Guidelines for an Expert Witness. Chest 98:1006 (1990).

[8] AMA Board of Trustees, Proceedings: House of Delegates 149-154 (June 18-22,1989). See generally Nathan Schachtman & Cynthia Rhodes, “Medico-Legal Issues in Occupational Lung Disease Litigation,” 27 Seminars in Roentgenology 140 (1992).

[9] Quintilian, IV Institutio Oratoria 1.57 (“But to avoid all display of art in itself requires consummate art.”)

[10] Bradshaw v. Twin City Insulation Co. Ltd., Industrial Court of Indiana, Claim No. O.D.1454 (Oct. 14, 1966); Bradshaw v. Johns-Manville Sales Corp., E. D. Michigan Southern Division, Civ. Action No. 29433 (July 6, 1967); Bambrick v. Asten Hill Mfg. Co., Pa. Commonwealth Ct. 664 (1972); Tomplait v. Combustion Engineering Inc.., E. D. Tex. Civ. Action No. 5402 (March 4, 1968); Rogers v. Johns-Manville Products Corp., Cir. Ct. Mo., 16th Jud. Cir., Div. 9, Civ. Action No. 720,071 (Feb. 19, 1971); Utter v. Asten-Hill Mfg. Co., 453 Pa. 401 (1973); Karjala v Johns-Manville Products Corp., D. Minn., Civ. Action Nos. 5–71 Civ. 18, and Civ. 40 (Feb. 8, 1973).

Selikoff also participated as a testifying witness for the government, in the Reserve Mining case. See United States v. Reserve Mining Co., 56 F.R.D. 408 (D. Minn.1972); Armco Steel Corp. v. United States, 490 F.2d 688 (8th Cir. 1974); United States v. Reserve Mining Co., 380 F.Supp. 11 (D. Minn.1974); Reserve Mining Co. v. United States, 498 F.2d 1073 (8th Cir. 1974); Minnesota v. Reserve Mining Co., 418 U.S. 911 (1974); Minnesota v. Reserve Mining Co., 419 U.S. 802 (1974); United States v. Reserve Mining Co., 394 F.Supp. 233 (D.Minn.1974); Reserve Mining Co. v. Environmental Protection Agency, 514 F.2d 492 (8th Cir. 1975); Reserve Mining Co. v. Lord, 529 F.2d 181 (8th Cir. 1976); United States v. Reserve Mining Co., 408 F.Supp. 1212 (D. Minn.1976); United States v. Reserve Mining Co., 412 F.Supp. 705 (D.Minn.1976); United States v. Reserve Mining Co., 417 F.Supp. 789 (D. Minn.1976); United States v. Reserve Mining Co., 417 F.Supp. 791 (D.Minn.1976); 543 F.2d 1210 (1976).

[11] See Peter W.J. Bartrip, “Irving John Selikoff and the Strange Case of the Missing Medical Degrees,” 58 J. History Med. 3, 27 & n.88-92 (2003) (citing Haas).

[12] Ruth Lilis, Albert Miller, Yasunosuke Suzuki, William Nicholson, Arthur Frank, Henry Anderson, Stephen Levin, Steven Markowitz, Jacqueline Moline, Susan Daum, et al.

[13] Jock McCulloch & Geoffrey Tweedale, “Shooting the messenger: the vilification of Irving J. Selikoff,” 37 Internat’l J. Health Services 619, 626 & n.33 (2007).

[14] Jock McCulloch & Geoffrey Tweedale, “Shooting the messenger: the vilification of Irving J. Selikoff,” 37 Internat’l J. Health Services 619, 626 & n34 (2007) (citing letter from Prof. Julian Peto to Dr. Thomas Chalmers, Mount Sinai Medical Center, June 28, 1990, from the Selikoff Archive, at Mount Sinai Hospital, NY).

[15] Arthur C. Upton, Jonathan Samet, Margaret R. Becklake, John M.G. Davis, David G. Hoel (of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences) Morton Lippmann, Gordon Gamsu, and Julian Peto

[16] William J. Nicholson and Arthur Langer, although Dr. Langer had by this time left Mt. Sinai.

[17] See, e.g., Philip H. Abelson, “The Asbestos Removal Fiasco,” 247 Science 1017 (1990).

[18] See Department of Labor, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Final Rule re Docket No. H-033-dl Occupational Exposure to Asbestos, Tremolite, Anthophyllite and Actinolite, 29 C.F.R. Parts 1910 and 1926, 57 Fed. Reg 24310 (June 8, 1992) (rejecting Selikoff’s and the Lobby’s attempt to have cleavage fragments regulated as though they were fibers).

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Contrivance Standard Applied to Gatekeepers and Expert Witnesses

October 1st, 2014

In Rink v. Cheminova, Inc., 400 F.3d 1286 (11th Cir. 2005), the Eleventh Circuit’s articulated a “contrivance standard,” which suggested that a district court “may properly consider whether the expert’s methodology has been contrived to reach a particular result.” Id. at 1293 & n.7; see also “The Contrivance Standard for Expert Witness Gatekeeping” (Sept. 28, 2014).

Although this standard has some appeal, it raises questions of motives that can complicate the Rule 702 inquiry into whether an purported opinion is “knowledge.” A less psychoanalytic inquiry into the expert witness’s motivation should generally be the first line of approach.

In the Zoloft MDL, the trial court banished Dr. Anick Bérard from federal court birth defect cases because of her unprincipled and inexplicable cherry picking of data, relied upon for her causation opinions. See In re Zoloft (Sertraline Hydrochloride) Prods. Liab. Litig. MDL No. 2342; 12-md-2342, 2014 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 87592; 2014 WL 2921648 (E.D. Pa. June 27, 2014) (Rufe, J.). The “contrivance” was objectively obvious and manifest in double-counting data points, and ignoring point estimates that were contrary to the desired outcome, even from papers that provided point estimates that were selectively embraced.

In the Chantix MDL, the trial court found the defendant to have harped on methodological peccadilloes but obviously did not like the beatific music (3x). Cherry picking was going on, but it was perfectly acceptable to this MDL court:

“Why Dr. Kramer chose to include or exclude data from specific clinical trials is a matter for crossexamination, not exclusion under Daubert.”

In re Chantix (varenicline) Prods. Liab. Litig., 889 F. Supp. 2d 1272, 1288 (2012) (MDL No. 2092) (permitting Dr. Shira Kramer to testify on causation despite her embracing a “weight of the evidence” method that turned largely on‘‘subjective interpretations’’ of various, undescribed, non-prespecified lines of evidence).

The differing approaches to cherry picking are hard to reconcile other than to note that Chantix had drawn a “black box” warning from the FDA, and the SSRIs involved in Zoloft had not been given any heightened warning from the FDA, foreign agencies, or any professional society. FDA labeling, of course, should not have been determinative of the causation question. The mind of the gatekeeper, however, is inscrutable.

 

 

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The Contrivance Standard for Expert Witness Gatekeeping

September 28th, 2014

According to Google ngram, the phrase “junk science” made its debut circa 1975, lagging junk food by about five years. See “The Rise and Rise of Junk Science” (Mar. 8, 2014). I have never much like the phrase “junk science” because it suggests that courts need only be wary of the absurd and ridiculous in their gatekeeping function. Some expert witness opinions are, in fact, serious scientific contributions, just not worthy of being advanced as scientific conclusions. Perhaps better than “junk” would be patho-epistemologic opinions, or maybe even wissenschmutz, but even these terms might obscure that the opinion that needs to be excluded derives from serious scientific, only it is not ready to be held forth as a scientific conclusion that can be colorably called knowledge.

Another formulation of my term, patho-epistemology, is the Eleventh Circuit’s lovely “Contrivance Standard.” Rink v. Cheminova, Inc., 400 F.3d 1286, 1293 & n.7 (11th Cir. 2005). In Rink, the appellate court held that the district court had acted within its discretion to exclude expert witness testimony because it had properly confined its focus to the challenged expert witness’s methodology, not his credibility:

“In evaluating the reliability of an expert’s method, however, a district court may properly consider whether the expert’s methodology has been contrived to reach a particular result. See Joiner, 522 U.S. at 146, 118 S.Ct. at 519 (affirming exclusion of testimony where the methodology was called into question because an “analytical gap” existed “between the data and the opinion proffered”); see also Elcock v. Kmart Corp., 233 F.3d 734, 748 (3d Cir. 2000) (questioning the methodology of an expert because his “novel synthesis” of two accepted methodologies allowed the expert to ”offer a subjective judgment … in the guise of a reliable expert opinion”).”

Note the resistance, however, to the Supreme Court’s mandate of gatekeeping. District courts must apply the statutes, Rule of Evidence 702 and 703. There is no legal authority for the suggestion that a district court “may properly consider wither the expert’s methodology has been contrived.” Rink, 400 F.3d at 1293 n.7 (emphasis added).

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Examining Expert Witnesses Before Trial – Getting Personal

September 27th, 2014

Personal and cognitive biases are major issues in challenging expert witnesses and their opinions. Discovery is an important opportunity to explore substantive issues, but some time should be allocated to inquiring about biases. Unfortunately, many lawyers inquire about fees and income and stop. At the end of a case, the jury will have heard that all the expert witnesses, typically, are charging for their time, and the jury’s initial shock at exorbitant fees will subside. Finding more revealing biases than income should be one of the goals of a pre-trial deposition.

One question that I try always to ask of expert witnesses is whether they have any friends or family members who have been injured by a product, and especially my client’s product. You never know until you ask.

Here is how the inquiry went with one expert witness in the field of history:

Q. Has anyone in your family or any close friend ever in your belief been injured by a product?

A. Well, this would only be my own belief. I don’t know that this is true. I have no specific knowledge of it.

Q. Sure.

A. It was never brought to court, but I believe my father was.

Q. In what way?

A. Well, he always had a very bad cough and he had always been very — he had been exposed as a worker in many different conditions to various dusts.

Q. What kind of dusts?

A. I have no idea. He worked in a foundry. He worked in a steel mill.

Deposition Transcript at 32:7-23, taken in Mendez v. American Optical, 342d Judicial District, District Court of Tarrant County, Texas (July 13, 2005)

In insurance coverage cases, I have asked defense expert witnesses whether they have advised family members against using products, the safety of which was at issue. Again, on more than one occasion, I have elicited testimony that family members were using the product and had no ill effects. In each case, the expert witness for the defendants withdrew rather than testify at trial about why they permitted a close relative to use the product, which they had maligned in their litigation opinion. Here is the Q&A in a deposition of one frequent testifier:

Q. By the way, has anyone in your family or any of your friends ever been implanted with a silicone medical device?

A. Yes.

Q. And does that have any significance in your reaching your opinions?

A. No.

Q. Is it a friend or a family member?

A. Family member.

Q. In your view, did that family member sustain any harm as a result of the silicone implant?

A. I have no comment to make about that. There have been no complaints and no difficulties. So, so far, I can’t answer the question. I’m not her physician.

Q. Does that person have a legal suit involving the silicone medical device?

A. No.

Deposition transcript at 19-20, in Claus v. Cooper Surgical, Inc., California Superior Court for San Diego County, JCCP-2754-00243, and Santa Clara County, No. 922061 (Dec. 6, 1994). The “cold” record does not capture the witness’s discomfort. The deposition was not concluded, and the witness withdrew rather than continue with his advocacy. See also Deposition transcript in Medical Engineering v AIU Insurance, 58th Judicial District, District Court for Jefferson County, Texas (Feb. 6, and 7, 1997).

Moving beyond the obvious financial incentives for expert witnesses, there are many other sources of potential and actual bias. Injuries and diseases among family members and friends are just the beginning. Memberships in advocacy groups, political organizations, and special-interest professional associations are other issues to be discovered and explored. Many expert witnesses have signed on to amicus briefs that have taken tendentious positions in high-profile cases. Beware of advocate expert witness opinion testimony.

 

 

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Maryland Refuses Apportionment in Asbestos Lung Cancer Cases – Carter

September 19th, 2014

In Carter v. The Wallace & Gale Asbestos Settlement Trust, 439 Md. 333, 96 A.3d 147 (2014), the Maryland Court of Appeals missed an opportunity to place causal apportionment of damages in asbestos cases on a sound legal and factual basis. Instead, the Court misinterpreted the law to be about fault instead of causation, and it failed to come to terms with the facts that supported apportionment.

Carter was a consolidation of four lung cancer cases for trial before a single jury. All plaintiffs had substantial smoking histories, with varying degrees of asbestos exposure. None of the plaintiffs had been an insulator or worked in an asbestos factory. In one of the cases, involving Roger C. Hewitt, Sr., defendant Wallace & Gale Asbestos Settlement Trust[1] proffered a report of its expert witness, Dr. Gerald R. Kerby, who opined that the Mr. Hewitt’s lung cancer and death was apportionable, 3:1, between two causes, smoking and asbestos. 96 A.3d at 151-52.

The plaintiffs’ expert witness, Dr. Steven Zimmet provides the catechistic testimony, based upon the Mt. Sinai scriptures. Zimmet testified that “he could not differentiate between the two causes because the two exposures [asbestos and tobacco] are ‛not just additive, they are synergistic which means they multiple exposures’.” Id. at 151. Of course, Zimmet’s profession of ignorance was hardly probative of whether an apportionment could be made. The distinction, however, between knowledge that something cannot be done, and ignorance as to how it might be done, was lost upon the trial judge, who was wildly dismissive of the proffered opinion from Dr. Kerby:

“No, I understand there is a statistical basis for likelihood of risk. But in a given—with a given plaintiff, I don’t know how you can apportion it. But, you know, I guess, the witness can say what he says if he is qualified to say it. But I’m not going to give an instruction on this because it is not — I don’t perceive it at this point to be the law in these types of cases.

* * *

You can apportion risk. I don’t know how, in an individual plaintiff[‘s] case, you can apportion damages. I don’t know. It is a mystery to me. We’ll find out. The doctor will show up and we will hear about it.”

Id. at 151.

The trial judge excluded Dr. Kerby’s apportionment opinion, based upon a filed offer of proof, and refused to charge the jury on apportionment of damages. As for the jury instruction on apportionment, the trial judge ventured that the defendant was asking to the jury to make “a very unscientific wild guess.” Id. at 151. Of course, allowing the jury to decide any causation claim upon evidence of increased risk sanctions wild guesses and unscientific speculation. Risk is not causation. See, e.g., Guinn v. AstraZeneca Pharms., 602 F.3d 1245, 1255 (11th Cir. 2010) (“An expert, however, cannot merely conclude that all risk factors for a disease are substantial contributing factors in its development. ‘The fact that exposure to [a substance] may be a risk factor for [a disease] does not make it an actual cause simply because [the disease] developed.’”) (internal citation omitted). See also Richard Doll, “Proof of Causality: Deduction from Epidemiological Observation,” 45 Perspectives in Biology & Medicine 499, 500 (2002) (“That asbestos is a cause of lung cancer in this practical sense is incontrovertible, but we can never say that asbestos was responsible for the production of the disease in a particular patient, as there are many other etiologically significant agents to which the individual may have been exposed, and we can speak only of the extent to which the risk of the disease was increased by the extent of his or her exposure.”). Given that courts have put juries into the business of making wild guesses, the trial court failed to explain why it could not make a guess based upon the same sort of increased risk evidence that would support a finding of causation against the asbestos defendant alone.

The jury returned verdicts for all four plaintiffs, and the defendant appealed. The Maryland Special Court of Appeals reversed and remanded the Hewitt case for a new trial.[2] Wallace & Gale Trust v. Carter, 65 A.3d 749, 752 (Md. App. 2013). The Maryland Court of Appeals, however, took the plaintiff’s appeal, and reinstated the verdict in favor of the Hewitt family[3].

The Court of Appeals did not fuss over the general statement of Maryland law of apportionment of damages, which has adopted the American Law Institute’s Restatement (Second) of Torts § 433A (1965), which provides:

“(1) Damages for harm are to be apportioned among two or more causes where

          (a) there are distinct harms, or

(b) there is a reasonable basis for determining the contribution of each  cause to a single harm.

(2) Damages for any other harm cannot be apportioned among two or more causes.”

Id. at 157-58, quoting the Restatement. The Court did not explain why it was relying upon a portion of the Restatement, which has been superseded by the Restatement Third of Torts: Apportionment of Liability § 26 (2000).

In any event, the Court of Appeals did recognize that the crucial issue was whether there was a reasonable basis for determining the contribution of each cause to a single harm. On this issue, the Carter court took its lead from antiquated dicta from a treatise, 30 years out of date. W. Page Keeton, et al., Prosser and Keeton on Torts § 52, at 345 (5th ed. 1984). See Georgetown Law Library, “Torts Law Treatises” (“This classic hornbook on torts is no longer up-to-date… .”). The Court quoted:

“The distinction is one between injuries which are reasonably capable of being separated and injuries which are not. If two defendants, struggling for a single gun, succeed in shooting the plaintiff, there is no reasonable basis for dividing the injury between them, and each will be liable for all of it. If they shoot the plaintiff independently, with separate guns, and the plaintiff dies from the effect of both wounds, there can still be no division, for death cannot be divided or apportioned except by an arbitrary rule devised for that purpose. If they merely inflict separate wounds, and the plaintiff survives, a basis for division exists, because it is possible to regard the two wounds as separate injuries; and the same of course is true for wounds negligently inflicted…. Upon the same basis, if two defendants each pollute a stream with oil, in some instances it may be possible to say that each has interfered to a separate extent with the plaintiff’s rights in the water, and to make some division of the damages. It is not possible if the oil is ignited, and burns the plaintiff’s barn.”

96 A.3d at 158, quoting Prosser and Keeton on Torts § 52, at 345-47 (5th ed. 1984) (internal citations omitted). As can be seen from the language quoted by Court, the venerable, but out-dated text never even considered an apportionment of an injury where the only information about causation was the existence of ex ante risks. Conspicuously absent from the hornbook are any examples of cases in which causation itself is predicated upon quantitative risk estimates, which in turn could readily supply the basis for apportionment.

As for the science, the Court of Appeals cited a textbook written by plaintiffs’ lawyers:

“asbestos and tobacco smoke are complex carcinogens that can affect multiple steps in the multistage process of cancer evolution, and that the combined effects will depend on the relative magnitude of each carcinogen at each stage. As reported in different studies, the interactive effect ranges from less than additive to supramultiplicative [sic] but the model for insulation workers approximates a multiplicative effect. If the multistage model of carcinogenesis holds, and asbestos and smoking act at different stages, then a multiplicative relationship follows.”

96 A.3d at 160-61, quoting from George A. Peters & Barbara J. Peters, Asbestos Pathogenesis and Litigation, 13 The Sourcebook on Asbestos Diseases: Medical, Legal, and Technical Aspects 149 (1996). Peters and Peters is a consulting and law firm in Santa Monica. Barbara J. Peters is a lawyer and a member of the Consumer Attorneys Association of Los Angeles, the Consumer Attorneys Association of California, and the Association of Trial Lawyers of America.

If the Court of Appeals had even bothered to read the plaintiffs’ lawyer tract, it would have seen that even the Peters had qualified their opinion, in their 1996 book, by suggesting that the “model for insulation workers approximates a multiplicative effect.” Id. (emphasis added). Mr. Hewitt had been a crane operator, which hardly involves the same level of exposure as an asbestos insulator, and the evidence for multiplicative synergy is sorely lacking outside a few, heavily exposed cohorts such as insulation workers. In any event, the Court of Appeals failed to explain or justify why a multiplicative model, even if it were appropriate, is decisive of the issue whether or not there was a reasonable basis for apportionment.

While we might excuse the Court of Appeals’ missteps in interpreting scientific evidence, even if filtered through funnels created by the plaintiffs’ expert witness Zimmet and the law firm of Peters & Peters, harder to forgive is the Court’s bobbling the interpretation of apportionment in New Jersey courts. The Special Court of Appeals had relied upon the New Jersey Dafler case, which affirmed a jury’s apportionment of damages in an asbestos and smoking lung cancer case. Dafler v. Raymark Industries, Inc., 259 N.J.Super. 17, 611 A.2d 136 (App. Div.1992), aff’d 132 N.J. 96, 622 A.2d 1305 (1993) (per curiam). In Dafler, the plaintiff’s expert witness made the usual protestations that the outcome, lung cancer, was indivisible, and the defense expert witness opined that smoking was the sole cause. The New Jersey appellate courts held that it would be manifestly unjust to attribute 100% of the lung cancer to smoking when no expert witness testified to such an allocation.

The Court of Appeals correctly pointed out that New Jersey cases are not binding upon it and that it would choose not to do so, which was its wont. The Court then proceeded to ignore that the Dafler holding was explicitly adopted by the New Jersey Supreme Court, and that the holding was based upon a causal, not a fault-based, apportionment. Indeed, the Court of Appeals went as far as to declare that the Dafler case was based upon fault principles because the Appellate Division there had stated that “apportionment is also consistent with the principles of the Comparative Negligence Act.” 96 A.3d at 155, quoting from Dafler, 259 N.J.Super. at 35, 611 A.2d at 145 (emphasis added). What the Maryland Court of Appeals failed to realize, however, was that the Dafler case was tried in New Jersey’s regime of hyper-strict asbestos liability, in which evidence of fault is excluded. Of necessity, the evidence and the verdict in Dafler were based exclusively upon causal determinants, not fault principles. Indeed, the Appellate Division’s “also” emphasized here in the quote from Dafler makes clear that the Appellate Division was merely noting that New Jersey juries are asked to make similar assessments of comparative contributions in fault, and that making such an assessment is not beyond the jury’s function or competence.

Two judges, in Carter, dissented in a polite, factual opinion that tore away at the majority opinion. The dissent noted that in Maryland, as in most states, workman’s compensation judges apportion causal shares to single injuries all the time. 96 A.3d at 173. And the dissent dug deeper into New Jersey law, as well as other foreign states, to expose the majority’s poor scholarship:

“Death may be indivisible as to result, but it is not per se incapable of apportionment. Many courts around the country have permitted apportionment in death cases. See e.g., Brisboy v. Fibreboard Corp., 429 Mich. 540, 418 N.W.2d 650, 655 (1988) (permitting apportionment of damages in a wrongful death action based on smoking history and asbestos exposure); Champagne v. Raybestos–Manhattan, Inc., 212 Conn. 509, 562 A.2d 1100, 1118 (1989) (same); see also Poliseno v. General Motors Corp., 328 N.J.Super. 41, 744 A.2d 679, 687 (2000) (concluding that while death is indivisible as to result, it is capable of apportionment in terms of causation). … In my view, a categorical rule that death is an indivisible injury incapable of apportionment speeds past an accepted principle of law: death can be capable of apportionment as to damages, but not as to fault. See Restatement (Third) of Torts: Physical and Emotional Harm § 28, cmt. d (2010) (“Death as an injury may not be divisible, but damages for death are divisible.”); see also Gerald W. Boston, Toxic Apportionment: A Causation and Risk Contribution Model, 25 Envtl. L. 549, 568–69 (1995) (stating that although “comment i [to the Restatement (Second) of Torts § 443A] states that death is the quintessential indivisible harm … deaths attributable to toxic causes, as when a plaintiff dies from lung cancer brought about by the combined effects of smoking and asbestos exposure, each of the contributing causes can be compared and the harm apportioned on that basis.”).

Id. at 173.

The dissent saw clearly that the characterization of apportionment in New Jersey law, relied upon by the intermediate appellate court, was not a mere matter of opinion. The majority of the Court of Appeals was wrong, as a matter of fact, in claiming that apportionment of damages in New Jersey was based upon fault. Id. at 174, citing Poliseno v. General Motors Corp., 328 N.J.Super. 41 55-56, 744 A.2d 679, 687-88 (2000), for clear distinguishing between apportionment based upon causation as opposed to fault.

The dissent also called out the majority for the disturbing partisanship in adopting plaintiffs’ lawyers’ and plaintiffs’expert witness’s opinions on apportionment, without any consideration of the excluded expert witness’s contrary opinions. See Gerald W. Boston, Toxic Apportionment: A Causation and Risk Contribution Model, 25 Envt’l L. 549, 555 (1995) (cited by dissenters for his conclusion that “[i]f the plaintiff’s asbestos exposure and his smoking are both shown to be causal factors in the plaintiff’s lung cancer, then the loss is necessarily capable of apportionment on the basis of the relative risks demonstrated for each kind of toxic exposure.”).

The Carter case comes about a year after the Court of Appeals reversed a careful opinion of the Special Court of Appeals, and held that plaintiffs’ expert witnesses may testify that each exposure, however small, represents a substantial contributing factor to a plaintiff’s asbestos-related disease. Dixon v. Ford Motor Co., 433 Md. 137 (2013). Science seems not to play well in asbestos cases before the high court of Maryland.

[1] Apparently, the Trust was inappropriately named a Settlement Trust, probably by plaintiffs’ counsel creditors who had apparently hoped it would simply be a cash delivery device.

[2] Colleen K. O’Brien, “Trial Court Erred by Excluding Defense Expert Testimony on Cigarette Smoking As Contributing to Plaintiff’s Lung Cancer” (May 2013); Arlow M. Linton, “Maryland: Failure to Allow Apportionment of Causes of Lung Cancer is Reversible Error” (Oct. 28, 2013).

[3] Colleen K. O’Brien, “Trial Court Properly Excluded Defense Expert Testimony on Cigarette Smoking as Contributing to Plaintiff’s Lung Cancer in Asbestos Case” (Aug. 19, 2014).


				


				
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The Dog That Didn’t Bark – Adverse Inferences for Expert Witnesses

				September 13th, 2014 

				

					
The New Jersey Supreme Court is known for bloated writing, which in the past has gotten the Court in trouble.  Witness the fiasco of the Court’s volubly outrunning its headlights to redefine strict liability to exclude the requirement of a reasonable knowability component in product liability failure-to-warn litigation.  Beshada v. Johns-Manville Prods. Corp., 90 N.J. 191, 447 A.2d 539 (1982). Realizing its error, the Court attempted to correct itself a short two years later, but probably only managed to make things worse, in Feldman v. Lederle Labs., 97 N.J. 429, 479 A.2d 374 (1984). Arguably, the prestige of the New Jersey Supreme Court never recovered. See Andrew T. Berry, “Beshada v. Johns-Manville Products Corporation: Revolution-or-Aberration in Products Liability,” 52 Fordham L. Rev. 786 (1984); J. Berman, “Beshada v. Johns-Manville Products Corp.: the function of state of the art evidence in strict products liability,” 10 Am. J. Law & Med. 93 (1984).


Bitten by the Dog That Didn’t Bark


There is a danger is saying too much, and, of course, in not saying the right thing. The New Jersey high Court recently addressed adverse inferences for expert witnesses not called at trial. Washington v. Perez, ___ N.J. ___ (2014). See Bruce D. Greenberg, “Failure to Call an Expert Witness to Testify,” (Sept. 12, 2014). The case was a relative simple vehicular injury case. The defense served two expert witness reports, but did not call either expert witness at trial. In his closing argument, the plaintiff’s lawyer focused on the defense’s uncalled expert witnesses, and went so far as to suggest that defense counsel had lied to the jury. On plaintiff’s request, the court issued an adverse inference charge, instructing the jury that if it reasonably thought defendants should have called Drs. Sharetts and Hayken, then it could infer from the defendants’ not having presented these witnesses, that the missing testimony would have been adverse to defendants’ position at trial. The jury awarded plaintiff substantial damages.


The trial court refused a motion for new trial, but the Appellate Division reversed and remanded for a new trial. Washington v. Perez, 430 N.J. Super. 121, 131 (App. Div. 2013) (holding that trial court had abused its discretion in giving the adverse inference charge). See David R. Kott & Edward J. Fanning Jr., “Adverse Inference for Failing To Call a Witness: What rules apply when a person with material knowledge of a case does not testify?” 212 N.J. Law Journal 783 (June 17, 2013) (reporting on the Appellate Division’s decision). Perhaps not knowing when to stop, plaintiff obtained review in the New Jersey Supreme Court, which then endorsed the Appellate Division’s decision, and held that the giving of the adverse inference charge was error.


As the Appellate Division explained, the kerfuffle started when the plaintiff’s counsel presented a videotaped deposition of plaintiff’s expert witness, Dr. Rosen. In the course of the deposition, Dr. Rosen testified:


“Q. And in both of those reports did Dr. Ha[y]ken indicate what traumatic event or what event he associated the herniated disc that we’ve spoken of and the radiculopathy that we’ve spoken of?


A. Dr. Ha[y]ken states in his report that he feels that the cervical herniated disc and radiculopathy are related to the accident of 12/20/06.”


The defense asked that this Q&A be redacted, and plaintiff’s counsel conceded that Dr. Hayken never so stated in his report. Judge Charles Little, sitting in Burlington County, however, took a “let it all in” approach, despite defense counsel’s statement that he did not plan upon calling Dr. Hayken, and so the elicited testimony would not have been appropriate rebuttal.


The trial judge’s error only compounded. During voir dire of the jury panel, defense counsel had identified his two expert witnesses, and in his opening statement, the defense counsel has told the jury that “the evidence will show that [plaintiff] was not injured in the accident … .” Plaintiff’s counsel ran with the admittedly false testimony of Dr. Rosen, pilloried defense counsel for not calling Dr. Hayken, and argued that Dr. Hayken would have supported the plaintiff’s case.


Despite the Appellate Division’s sure-footed handling of the case, the Supreme Court granted certification, and affirmed in a slip opinion over 40 pages long. Although it took a lot of words, at least in this instance the Court got to the decision right:


“an adverse inference charge should rarely be invoked to address the absence of an expert.”


Slip op. at 3.


Defense counsel had served reports of Drs. Sharetts and Hayken, on plaintiff’s counsel, with a disclaimer that the reports were not defendants’ adoptive admissions. Id. at 6. When objecting to Dr. Rosen’s testimony, defense counsel explained that he did not intend to call his expert witnesses, because plaintiff had failed to prove her case. Id. at 10. Later, however, he claimed that Dr. Hayken was unavailable. Id. at 12.


In any event, Rosen’s dodgy testimony, and the trial court’s equally dodgy awarding of an adverse inference charge, set defense counsel up for a pasting before the jury. After the summations, the trial court let on that it was unhappy with plaintiff’s closing argument that the defense had tried to hide evidence, and that it “should probably grant a new trial,” but the trial court incongruously and circularly denied the new trial because the defense did not present any expert witnesses. Id.


A large part of the bloat in the high court’s opinion is the Court’s exploration of missing witness instructions in civil and criminal cases, for fact and expert witnesses. Id. at 13-28. Given that the Court ultimately held that expert witnesses are different, it might have spared the reader a recitation of the law for fact witnesses. Two thirds into its opinion, the Court finally gets to expert witnesses, but attempts to resolve the conflicting case law and the claims in the case sub judice within the confines of its precedent in State v. Hill, 199 N.J. 545, 974 A.2d 403 (2009). Hill articulated a standard for the propriety of an adverse inference jury instruction in the face of a party’s failure or refusal to call a fact witness.


As the Supreme Court explains, and what we all know, expert witnesses are different. Slip op. at 30. Expert witnesses must be disclosed, and they are subject to heightened discovery in the form of interrogatories and depositions. Second, expert witnesses rarely are in exclusive possession of facts essential to the other side’s case. Id. at 31, 39. Somewhat puzzlingly, the Court offered that parties are not under any obligation to call an expert witnesses, unless their opinions are needed to satisfy an element of the claim or defense. Id. at 32. The same, however, could be said of fact witnesses.


Finally, and most importantly, Court acknowledged that there are “many strategic and practical reasons that may prompt a party who has retained an expert witness to decide not to present the expert’s testimony at trial.” Id. at 33. Expert witnesses are expensive; they are sometimes duplicative; and sometimes they are unavailable. Id. at 35.


According to the Supreme Court, expert witnesses are not generally under a party’s exclusive control, and there is no privilege in a testifying expert witness’s opinion. Id at 36-37. The Court thus suggested that expert witnesses are “available” to the party seeking the adverse inference. Id. at 37.


As with adverse inferences, the most interesting aspects of the Supreme Court’s decision in Washington v. Perez is what the Court did not say. The Court omitted a necessary discussion of how expert witness testimony is presented to a jury or a court, who may, as the finder of fact, accept some, all, or none of the opinion testimony. The party without the burden of proof is free to argue that the adversary’s expert witness was incredible, or that the witness conceded the most important points for the trial, and that calling yet another expert witness in opposition would have wasted the factfinder’s time, and the client’s money.


The availability argument raises the ethical concern of legal counsel attempting ex parte agreements with adversaries’ expert witnesses. And then there is the simple solution that plaintiff’s counsel did not need to elicit imaginary or phony concessions from Dr. Rosen about Dr. Hayken’s report; counsel could have taken Dr. Hayken’s deposition before trial, or during a short recess.


Perhaps even simpler yet, the Court could have (and should have) condemned the admission of Dr. Rosen’s concededly false testimony about what Dr. Hayken’s report stated. The exclusion of this testimony would taken away much of the rationale for plaintiff’s request for the adverse inference instruction.


One way to avoid the request for adverse inference instructions is to announce, say the day before resting, that you have decided not to call an expert witness and that you have released that witness to testify for anyone calling him. This announcement should place the onus on your adversary to ask for time to ask for, or compel, the attendance of the witness. This procedure also preserves the integrity of the process by making clear that your adversary is not free to contact your expert witness until you give permission.

				


				
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