Spring 2017, Guardians and Gatekeepers

     

    Expert Witnesses

    Expert Evidence Post-Daubert: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

    Demosthenes Lorandos

    The Daubert trilogy requires scientists to be scientists first and expert witnesses second, but how are judges and lawyers to evaluate the testimony of scientists?

    Features

    Columns

    Media & Communications

    iWitness: Call Me, Maybe: The TCPA’s Impact on Technology Used for Consumer Communications

    Christine M. Reilly and Diana L. Eisner

    As Spiderman’s Uncle Ben warned us, with greater power comes greater responsibility. In the consumer marketing and engagement arena, that responsibility largely arises from the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (TCPA), 47 U.S.C. § 227 et seq., and regulations promulgated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200 et seq. There have been recent developments in TCPA law that you and your clients with consumer-facing businesses will want to know about.

    Litigation & Trials

    Advance Sheet: Gotta Get a Witness—Wait!! Maybe Not

    Robert E. Shapiro

    Some bad ideas just refuse to go away. A couple of decades ago, defense lawyers in criminal cases, looking for some kind of edge against eyewitness testimony, seemed to strike gold when they came upon psychological research showing that eyewitnesses are not what they are cracked up to be. Eyewitnesses, said this newfound science, routinely make mistakes. Far from providing reliable evidence—which these researchers contended everyone supposedly believed was the case—eyewitnesses often get things wrong, skewing the pictures before their eyes with the biases of their brains, not to mention their fears, or anger, or likes and dislikes. Our presumed faith in eyewitnesses, this research claimed, was somewhere between doubtful and delusional.

    Headnotes

    Litigation & Trials

    Privilege: After Mohawk: What Remedies Are Left for Litigants Facing Adverse Privilege Rulings?

    Edna Selan Epstein

    Your client has just lost a privilege claim and has been ordered by the trial court to turn over attorney-client privileged documents. These may prove to be the nail in the coffin to your successful defense on the claims at issue. You are convinced that the trial court made a mistake in ruling that the documents were indeed privileged communications between your client and in-house counsel but that the privilege had been waived.