Manipulating Expert Testimony in Injury Cases
Over the past two decades representing injury victims, we have seen horrific examples of corporations putting profit over people. Recently, the American Association for Justice has reported on such corporate tactics and the fact that corporations will stop at nothing to protect their profits. A recent case in the Illinois courts helps to expose one such corporate tactic: manipulating expert witness testimony.
Expert witnesses are a critical resource in numerous cases. Courts require litigants to provide expert testimony in virtually every serious injury case. Negligent corporations, however, have begun using their financial clout in an attempt to buy experts — even academics. What's more, they have done so behind a veil of secrecy.
In Rago v. Federal Signal Corp., firefighters who had suffered noise-induced hearing loss from sirens produced by Federal Signal Corp. brought a mass tort lawsuit for restitution from the company in an Illinois state court. In the course of defending Federal Signal, the company's lawyers pointed to an academic study published by Dr. William Clark, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine. The study concluded that firefighters were not at risk of hearing loss from sirens, despite their exposure to high levels of occupational noise. What the lawyers, and the study itself, did not say was that Clark had long been a paid consultant to Federal Signal and had helped the company defend other hearing-loss litigation while he was conducting his research. In fact, the "study" was based on data Federal Signal itself had collected and provided to Clark.
Federal Signal did all it could to hide its role in the study, even when it was required under standard court procedures to disclose its involvement in research. When the firefighters' lawyers learned of the company's cover-up, they forced the company to turn over an additional 1,400 pages of data and analysis that it had previously held back. As a punishment for the deception, the judge, barred the company from using the study in court, barred Clark from testifying and ordered Federal Signal to pay the firefighters $50,000 in attorney fees for the additional time their lawyers had to spend to force the company to come clean.
