Opposing the Adverse Expert: A Comprehensive Guide for Every Stage of Litigation

Opposing the Adverse Expert is a step-by-step guide to investigating, evaluating, and opposing the adverse expert in civil cases. It outlines tactics you can use to gather information about the adverse expert, both in the discovery process and on your own to:

• take effective expert depositions;
• evaluate the adverse expert's analysis of the key issues;
• move to exclude his testimony;
• conduct devastating cross-examinations of incorrect experts;
• make the most of your voir dire, opening statement, and closing argument;
• and even to advocate powerfully about expert issues on appeal.

Purchasers of the book gain access to our website, which includes checklists you can put to immediate use in your practice, outlines for expert depositions and cross-examinations, nationwide charts of expert witness law, and state outlines with numerous citations to key expert witness rules, cases, and pattern jury instructions.

First and foremost, Steve Easton is a trial attorney. He has tried a wide variety of expert-dominated cases, including those featuring such staples of civil litigation as medicine, engineering, construction, economics, contracts, insurance, accident reconstruction, electricity, product design, injury causation, physics, and psychology, but also such unusual issues as hypnosis, handwriting analysis, cattle hauling, memory deficiencies, football, hockey, and rodeo. Even as a law professor, Mr. Easton continues to do battle with experts in jury trials. He has tried cases to verdict in all four chairs―that is, as a plaintiff's attorney and defense attorney in civil cases and as both a prosecutor and a criminal defense attorney.

Formerly the United States Attorney for the District of North Dakota, Mr. Easton is the William T. Schwartz Professor of Law at the University of Wyoming. In academia, he has concentrated his research and writing on expert witnesses. In 2004, the American Inns of Court awarded him the inaugural Warren E. Burger Prize for scholarship concerning legal excellence, civility, ethics, and professionalism. In 2006, the Pound Civil Justice Institute presented him with its Richard S. Jacobson Award for excellence in teaching trial advocacy.

Professor Easton, a graduate of Stanford Law School, is the author of How to Win Jury Trials: Building Credibility with Judges and Jurors, published by ALI-ABA; the coauthor of a West/Thomson Reuters casebook on professional responsibility and Wolters Kluwer's Materials in Trial Advocacy; and the author of numerous law review and bar journal articles, most of which concern expert witnesses and other aspects of trial advocacy. He is also a nationally prominent continuing legal education teacher who has presented numerous seminars in dozens of states to thousands of trial attorneys.