September 20, 2004

The Texas lawyer-blogger has been a prominent online commentator on the controversy over "60 Minutes"' use of apparently forged documents; now he contributes a post on the role of document experts in the affair. (Dan Rather's producers appear to have gone "authentication-shopping", as one critic puts it.) Trial lawyers are free to retain both "testifying experts" (fully disclosed) and "consulting experts" (kept secret, especially when they say unhelpful things) but journalists, whose loyalties are supposed to lie more with the advancement of truth and the public interest than with the advancement of clients' interests, should be held to other standards. The post is a useful primer on expert practice in litigation quite aside from the light it casts on the CBS affair.