Plaintiff sued Defendants for their purported involvement in unlawfully accessing and disclosing confidential financial information pertaining to him, and to others similarly situated to him, in connection with a state court case against Plaintiff’s accountant. As part of the discovery in that case, which involved claims against the accountant for contractual breaches and related business torts, the State Court ordered the accountant to provide access to client records. Plaintiff thereafter filed this putative class action. Plaintiff’s motion for class certification was denied on July 20, 2026.
Plaintiff has disclosed Jeffery Stollman as an expert on the two statutes that Defendants are accused of violating in this case—the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) and the Stored Communications Act (SCA)—as well as on damages.
Privacy Expert Witness
Jeffery P. Stollman is an identity and privacy expert with decades of experience in the technology and privacy fields. His educational background is also in those fields, as well as in economics
Discussion by the Court
To begin with Stollman lacked sufficient familiarity with the ECPA and SCA to qualify him to offer legal opinions on these statutes. His deposition testimony indicated, for example, that before Plaintiff retained him for this case, Stollman had not read the statutes and did not know the good faith reliance defense applicable to them.
As to Stollman’s methods, he reviewed the operative pleading in this case and read the text of the statutes to arrive at his opinions as to how the complained-of misconduct amounted to violations of the ECPA and SCA, and he calculated damages based on general risks associated with the disclosure of personally identifiable information, such as the information that Plaintiff alleged Defendants unlawfully disclosed. The Court held that Stollman’s methods regarding the ECPA and SCA are unreliable because they amount to his ipse dixit.
As to helpfulness, Stollman concluded that Defendants violated the ECPA and the SCA, and that in general, damages from unlawfully disclosed information totaled approximately $5,905, although additional analysis aimed at increasing precision could “result in values significantly lower or significantly higher.” These conclusions are not helpful. Respecting the ECPA and SCA, an expert “may not . . . merely tell the jury what result to reach” and “may not testify to the legal implications of conduct” because “the Court must be the jury’s only source of law.”
Held
The Court granted Defendants’ motion to exclude Jeffery Stollman’s testimony.
Key Takeaway
Expert testimony will not help the trier of fact when it offers nothing more than what lawyers for the parties can argue in closing arguments.
Case Details:
| Case Caption: | Mohamad V. Lawgical Insight |
| Docket Number: | 6:24cv2354 |
| Court Name: | United States District Court, Florida Middle |
| Order Date: | July 21, 2026 |
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