Expert Witness Profiler

Tag: Skill

  • Trucking Expert’s Testimony on the Preventability of the Accident Excluded

    Trucking Expert’s Testimony on the Preventability of the Accident Excluded

    This case arises from a fatal automobile accident that occurred on September 22, 2017. Blake Haddox was traveling southbound on a motorcycle as Defendant Nicholas Roshon Moore drove a semi-truck in a northbound lane and turned left across traffic. The two collided, and Haddox died as a result.

    Defendants Central Freightlines, Inc. and Nicholas Roshon Moore (collectively, “Defendants”) filed a motion to strike Plaintiffs’ expert Lewis J. Grill, a motion in limine with respect to anticipated testimony by Grill and a motion to strike his supplemental expert report.

    Defendants argued that Grill is not qualified to provide expert testimony in this case, and that his opinions are neither relevant nor reliable.

     His proffered testimony relates to “four overarching areas” that include: (1) “general trucking industry customs, practices, and standards”; (2) the “operating performance” of Moore; (3) CFL’s “management practices”; and (4) “accident preventability from a commercial trucking industry standpoint.”

    Trucking Expert Witness

    Lewis Joseph Grill has extensive experience as a commercial truck driver, training instructor, training program director, safety director, and trucking consultant. 

    He is licensed as a commercial driver and has logged approximately 2 million miles driving tractor-trailers in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Central America. Grill has published books and articles and spoken on the subject of commercial trucking, in general, and driver standards, in particular.

    Want to know more about the challenges Lew Grill has faced? Get the full details with our Challenge Study report.

    Discussion by the Court

    A. Motion to Strike Supplemental Report

    Plaintiffs provided Defendants with Grill’s original expert report by the applicable deadline. In accordance with an Amended Scheduling Order, Defendants timely filed a Daubert motion, requesting the Court strike Grill’s expert testimony. Over two months later, on December 4, 2020—well after the deadline to exchange expert reports had passed—Plaintiffs provided Defendants with a supplemental report prepared by Grill. Defendants filed a motion to strike Grill’s supplemental report as untimely.

    The Court understood Defendants’ position. However, a review of the supplemental report indicated that the main change is the addition of two new opinions. These new opinions are apparently offered as a result of information gleaned from the deposition of Defendant Central Freightlines, Inc.’s Corporate Representative Thomas Weeks, taken September 16, 2020. Plaintiffs provided notice in their October 2020 response to Defendants’ motion to strike that Grill had “not had a reasonable opportunity to review the transcript and update his opinions accordingly.”

    Grill also does not appear to have substantively changed his opinions in any meaningful way. At the time Defendants received the supplemental report, trial was scheduled for April 19, 2021. Defendants still had over four months to review the supplemental report and prepare for trial. Further, on March 9, 2021, the Court struck the scheduling order due to the Covid pandemic and the Court’s excess criminal case load. The Court acknowledged the importance of scheduling order deadlines and complying with the Court’s orders and procedures. However, the Court cannot ascertain any prejudice Defendants suffered as a result of the delayed supplemental report. Defendants have not requested leave to take Grill’s deposition out of time; nor have they filed a rebuttal report.

    B. Motion to Strike Grill’s Testimony

    I. Grill is qualified to testify about general trucking industry customs, practices and standards

    Defendants argued that Grill is unqualified because “none of Grill’s background and experience concerns issues to be determined in this matter.” Defendants asserted that Grill is not an expert in matters of “accident reconstruction, traffic signals or human factors.” However, Defendants never contended that Grill is unqualified as an expert in the areas of general trucking industry customs, practices, and standards.

    Plaintiffs responded that Grill is qualified as an expert in the field of commercial trucking based on his experience as a commercial truck driver, training instructor, training program director, safety director, and trucking consultant. Plaintiffs also contended that Grill has been qualified in numerous cases as an expert. The Court found that Grill has decades of experience and involvement in the trucking industry. Therefore, he possessed the necessary training, experience, knowledge and skill to testify in the areas of general trucking industry customs, practices and standards.

    II. Some of Grill’s proffered testimony is relevant and reliable

    Defendants contended that Grill’s testimony will not aid the jury because the jury can make a liability determination in this case without the aid of an expert witness.

    As an initial matter, although not specifically raised by Defendants, the Court had concerns about representations in Grill’s report. It appeared Grill held opinions that elevated the standard of care applicable to commercial truck drivers. For example, Grill states, “in my opinion, the performance standards to accomplish this standard of care are much different for truck drivers than operators of smaller vehicles.” The Court will instruct the jury as to the proper standard of care. Therefore, Grill is prohibited from testifying about any opinion he holds concerning the standard of care applicable to commercial truck drivers.

    Further, Plaintiffs proposed Grill will provide opinions “regarding the hiring, retention and safety management of Central.” However, the Court already granted Defendant CFL summary judgment as to Plaintiffs’ negligent hiring, retention, supervision and training claims.

    Moreover, the Court found Grill’s proffered testimony about the accident and Moore’s actions leading up to the accident conclusory without underlying factual support. 

    Defendants specifically challenged Grill’s opinion that the accident was avoidable or preventable. The Court similarly found this opinion an impermissible conclusion. Any testimony that Moore violated law, regulations, procedures, or policies are likewise impermissible legal conclusions.

    Grill’s report provided that “Moore, because of failing to perceive a hazard in time, and failing to make proper safety decisions when he ultimately chose risk over safety by intruding into the approaching traffic stream, caused this collision.” However, causation is an issue of fact for the jury.

    Held

    • The Court denied the Defendants’ motion to strike Plaintiffs’ expert Lew Grill.
    • The Court granted in part and denied in part the Defendants’ motion in limine with respect to anticipated testimony by Plaintiffs’ expert Lew Grill. Grill is prohibited from testifying about the topics identified by the Court in this order. Any other concerns possessed by Defendants may be addressed by a contemporaneous objection at trial or through cross-examination.
    •  The Court denied the Defendants’ motion to strike Lew Grill’s supplemental report.

    Key Takeaway:

    Grill’s knowledge, skill and experience in the trucking industry will help the jury understand the evidence and determine the factual issues of this case.

    However, much of Grill’s proffered testimony was excluded because it reached unsupported conclusions and invaded the province of the jury. The jury is more than capable of reaching their own conclusions as to the ultimate issues in this case.

    Case Details:

    Case Caption: Haddox Et Al V. Central Freightlines, Inc. Et Al
    Docket Number: 4:18cv266
    Court Name: United States District Court, Oklahoma Northern
    Order Date: September 25, 2025
  • Economics Expert’s Lack of Specialized Credentials Did Not Provide a Basis for Exclusion

    Economics Expert’s Lack of Specialized Credentials Did Not Provide a Basis for Exclusion

    Plaintiff Michael Ruiz (“Ruiz”) is suing his former employer, Defendant Magellan Financial & Insurance Services (“Magellan”), under the theory that his alleged demotion and subsequent termination were due to his race and national origin and that he was also subjected to a hostile work environment.

    Ruiz retained an expert, Michael J. Stokes (“Stokes”) of Beta Business Consulting LLC (“Beta”), to calculate the net present value of his lost wages and benefits. Magellan, however, filed a motion to exclude the expert testimony of Stokes.

    Economics Expert Witness

    Michael J. Stokes earned an MBA from the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a focus in entrepreneurship. He has been employed as a litigation-related economic expert for 6 years at Beta Consulting.

    Want to know more about the challenges Michael J. Stokes has faced? Get the full details with our Challenge Study report. 

    Discussion by the Court

    Qualifications

    Magellan argued that Stokes is unqualified because “his financial or accounting training concerned issues related to capital and corporate investment, and no other topics” and “he has no other certifications or licenses, and no publication history.”

    Analysis

    The Court held that Stokes is qualified to offer opinions about the net present value of Ruiz’s purportedly lost wages and benefits. First, Stokes’ opinions are “within the reasonable confines of his subject area.” Stokes holds an MBA from the University of Massachusetts, where he took classes on management, supply-chain management, entrepreneurship, finance, and basic economics. 

    As for the “finance and accounting” portion of his studies, Stokes studied “[a]nything from investment to just looking at capital investment, corporate investment.” These areas of study appear to encompass the opinions set forth in the report. Although Magellan may be correct that Stokes’ credentials are not highly specialized, the absence of specialization goes to the weight of Stokes’ testimony and did not provide a basis for exclusion.

    Second, Stokes’ experience also forms part of the basis for his qualification to testify as an expert. Stokes is an “economic analyst” for Beta, where he has worked since 2018, and is now the full owner of the company. Before assuming ownership, Stokes was trained by the founder and previous owner, Larry Stokes (his father), who has a Ph.D. in economics.  In addition to being trained and advised by his father, Stokes “occasionally reviews” trainings from the National Association of Forensic Economics (“NAFE”), a standards-setting association for forensic economists of which he is a member. 

    Relevance

    Magellan next argued that Stokes’ testimony is not relevant because it does not consider the relevant factors in an economic damages calculation “such as back pay or mitigation” and only “seeks to estimate what [Ruiz] might have earned from Magellan had he not been terminated.”

    Analysis

    Stokes’ report purported to calculate the net present value—$3,729,078—of the wages and benefits Ruiz would have earned had he remained employed by Magellan until his retirement. Although this figure likely overstated Ruiz’s economic damages, as it made no attempt to account for offsets and mitigation, it was still at least one piece of the puzzle.

    Magellan contended that even if relevant, Stokes’ testimony would be confusing, misleading, and/or prejudicial because Ruiz “claimed that Stokes’ calculation represents his damages.” In essence, Magellan argued that a jury would be confused by the difference between Stokes’ economic earnings projection and “economic damages,” which are calculated by incorporating a variety of figures, including mitigation. The problem with this argument is that although Ruiz has at times during this case appeared to characterize the report as showing his economic “damages,” the report itself did not purport to calculate Ruiz’s litigation damages and Stokes did not suggest as much in his deposition. In fact, he clearly stated the opposite.

    Moreover, Ruiz clarified in his response brief that the report did not purport to establish his damages and will simply “be helpful to the jury to determine [Ruiz’s] damages.”

    As a result, the Court will not categorically exclude Stokes’ opinions before trial based on Rule 403.

    Reliability

    Magellan’s final argument for exclusion is that “Stokes’ opinion is not reliable because it did not comply with his own assumptions.” Specifically, Magellan contended that Stokes “assumed that generally an employee’s earnings peak mid-career, and then ‘tend to’ decline toward the end of the employee’s working life.” The opinion that Stokes offered, however, assumed that [Ruiz’s] earnings would continue to increase through the end of his working life.

    Analysis

    The Court held that Magellan’s reliability-based arguments did not provide a basis for exclusion because the report is based on clear and accessible data, including Ruiz’s responses to a questionnaire, Ruiz’s W-2s from 2018-2023, publicly available government data, and scholarly research—all of which Stokes disclosed throughout the report. 

    In each section of the report, Stokes also explained his methodological approach. By disclosing his methodology and the data on which his analysis relies, Stokes’ calculations may be retested, refined, and challenged. This ability to be tested—also known as falsifiability—is a hallmark of the scientific method and a factor that courts may consider in testing for reliability.

    Additionally, the Court is sufficiently convinced that Stokes’ methods are “generally accepted in the scientific community.” The record indicated that Stokes devised his methods in compliance with NAFE, a professional standards-setting organization for forensic economists.

    Magellan argued that Stokes’ approach is unreliable because he failed to adhere to his own assumption by not lowering Ruiz’s projected wages closer to retirement. However, Stokes merely stated that a late-career decrease in earnings “often tends” to occur but that this tendency “is affected by a worker’s age, sex and level of educational attainment.” Given these caveats and qualifications, there was nothing inherently contradictory and unreliable in Stokes’ decision to assume that Ruiz’s earnings would not decrease over time. 

    For the same reasons, exclusion is not warranted based on Magellan’s contention that Stokes relied on other “unreliable assumptions.” As an initial matter, Stokes’ decision to use industry averages of similarly situated persons to quantify Ruiz’s projected health and retirement benefits, instead of basing the calculation on Ruiz’s actual health and retirement benefits, is not clearly unreliable. Magellan offered no authority suggesting that such an assumption is per se unreliable.

    Held

    The Court denied Magellan’s motion to exclude the testimony of Plaintiff’s expert Michael J. Stokes.

    Key Takeaway:

    Although an expert’s “failure to follow his own general practice” is a methodological flaw that may provide a basis for exclusion, the Court is not persuaded that Stokes engaged in such a failure here. Stokes merely stated that a late-career decrease in earnings “often tends” to occur but that this tendency “is affected by a worker’s age, sex and level of educational attainment.”

    Case Details:

    Case Caption: Ruiz V. Magellan Financial & Insurance Services
    Docket Number: 2:23cv2090
    Court Name: United States District Court, Arizona
    Order Date: July 10, 2025