Weinstein Trial Firm Has Expert Witness Testimony Stricken Under Daubert

Stuart Weinstein, Esq., of Weinstein Trial Firm, PLLC successfully drafted and argued a Daubert motion to strike multiple opinions of a well-known plaintiff’s-side liability expert in the vertical transportation industry. This expert was retained by Plaintiff’s counsel to provide opinions supporting Plaintiff’s claims of negligent modernization and maintenance in a case involving two elevator events at a condominium tower in downtown Miami, Florida. According to the Plaintiff, both events caused injuries including the need for a multi-level neck fusion.

As detailed in the briefs and presented as evidence at the Daubert hearing, Plaintiff’s elevator expert had not performed any testing of his causation opinions, did not rely upon any outside testing literature–such as investigations of events comparable to those alleged in this case–nor did the expert analyze or extrapolate any data to credibly conclude that “more likely than not” the events at issue were caused by improper elevator maintenance. The Court agreed that this expert’s testimony lacked a sufficient factual basis and was without a reliable methodology to opine that either of the two elevator events were causally connected to some aspect of our client’s elevator modernization or maintenance work, and therefore struck the opinions pursuant to Florida Statute §90.702 and Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579, 585 (1993).

Daubert motions in negligence cases are infrequently filed because experienced experts generally do and say enough to avoid the risk of having their opinions stricken. And of the relatively few Daubert motions which make it to a hearing, very few are ever granted because trial courts are reluctant to strike an expert’s testimony in lieu of letting a jury have a chance to give the testimony the weight it deserves. Here, however, the Weinstein Trial Firm fully developed a record establishing all of the shortcomings of this expert’s opinion, which the Court deemed just too much to allow a jury to hear. Of even more significance, this particular expert is a popular choice among Plaintiff’s counsel in elevator maintenance cases — Stuart’s success reflects the first time that this expert’s opinions have been stricken under a Daubert methodology standard and serves as both a roadmap and ammunition when this expert inevitably appears again.