Imagine the typical hard-fought products liability trial:  The defendant vigorously defends itself and its product, and the plaintiff tenaciously argues that the defendant should have warned about the harm the product could cause.  Certain products—aircraft, heavy machinery, prescription drugs, and a host of others—always come with a risk of injury, and a manufacturer’s failure to warn of risks can result in liability. 

Imagine now that the plaintiff’s next witness is a proclaimed expert on “ethics.”  What on Earth is an “ethics” expert and what is he going to say?  Ethics experts are by no means new, but they are appearing in product liability lawsuits with greater frequency in recent years, making their introduction a most unwelcome trend for the targets of their “opinions.”  Ethics experts are often physicians, industrial hygienists, corporate ethicists, or philosophy professors; and plaintiffs’ lawyers retain them to give opinions on whether a defendant company conducted itself in a “good” and ethical way.  That often includes forming opinions on what a defendant knew, when it knew it, and how it conducted itself with its purported knowledge.  Usually based on a selective review of company documents, the plaintiff’s ethics expert, if permitted to testify, likely will say that the defendant knew all about the dangers of its products, intentionally kept that information from hapless consumers, and conducted itself in a despicable and unethical manner, which is to be expected of “industry” and “big business.”

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