THE EXPERT WITNESS – AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY

Circumstances and opportunities outside of our control play an underappreciated role in our lives and careers, and this has certainly been true for me. After receiving my PhD and graduating into a recession, I nevertheless found opportunities to apply my knowledge, broaden my experience, and sharpen my skills, eventually finding my way into the universe of expert witness work (a.k.a. “forensic geology”) 25 years ago. Translating scientific knowledge and observations into legally defensible opinions that can be rendered understandable to a judge and jury requires years of experience, teamwork, and concentrated effort, but it can be both personally and professionally fulfilling, even transformative. The kaleidoscopic, ever-changing landscape of technology, legal rulings, climate, regulations, social norms, land development, and aging infrastructure creates both challenges and opportunities for the expert. While never easy, there is never a dull moment! In this presentation, I will provide some personal history to help explain my career trajectory, outline my educational background and work history, and then explore the wide variety of cases in which I have been engaged over the course of my forensic career, which have taken me across the United States, as well as to international locales like New Zealand and Venezuela, and even resulted in changes to case law in California. These investigations have focused on the causation of landslides, debris flows, wildfires, dam failures, floods, settlement, and more. I’ll specifically discuss my work on the 2005 La Conchita landslide in Ventura County, California, and the 2006 Ka Loko Dam failure in Kauai, Hawaii, both of which were legally and technically complicated cases that resulted in multiple fatalities.