Volta face (voltafaccia = turnaround) is what I did. I changed my position 180 degrees around.
I finished my expert witness paper against Israel's largest water corporation. At the beginning I refused to accuse water engineers I am familiar with. I had a good opinion of them. Nice hardworking decent collegues. Zionists too. Actually I rather liked them.
In two days, the lawyers succeeded in changing my mind: Now I maintain that the corporation is a vast, corrupt, technologically regressive monster, overcharging its clients, many of whom are penniless, extremely pious Jews, with large families and totally unfamiliar with the world. All over the world water companies are changing to electronic digital water meters, with no moving parts, with on-line reporting and automatic billing. Not them. They keep playing around with antiquated mechanical meters, hopelessly imprecise and given to brake down with the minimal pressure wave or exposition to the sun.
The lawyers made me write a summary in half a page, which is they say the judges may read. My expert opinion, 100 pages full of equations and graphs, will be used as door stop. The lawyers say they never met someone who invested such amount of research in a paper. I am that like, what can I do.
5 comments:
I see this in my work - even if people are hardworking and decent they respond to incentives (or punishments). I just went thru a negotiation where the seller's lawyers gave round after round of comments on a document, long after it was really necessary to negotiate further. Keep in mind that they are being paid (several hundred $) for every additional hour that they spend working on this document. If the system of payment for legal work changed to a flat rate, then even though they were the same hardworking decent people as before, they would somehow have fewer comments on the document, I am 100% certain. As I said before, if the new electronic meters were able to consistently (and accurately) register MORE rather than less billable water consumption you can bet your life they would have switched already.
At my own house, some time ago the electric company replaced their meter with a digital meter. It was defective and so they had to bill me on an estimate for several months. The replacement digital meter was also defective. Finally the 3rd meter they installed was an old fashioned analog meter with a spinning rotor and dial pointers (but a modern remote data sending system) and that one worked. A well constructed analog system can sometimes be superior to "modern" digital solutions whose failure modes are binary - either they work perfectly or they don't work at all.
Now this is legally irrelevant (for the reasons already discussed) but did you discover failure modes where the analog meters register LESS rather than more consumption or are they biased to fail in the "spin too fast" direction?
K
Mechanical, analog meters are biased to register more than actual volumes of water that passes through them. This effect is generally compensated by the manufacturer through balancing the mechanism to undermeter in tghe beginning, so the long term average is more or less correct. In my grandfather's time, pocket watches were perfectly accurate for their need, a deviation of five minutes a day was normal, yet today it would be unacceptable and we all use electronic watches with an accuracy of nanoseconds per year.
On the other hand, 1000 liter of water costs about 2 dollars in Israel, so we are talking about deviation of 10 to 20% that is ... a few cents per month. My heart is with the water supply corporation that deems these mass law demands something like blackmail, trying to catch them in some unimportant contravention to some obscure and forgotten law. The lawyers of this case forced me to emphatize that the corporation was not complying with some antique and obsolete paragraph, a ten word regulation that now we know is based on the misunderstanding how the meter works.
You will not be paid if the judges find for the corporation. As you say, this seems to be pure blackmail of a corporate entity, but since no one appears to get hurt (having to sell his house or stop his children's education) it is easier on the conscience. Life is like that; take the money and run. Or look at it this way, the corporation's lawyers will have expert witnesses of their own whose job it is to present their side of the story. On your deathbed you can make up for it.
Ivan
Whatever happened to "Justice -- though the world be destroyed"? You should have turned down the job of helping to sue this corporation. You don't need the money, and you know this is a shakedown.
I was offered a percentage of the booty or a lump sum. I choose the last. I hope to be paid.
About the morality of my expert witnessing, I only say what I know to be true, that antiquated mechanical water meters are inaccurate and screw systematically the customer. I say only things that I can defend in court.
All my life I worked for "the establishment" and never cared for the small consumer. Myself always pay punctually my water bill, knowing it to be inaccurate. But I have no time to fight for ten dollars a month. But multiply that by a million customers and several years of pillaging the public, you see that it is good that someone takes up the case. The legal technicalities of how to fight it at court and win are foreign to me. Lawyers think differently from engineers, but they are expert professionals in their trade. I hope they win. Anyway, their name is already in the papers, which is what they may have sought in the first place.
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