Engineering Experts Allowed To Testify In Alleged Injury-Causing Cell Phone Case

The manufacturer and seller of a cellular phone was sued by a plaintiff who alleged that she sustained a burn on her left breast, which developed into complex regional pain syndrome during an overnight bus trip from North Carolina to New York.  The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York sorted through the plaintiff’s challenges to the defendant’s proffered expert testimony last week.  The defendants proffered two engineering experts to testify about an exemplar field test in which they traveled the same bus route under similar conditions with the same model phone.  The court concluded that both experts could testify as the test was the product of reliable principles and methods  and that any of the plaintiff’s concerns with the testing go to weight and not admissibility, and the testimony was not duplicative as the experts’ testimony was substantively different even though based on the same testing.

The court also allowed testimony by one of the defendants’ two proffered warnings expert, but excluded testimony of the other warnings expert.  The excluded expert was going to opine that there was no duty to warn against a non-existent hazard, which the court construed as a legal fact and not an opinion.  Therefore, that opinion invaded the role of the jury in applying the law to the facts on the causation question because before the jury considered the adequacy of such a warning (and the necessity for it), it must first determine that the plaintiff met her burden of establishing that the product caused her injury.