The VLW Blog

Lawyers litigating a patent suit can protect drafts of their expert reports under a new amendment to federal discovery rules, a magistrate judge for the Norfolk U.S. District Court ruled last week. An amendment to Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(b)(4) extends work-product protection to drafts of expert reports and disclosures and to attorney-expert communications, both [...]

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In a decision that may soon be mooted by the General Assembly, the Supreme Court of Virginia has upheld the exclusion of podiatrist testimony about the cause of a plaintiff’s foot injuries. Under the Virginia Code, podiatrists are not qualified to testify as experts regarding “the cause of a human physical injury,” the court holds [...]

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A couple of years back, we reported a speaker’s comments that trial judges are warming to the use of expert testimony to challenge eyewitness identifications. But it’s a slow thaw, as evidenced by a 4th Circuit case upholding exclusion of a psychologist’s expert testimony at a defendant’s prosecution in Richmond federal court for an alleged [...]

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The Supreme Court of Virginia has given a family a new chance at a medical malpractice claim for a child who died of whooping cough after a hospital emergency doctor failed to admit him for treatment. In Jackson v. Qureshi, the court today ruled the trial court erred by excluding the family’s expert witness, a [...]

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That description of a recent Norfolk Circuit Court case on the court’s Web site sounds like those English class assignments on collective nouns: a pack of hounds, a congress of baboons, a charm of hummingbirds. In fact, Judge Everett Martin Jr.’s Nov. 14 opinion confronted a collection of experts the parties wanted to bring to [...]

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The family of a Dickenson County coal miner killed in a 2003 mining accident will get another chance to prove their products liability claims against the manufacturers of a mining machine’s remote control device that was strapped to the miner’s body. On March 12, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Judge Jim Jones’ [...]

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A discovery ruling in a black lung case may have ramifications for protecting work-product and confidential communications in other kinds of litigation. Elm Grove Coal Company was trying to overturn black lung benefits awarded to a retired miner named Ivan Blake. The two physician experts who supported Blake’s claim admitted that Blake’s lawyer might have [...]

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