Economists are playing a key role in the Apple vs Epic Games court case Bloomberg News reported. In fact, lawyers are apparently closing monitoring how much analysis such expert witnesses have submitted (its 294,969 words for Epic, 303,144 for Apple, if you want to keep count,) and rowing over the time allowed to depose them.
Judge in Epic Vs Apple Rules on Expert Witness Deposition
Indeed, the U.S. Magistrate overseeing the case, Judge Thomas Hixson, had to intervene in the row about how much time each side would have to question the economists representing their opponents. In a court order he said:
Apple focuses on comparing aggregates and argues that it is fair for each side to have the same number of total deposition hours for the economists’ depositions. But since Apple has four economists and Epic has three, the court fails to see why that is fair.
He then let Apple’s lawyers the lead expert economist for Epic, David Evans for 14 hours. This was double the time that had previously been allotted as Mr. Evans’s opinion is regarded as key to the case. However, Epic is only getting 10-and-a-half hours to question two key Apple witnesses, despite their attempts to increase this. “The court rejects Epic’s argument that if Apple gets an additional X hours, then out of parity Epic should also get an additional X hours,” Judge Hixson ruled.
Instead, he focused on balancing the time an expert can be questioned with the the extent of their various reports, “The court rejects Epic’s argument that if Apple gets an additional X hours, then out of parity Epic should also get an additional X hours,” Judge Hixson said. The focus is on the reasonable number of hours required to depose an expert and the scope of reports, “not on false equivalencies between the two sides.”