Amber is a Senior Consultant with Engineering Systems, Inc. located in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her team is contracted by other companies to investigate natural disasters, infrastructure collapse, and product defects for defense against litigation. After thoroughly testing the questionable items, Amber will present her client with her expert opinion (or deposition) which the client will use to decide whether to settle with the claimant or go to trial.
Transcript
>> My name is Amber Stern. And I am a senior consultant for Engineering Systems, Inc. We have 150 engineers on staff. And what we do is anything from national disaster investigations, so building collapses, bridges collapsing from the civil engineering's perspective to plane crashes, motor vehicle crashes from the large scale, to the small scale product defect claims, product investigations, and civil litigation. So some days I spend the entire day reading court documents, depositions, looking at product design documents or accident reports and photographs. Other days I'm out doing a site inspection, a vehicle inspection, looking at different facilities. Other days I'm giving a deposition about my opinions. Other days I'm writing reports. And the other days I'm at trial and on the stand providing expert opinions on the cases that I'm involved in. The way I would get an assignment like that would probably be from a lawyer saying, "We are defending this product. There's been a claim made against us. So and so, you know, Mr. Smith said he got hurt using this product; is it possible what happened?" Sometimes we design our own testing. Depending on the type of product, we can do volunteer studies or surrogate studies and look at the product use. Sometimes we need to use crash test dummies to test the products if that's appropriate. And then other times we'll use literature, looking at the literature to see injury tolerances and comparing how the product performed with whether or not it makes sense with their claims.
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