>> 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.