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