Any of y'all had to be an expert witness in a court case?

[stephen4785]

An old customer of mine has been in a lawsuit this year involving a machine that I worked on for them. It's a rental machine and the rental company is trying to bill them for a ton of damage(usage damage, not from my repairs) to the machine and 7 months of rental charges because the rental company forgot to have it picked up. They asked me to go over the invoice and write a statement about the invoice they were sent. Since then Iv written 3 separate rebuttals to there statements. Im wondering if they can sue me for anything Iv written? Iv posted a legal disclaimer saying "this is my opinion" on top of every page I submitted but Im concerned that if the rental company looses they'll try to sue me.
Any ideas?

[scootro]

do you work for the rental company or just a independent mechanic that does repairs for the rental company. Why are you going over invoices and writing statements! Fuck 'em their not paying you for writing statements especially three of them

[Craizie]

do you work for the rental company or just a independent mechanic that does repairs for the rental company. Why are you going over invoices and writing statements! Fuck 'em their not paying you for writing statements especially three of them

Sounds like he repaired a machine that was rented out to his customer. In my experiance if you break a rental unit they usually bill you back, or have you take it to a shop of their choice.

[stephen4785]

A customer of mine rented the machine. The rental company refused to repair the machine in the field even though it was in the contract. They always had a 3+ week lead time and the machine was broken most of the time. Since I was doing repair work for the company that rented the machine my customer paid my labor and the rental company supplied all of the parts for free as warranty. The machine was highly modified from its original design in order to perform a specific job. I think the entire modification caused the machine a bunch of problems which lead to it not being able to be used by my customer. So, my customer doesnt want to pay for the amount of time the machine wasnt able to be used and neither of us feel like they should pay the $150k+ repair bill the rental company sent them.
My customer is paying me for my statements so it's profitable to me to write them out and refute any remarks by the rental company.

[GeorgeG.]

Take this with a grain of salt because I do not know the rental industry at all BUT....

If you're going to offer to do that, I would do it probono. Doing this for monetary gain makes it seem like your report would be biased due to getting something out of it at which point your previous concern about the rental company going after you could be much more likely.

[scootro]

i want to say your customer is a dumbass but No! they had that shit planned out and consulted a lawyer way before you came along and fixed it.

Paying you for three statements automatically involves to attend court on your customers behalf and if you did the repairs on the rental equipment without proper permission from the rental company then yes you'll be sued. they'll say you damaged the rental equipment and improperly fixed it.