About the Course:
This seminar provides the legal professional with the foundations of statistical thinking, in a conceptual, non-mathematical (and sometimes humorous) fashion. This knowledge will provide you with the confidence to challenge statistical evidence presented in a court of law, and finally understand statistically-based arguments. It will also provide you with the knowledge to understand your own statistical expert, and have the confidence to know when to challenge the opposition’s expert witness.

The seminar will also instruct you on how to build decision models for important decisions in litigation, such as whether to call a witness to testify and how to estimate the cost-effectiveness of pre-trial strategies. By eliciting probability estimates for potential outcomes, decision models for litigation empowers the legal firm to accurately and reliability quantify uncertainty in a legal trial, and weigh the risks of various competing courses of action in terms of financial costs as well as win or lose trial outcomes.

If a lawyer does not have an essential understanding of statistical inference, he or she will not be able to evaluate the claims made by statistical expert witnesses. Nor will the legal professional be in a position to object to statistical claims and testimony advanced by prosecution or defense teams. Consequently, such testimony may go unchallenged, not necessarily because it is correct, but because the legal team lacks the statistical knowledge to appraise and evaluate the expert’s claim.

Among the things you will learn in this course include:

• How the language of probability permeates all in-court decisions
• Why it is the probability of the evidence that is under test, and not innocence or guilt
• How to understand the language of a statistical expert witness, and how to know when that witness is wrong
• How to make a case against a statistical expert even when you know that expert is correct
• How to present statistical evidence in such a way as to sway jurors to your side
• How to get jurors to dismiss probabilistic thinking when such thinking does not serve your client
• How to conceive of error rates in trial decisions (Type I and Type II errors)
• How to build arguments for and against the use of statistical evidence in court by referring to classic legal cases in which such evidence was used or misused
• How to think of litigation in terms of probabilistic decision-making
• How to estimate costs and risks associated with pre-trial litigation strategies
• How to build decision models that take into account key contingencies in upcoming legal trials, and how to use this decision model to make cost-effective decisions, and minimize loss

About the Instructor:

Michael Fillmore, Partner, Statistical Analyst

Michael Fillmore competed his undergraduate studies at the University of Maine (with a major in Mathematics); earned his MBA at the University of Delaware and his PhD. in Statistics and Probability at the University of Vermont.

He worked in the Statistical Modeling Department at Drexel Burnham Lambert and as a senior statistician with Donaldson Luftkin Jennrette.

Michael runs his own statistical consulting business and counts a variety of insurance companies, manufacturing firms, pharmaceutical companies, law firms and the military as his clients.

Course Length: Approx. 7 hours
Time: 8:30 am – 5:00 pm

Seating is Limited to 40 per session
Register online or by contacting
Registration / Membership Coordinator,
at 609-919-1895 ext. 100 or registration@bdacademy.com

Requests to cancel your registration must be made in
writing one month before the date of the seminar. Your refund will reflect a $95
processing fee. No refunds will be granted within one month of the course for which
you are enrolled. You may send a substitute for an additional $55 processing fee.