March 19, 2007

Berkeley Economist Strikes Gold as King of Academic Expert Witnesses

Today’s Wall Street Journal profiles a business-school professor at the University of California at Berkeley who has made an industry — and a mint — as an expert witness in business litigation. David Teece, a New Zealand-born economics professor, charges up to $850 an hour, and his company, LECG Inc., employs 1,300 researchers to support work by him and others. Thanks to the increasing reliance of courts on expert witnesses like him, and the deep pockets of corporate clients eager for the appearance of scholarly gravitas and precision, Mr. Teece now takes in $2-million or more a year.

His scholarly productivity — more than a dozen books and some 200 papers — has only enhanced his appeal, from the boardroom to the courtroom, and he regularly works until 2 a.m. to keep up the pace. The success of LECG has been so marked that it has been imitated by economists on several other campuses. So where does this immense workload leave his Berkeley students? About them the Journal says nothing, but it does note that Professor Teece recently switched to half-time status at the university, a step that reduced his pay to a mere $65,000 a year. Good thing he kept his day job.

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