The FEWA National Conference, April 26-27 at the Bar Association of San Francisco, is shaping up to be our best yet. The two-day conference will feature a wide range of dynamic sessions, designed with you in mind. It’s a conference for experts and attorneys, presented by experts and attorneys. Experts, forensic consultants, attorneys, paralegals, appraisers, and other legal professionals of all specialties and experience levels will benefit. First time attendees receive 10% off using discount code FirstConference; learn more and register at www.fewaannualconference.org.

Leading up to the conference FEWA will feature conference speakers in future eNewsletters. We’re excited to kick off with highlighting our conference closing speaker, P. Bobby Shukla. Bobby represents plaintiffs in employment litigation at Shukla Law in the Bay Area and will be presenting Answering Questions During Testimony Without Boxing Yourself In as well as Responding Skillfully to Questions You Don't Want to Talk About. Learn more about the conference, our speakers, and highlights at www.fewaannualconference.org.

FEWA Members and Non-Members are invited to attend a FEWA Virtual Academy Webinar on February 20, 2019 at 1:00 PM PT. The webinar will be led by Kristin Baldwin of the Baldwin Network and will focus on marketing for even the most introverted expert.

David J. Brotman, FAIA, is one of FEWA’s newest members and has joined the Arizona Chapter. He is an accomplished Senior Executive with a proven career and solid experience in all aspects of Architectural and Engineering Firm Management, including project management, profit and loss, business development, mergers and acquisitions, sales and marketing, and strategic planning. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, with 50 years of practical experience.

To learn more about David, visit his FEWA profile. Please join us in welcoming David to FEWA!

In a St. Louis, Missouri, courtroom last summer, David Egilman testified in a lawsuit filed by 22 women who claimed to have contracted ovarian cancer from exposure to Johnson & Johnson (J&J) baby powder. Like millions of women before them, they had dusted their babies with the powder and used it on themselves thousands of times. They alleged the talc was tainted with asbestos and that exposure to the carcinogenic fiber likely played a role in their cancers. Egilman, a professor of family medicine at Brown University who served as a paid expert witness, brought science and medical gravitas to his testimony. 

With Rapid DNA machines, genetic fingerprinting could become as routine as the old-fashioned kind. But forensic experts see a potential for misuse.

Thanks to the work carried out by University of Twente Ph.D. candidate Brigitte Bruijns, crime scenes can now be inspected on the spot for the presence of human DNA. In her Ph.D. thesis, she describes a lab-on-a-chip that rapidly indicates whether a trace discovered at a crime scene contains human DNA and, thus, whether it should be examined in the laboratory.

A British runner, cyclist and mob hit man has been convicted of murdering two rival gangsters, in part, because his fitness tracker had a GPS.

The way that law enforcers try to work out who committed a crime is constantly evolving to become more sophisticated. From the development of fingerprint profiling in the late 1800’s to more modern techniques such as DNA analysis and forensic testing at the scene. But evading justice may have just become more difficult for those committing a crime using a gun with the discovery that AI can be used to determine which ammunition, and ultimately which firearm, was responsible for a particular gunshot.