King & Spalding Can’t Use Professor’s Expert Testimony in Suit

King & Spalding can’t use an ethics professor’s expert testimony in a lawsuit brought against the firm by a former associate, a federal district court ruled.

Testimony by Fordham Law’s Bruce Green was excluded because it’s “only minimally probative and likely to be highly distracting and confusing to the jury,” Judge Valerie Caproni of the the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York said Sept. 24.

David Joffe alleges in the lawsuit that his firing and acts the firm took against him before he was let go were done in retaliation for his efforts to comply with New York professional conduct rules.

He claims that his demotion from senior associate to associate, pay freeze, denial of year-end bonus, and subsequent firing were the result of his attempt to report “ethical concerns about the conduct of two K&S partners, which arose during their representation” of a Chinese telecommunications company, the court said.

K&S argues that Joffe was fired for poor performance and there was no retaliation because he wasn’t reporting an ethics violation. The firm wanted to use Green’s opinion that it didn’t commit an ethics violation.

Joffe argued that Green’s opinion should be excluded because it wasn’t helpful to the jury, relevant, or reliable.

Green’s report is reliable and relevant, the court found, but it addresses the contents of professional conduct rules, and it’s a court’s job to instruct the jury on the scope of the rules, it said.

And because Green’s opinion “rests entirely” on his interpretation of the text of the rules, it’s not admissible, the court said.

It noted that “Green could have been an admissible expert, had he rested his opinion on whether K&S’s and Plaintiff’s actions were consistent with ordinary and custom legal practice,” which he didn’t do.

Green, when reached by Bloomberg Law, said he hadn’t yet seen the opinion. The firm didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The case is Joffe v. King & Spalding LLP, 2019 BL 359777, S.D.N.Y., No. 17-CV-3392 (VEC), 9/24/19.