Collaborate Stats Mock Deposition

Invitation to Help Lawyers (Yes, really) With Statistics Project

I am a law professor at the University of Houston Law Center. I teach a course called Analytic Methods for Lawyers that features Mathematica and the Wolfram Language. (Here’s a draft syllabus, if you are curious:

I want to do an in-class exercise in which students depose an "expert" who has done some bad statistical work on a case. I am thinking of things like running inappropriate statistical tests, omitting variables, arbitrary disposing of "outliers," p-value fishing, misstating the meaning of various statistical tests, etc. To do this, I would like a collaborator who is a real statistician and who is willing to work with me to create a brief report containing some bad statistical analysis and then subject themselves to an hour-long mock "deposition" via Skype (or something similar) at which they are questioned by law students on their work.

Hopefully, the law students will be able to detect some of the flaws. I have the "deposition" provisionally scheduled for March 1 but we can move it forward a few days if that is a problem.

What’s in it for you? Making the world a better place for statistical analysis. Practice being an expert witness, which can be very lucrative.

If anyone is interested (or know someone who you think would be willing), please respond here or, better yet, email me at schandler. I don’t necessarily need a cutting edge expert in statistics, just someone familiar with the basis who knows the Mathematica statistics functionality decently.