This podcast episode delves into the intersection of law and entomology, highlighting the often-overlooked legal implications surrounding pest-related cases. I engage in a rich dialogue with Doug Seeman, a distinguished expert in entomology, who elucidates the complexities of his role as an expert witness in cases involving pests such as bedbugs and termites. We explore the intricacies of the legal landscape, particularly as it pertains to personal injury cases and the challenges of maintaining public safety in various environments. Doug also shares compelling narratives from his extensive experience, illustrating the profound impact of pest control negligence on individuals and businesses alike. The discussion underscores the necessity for legal professionals to comprehend the nuances of entomological evidence in order to navigate these intricate cases effectively.

This podcast episode delves into the intricate relationship between entomology and the legal system, showcasing the unique expertise of Doug Seaman, a leading entomologist and expert witness. The discussion highlights Doug's journey from a passionate child fascinated by insects to a respected professional in the field of pest control and legal consulting. He recounts his experiences in various legal cases where entomological evidence played a pivotal role, such as incidents involving bedbugs and rodents in residential and commercial settings. The conversation emphasizes the often-overlooked intersection of pest management and legal accountability, illustrating how entomologists like Doug can provide critical insights in court to help establish liability and ensure justice for affected parties. Moreover, the episode explores the multifaceted nature of Doug's work, where he serves both plaintiffs and defendants, showcasing the complexity of legal cases involving pest control issues. This dual perspective allows him to navigate the legal landscape with a profound understanding of the implications that pest infestations can have on public health and property rights. Doug shares anecdotes from his career that reveal the sometimes surprising and often serious consequences of pest-related lawsuits, illuminating the challenges faced by legal professionals in these cases. Through his expertise, he aims to educate listeners on the importance of proactive pest management and the legal ramifications of negligence in this field, ultimately advocating for higher standards in pest control practices to protect both consumers and businesses alike.

Takeaways:

• The podcast explores the intersection of law and entomology, highlighting numerous case studies.
• Doug Seaman's journey into entomology reveals a profound passion for insects and their legal implications.
• Listeners gain insight into the complexities of legal cases involving pest control and personal injury.
• A discussion on the stressors and challenges faced by expert witnesses in legal proceedings is featured.
• The episode emphasizes the importance of thorough preparation for depositions and court appearances.
• Unique cases such as bedbug lawsuits illustrate the often-overlooked legal ramifications of pest infestations.

Links referenced in this episode:

• expertentomologist.com

Study, you know, your material and that.

But that's the fun part.

I like the depositions.

I really enjoy it in court.

I like appearing in court.

I like when there's an opposing Expert, there's a PhD or another entomologist on the other side and it's fun.

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Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, or good evening wherever you are in the world.

This is John, this is Legal Owl.

And today I've got a fascinating one of our partners, one of our legal partners in our network who is an expert in entomology.

And when you think about lawsuits and you think about bugs and insects, you don't tend to think about personal injury and things like that.

You don't tend to think about these cases that exist out there, from termites to bed bugs to rodents.

It's actually a big issue.

And so I'm delighted that one of our experts on the legal network is joining us today.

He is Doug Seaman of bce.

He is one of the leading experts in entomology.

Anything to do with bugs and insects and the legal industry and who would have thought it, A lot of people don't even know that these type of cases exist.

So let me bring on my friend now and we'll have a great conversation.

Doug, welcome to the Legal Owl, my friend.

How are you?

I'm here, I'm glad to be here.

And I am, I'm really glad to get you in because not a lot of people actually understand that entomology is a thing within the legal industry.

So let's talk a little bit about you, your history in pest control and entomology and how you managed to get into becoming one of the leading experts in the United States and Hawaii for entomology.

Yeah, so I, you know, when, when I was a little kid, I was the kid that was in the schoolyard Digging in the corner looking for bugs, and everyone else was playing.

And when I was in.

When I was in high school, you know, and in camp and all that, I was the guy with the butterfly collections.

And I remember in.

I think it was my junior year of high school, I got a grant from the Entomological Society to study aquatic insects as part of my independent study program.

And then when I got to college, I decided to take entomology and art classes to keep up my grade point average.

And the next thing I knew, I had run out of undergraduate and graduate classes to take as an undergraduate.

So my background was medical entomology at the University of Connecticut, and I graduated in 83.

And did you go straight into working in the pest control industry, or were you more involved in research and entomology?

Well, I got hired for the.

I was overqualified to clean test tubes and underqualified to do research.

And I working.

I was working in the cooperative extension station, CT AG station.

And I did that until the grant money ran out.

I spent time.

I went out to ponds with this very attractive young lady who's also an entomologist, and we sucked mosquitoes off of each other with aspirate.

And then when we weren't sucking mosquitoes, we'd go into the cornfield together and look at European corn borers.

And her husband, who also worked at the station, didn't appreciate that.

So when that grandfather ran out, I was out of a job.

And then I was selling cameras.

I was a substitute school teacher, and then I was a poor, shouty Jaguar salesman.

And that was a lot of fun.

And there's a lot of good stories from that.

But my cousin had this best friend.

They went to temple together, and he said to his friend, you're an entomologist, you're doing really well.

I have a cousin who's an entomologist, and he can't even get started.

So he told this guy, Austin Fishman, Dr. Austin Fishman, about me.

And Dr. Austin Fishman, who is one of the biggest names in the pest control industry, called me up and said, we can't have entomologists out there selling cars.

And I said, we're eating Porsches.

And he says, no, no, no, no.

We need entomologists in the industry.

And they said, there's this company in New Jersey called Bell Environmental Services, and they're looking for an entomologist who doesn't know anything.

And I go, that's me.

So I went out for an interview, and Doc says, when they ask you how you know Me, tell him you don't know me because I got a big name and I just found you.

And they asked me and I said, I don't know him.

He goes to temple with my cousin.

It was a brand new idea, Integrated Pest Management for Urban Settings.

And we were developing.

Austin was developing it, and I became.

They used to call me Little Austin Fishman.

And I go out in the field with them and we developed sticky traps and we tested insect baits.

You know, these combat hadn't come out yet.

We were testing combat.

And over the years, I got to be on the leading edge on termite baits and a number of different things because just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

And so I was in.

I was on the East Coast.

I went to work for Arrow Exterminating eventually, which at the time was the largest pest control company in New York.

And we didn't like New York.

So.

Me and my then wife had a deal that when one of our jobs turned sour, we'd moved to Arizona.

And she lost her job in a stock market crash on Wall Street.

And she said, you promised, you promised that we'd go to Arizona.

So next thing I know, I'm in Arizona with a company called University Pest Control.

And you know, on the east coast, you can't throw a rock without hitting an entomologist.

But out in Arizona, I was the only one.

Wow.

And so I got to serve on committees.

The governor appointed me the state entomologist advisor to the Office of Pest Management.

I got to write vacation manual.

I got to expand the company into several different states.

I opened an office in Mexico in Hermosillo.

We were serving the maquilas.

That was an interesting story.

They were making this company, you all know the name.

They were making surgical kits, hospital gowns, and things that when someone's going into surgery, they wrap them up.

And they were getting very small bugs in the kits.

And so they.

They didn't know what this was.

There were no entomologists in Mexico.

So they found me and they asked me to come down to Mexico and figure it out.

And it was an insect called thrips.

And a thrip is a very small insect.

The wings are like feathers, but they.

They're almost microscopic.

They're so small.

And they are in agricultural fields.

And then all of a sudden, the whole mass of them will rise up out of the field and drift with the wind.

And they drifted right through this manufacturing facility that was using swamp coolers.

For those of you that aren't out in Arizona, swamp cool is a.

Is like an air conditioner.

It's a box with a fan and pads, and water soaks into these pads, and it cools by.

By pulling air through the wet pads.

And it's like getting out of a shower.

You're cold.

And that's what a swamp cool.

In any case, these things are small enough.

They're getting sucked right through the pads and getting into the surgical kits.

And so what I did was I made sure that all the pads were in place, but they also made hair nets, surgical hair nets.

And I had them stitch some into slip covers for the pads.

And so they put the hair nets over the pads, and that acted like a filter, keeping the thrips out of the cooling, the air conditioning system, and kept them out of the surgical kit.

And after that, they said, oh, you got to do all of our facilities.

So we wound up doing all the facilities.

Kimberly Clark.

We wound up doing all of Kimberly Clark's manufacturing.

Massive name.

Massive.

And then we wound up doing the Ford plant.

That has interesting stories, too.

We were doing what's called maquiladores.

These are American manufacturing facilities in Mexico.

So Samsonite would send suitcases and send handles, and they'd build the handles, and they build the suitcases in Mexico, and then they send the handles and the suitcases back, and then we'd attach the handles and put the Made in America sticker on there because we finished them in America.

And that's what Mikhail is.

Wow.

So that's how you remain.

Hi.

If you are a legal expert or an expert witness and you would like to join our exclusive legal community, then connect with me on Help Lawyer, and let's have a conversation.

So tell me, Doug, how did you get into the legal aspect to entomology?

Because, I mean, you're, you know, you're one of our partners in the network, but you.

You're a.

You're a leading expert.

What was your first case, and how did you get involved in it all?

I had a company for four years, and then my.

My wife became my then wife.

And.

And I found myself a single parent.

And so I did two things.

I had opened a consulting company, and also I became a. I started becoming a real estate broker agent, and then a broker.

And it all fits together.

Everything, all of your life.

Experiences, even driving Porsches at 100 miles an hour down the highway.

All this becomes part of the life experiences.

Today I ran into the clients, and I was talking to them.

I was covering for someone else.

And the guy goes, well, I drive these big buses.

And I go, I drove city buses for two years while I was at UConn.

So everything you do in life is connected.

It's all connected.

I get jobs, consulting jobs sometimes, because I also have the real estate broker license.

And so I can.

When I'm on a case and they say, you know, is it.

How is it that.

What kind of pest control company should this management company be using?

And I start talking about it, and they go, wait a minute.

You're outside your wheelhouse.

And I go, actually, I have a real estate broker's license.

So it is in my wheelhouse.

I have a big wheelhouse.

But my first case.

My first case, I got a call.

Somehow somebody called me.

I'm not sure how they found me.

Most important thing in being an expert is being found.

So when I started up lucky that I got found, and I got called in on a bedbug case.

Somebody was bitten by bedbugs in an Indian casino in San Diego.

Oh, all right.

I happened to move to San Diego during my divorce.

I was commuting from Tucson to San Diego, and I was.

Ran a pest control company in San Diego, which was good because they got my California license, pest control license.

But the thing is, if you have a.

If there's a lawsuit that occurs on Native American lands, on tribal lands, it goes to tribal court.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

Because they have a different law.

Tribal court is supported by Indian casino gaming.

That's where the courts get their money from.

The Indian casino gaming.

And we're suing the Indian casino for bedbugs.

That's a bit of a catch 22 situation.

Yeah, well, ultimately, what happened is it got kicked down the road 10 times, and they got kicked out of court, and I came back in.

But I did get to go on TV and hold up test tubes of bedbugs and stuff like that.

So that was my first case.

And that case never really came to fruition or ended.

The people finally just gave up suing the casino because they couldn't get anywhere.

Yeah.

If I got a couple of cases in a year, I was.

I was in hog heaven.

Now I'm.

I'm averaging two cases a week.

I pick up and.

And I actually.

I Think.

I think people don't realize.

People don't realize how serious the legal aspects of entomology is.

For instance, you know, your bedbug lawyers, termite lawsuits, you have enroldence.

And I mean, it is.

There is a lot of cases.

There's a lot of issues in holiday places, leisure industry, the hotel industry.

Are you constantly.

And what is the most that you're dealing with?

Is it mainly bedbugs that you deal with, or is it mainly kind of.

Rodents dealing with what's called habitability, which are apartment complexes.

And either I'm working for the tenant suing a apartment complex, or I'm working for the apartment complex defending against the tenant.

So you work plaintiff at defense cases.

Yeah, so sometimes there's bedbugs in there.

I'm about 60% defense, 40% plaintiff.

Right.

And so I'd say the bulk of my cases are habitability and.

Or bed bugs.

I kind of group them together.

Sometimes it's only bed bugs.

We starting to see cases with short term rentals, vacation rentals.

So I've had a couple of beds and.

And it's not just insects, not bedbugs.

For instance, I have a case now where an air conditioning guy was coming and doing a service call on one of his clients that he's been to several times over the last five years.

And his job is the air conditioning.

So he gets there and the problem is in the unit outside.

So he goes out door to go to this air conditioner and he gets stung in the temple, and an hour later he's dead.

So his widow is now the company that owns the building and the company that.

The interior design company that was there, which just happens to be the same owners.

And so that's one case I have.

Now.

I had.

Let me ask you something, Doug, because that's shocking to me because I can understand with bed bugs, with rodents getting into habitable situations and causing it.

But we're now talking about a stinging insect, a flying insect that you could get in a building, you could get out in a park, you could get anywhere.

How in reality does that stack up for either any plaintiff or defense case that's a flying insect?

You can't control it.

Really.

Well, you can if when you walk out the back door, there's a canopy, and in the canopy a wasp nest.

Right.

Less than three feet above the guy's head.

When he comes out the back door, backdoor slams.

They're not happy.

So if they were maintaining their building, there wouldn't be any wasp nests on the Building.

So that's, that's.

So I think the moral of the story is if you're, if you're a building owner or a maintenance company, you get rid of those wasp nests, like immediately.

Well, you should have a, you should have a regular service.

If you have a building with people coming up, it could just as easily have been one of their employees.

So, yeah, so that's, that's a case where someone's not maintaining their building.

Now I have another case where they do mining, the energy mining, right.

It's oil or whatever, but they're doing mining.

And, and the guys that, that work the mines are all employees of the company.

But the guys in charge, the managers on the job site, are independent contractors.

And they bring in these engineers from all over the country in pairs, and they work two weeks on and two weeks off.

So there's two guys coming from different places.

They come in, they're working two weeks on, two weeks off.

One guy's the night guy, one guy's the day guy.

These mines are in the middle of nowhere.

So this mine happens to be in what's called the Four Corners region.

It's where the four states come together.

You could stand on one spot and be in four states at the same time.

Arizona.

Oh, wow, okay.

New Mexico and Colorado, those states come in just across.

You could stand on that spot.

But they call that area the Corners region, which is also part of the Navajo Nation.

The Navajo Nation is around that whole area.

So they're doing mining.

They're doing mining and they put up trailers, duplex trailers, to house these engineers that are coming from all over the country.

So now that's a long story.

But now you have the background.

And that area is notorious for having henta virus.

Okay.

Virus is carried in rodent urine.

So rodent urine and rodent droppings have.

From white footed mice have hentavirus.

And a very high percentage of these mice have hentavirus.

Back in.

Wow.

People were dying of henta virus.

They still die around the country.

Back then, though, if you got hentavirus, the prognosis was 80%, you were going to die.

Now it's down to 30%.

So it's still very.

It's probably the worst disease you can get in the US Unless you travel.

Is that similar?

Not rabies, the plague.

Like the Black Death, like the plague?

No, it's different.

Hetovirus affects your breathing, right?

Okay.

So in your lungs and stuff, fluids.

Start running into your body.

Cavity and your lungs and the way they treat you.

Because there is no cure.

It's a virus.

So the way they treat you is they put you in an oxygen tent and they very simplified version, and they draw the fluids out of your body to keep your body from drowning itself.

But your metabolites are all screwed out, so they have to put the same amount of fluid back into your body that's balanced.

And if they can keep this up for a couple of weeks and outlast the virus, you survive.

And if that's crazy.

So were you.

Were you in defense?

Were you defending the.

Well, what happened is the.

The mine put out training program for their employees on how to prepare, how to avoid hentavirus, but they didn't share this program with the independent contract.

Independent contractor came out.

He was in his second year of employment.

He was 10 days into one of his visits.

His.

His work site and his trailer was overrun with mice.

He got henta died in 48 hours.

That quick ma kills you fast.

Killed your family.

He got to the hospital.

He had less than a day to live.

So how quick did the lawsuit start then?

Because you obviously were called in for that.

Lawsuits go on for years.

So they sued the mining company.

They sued the company that makes the trailers, that leases them to the mining company, and they sued a contractor who is his immediate supervisor.

So the, The.

The.

Wow.

So the trailer company and the supervisor, they settled for $13 million, but the mining company didn't.

They offered.

They offered.

They offered.

I think it was a couple hundred thousand dollars.

What?

Oh, that's.

That's nothing.

Maybe.

Maybe a half a million.

But the guy that was working at the time, he was making.

He was making nearly half a million dollars a year working on this mine.

And this guy left three kids, a wife and three kids.

He was a young guy.

He was 40 years old.

Around 40 years old.

And it went to trial in California.

I was on the plaintiff side.

I was with the witness side.

And the jury awarded $100 million in compensation and $100 million in punitive damage.

So the whole.

Did they get that?

Yeah, well, they'll go into appeals, but at least they got the $13 million to hold them over until they worked out the $200 million in awards.

Jeez.

But that was the biggest case I was ever on.

But that has nothing to do with insects.

So when you're an entomologist in the pest control industry, they expect that, you know, about insects and about rodents and about birds and about weeds and trees and bushes, and so you're kind of,.

You're dealing with everything past guys with.

Guns, they think you know everything.

So I.

42 Years in the industry, you become an expert on most anything.

And so, you know,.

How have you coped with some of the stress in the industry in terms of like, when you've been deposed and you're in a deposition and you're maybe being crossy examined, have you found that particularly, like, stressful or how do you prepare for your cross examination when you're on trial?

You study, you know your material.

But that's the fun part.

I like the depositions.

I enjoy it.

I like appearing in court.

I like when there's an opposing Expert, there's a PhD or another entomologist on the other side.

And it's fun when there's a lawyer, the deposition, there's a lawyer on the other side.

And their whole goal, their whole goal is to disqualify you.

That's why they're there, is to break you down.

Yeah.

Not only find out your opinions, because that's what they're supposed to be doing, but to disqualify you.

And to.

And I had one deposition that ran over eight hours and just get beat up and beat up, and the woman's making faces and shaking her head and.

Yeah, that's crazy.

I had one of her other experts was just on the show and he said to me, he said, john, he said, this was the longest deposition I had and it was a nightmare.

And it was three hours and something minutes.

And now you're telling me that it was eight hours for you?

My average deposition is about three hours.

But the, the thing with the, the deposit.

And they can ask you anything, but in the old days before the pandemic, they would pay you a fee for going out to wherever it is to do the deposition.

Then you meet with them, you bring a file cabinet of paper with you, and they ask you whatever you want.

And you sit there and you have to remember everything.

Today all the depositions are zoom on video.

And you can your file open on the side so you have all the information.

If you organize it, you can very quickly find answers to everything you're looking for.

And you could bring them up and it's very comforting to have all those titles sitting there, you know, all of your files.

So the zoom deposition, you don't get your money for traveling someplace.

You don't collect a fee for that.

Yeah.

On the other hand, you know, I step into my wife's office here because my office is a disaster.

And I walk in here.

This is a nice background.

I have my depositions in here, and you don't even know if I'm wearing pants.

So I can have to step position and be comfortable and I can have my drinks.

That's awesome.

So this is nice.

Tell me, Doug, my wife runs out.

Have you done many trial cases, jury cases, where you've been involved as the expert, the entomologist?

I've been to court.

I think I've been to court 10 times, and I've had 35, 40 depositions.

And the thing is, if someone asked me to write a report, that's the other thing.

So that's where the real pressure is.

When you have a deadline coming up on a report and somebody sent you four gigabytes of material and you're trying to get all this, and there's 20 depositions and you have to try and remember everything.

And you don't want to write anything down because anything you write down is discoverable.

So you're storing all this stuff in your head.

It starts leaking out of your ears and you got.

It's in your nose.

It's everywhere.

Your whole head is packed with.

And you're trying to remember it, and you're writing this report, and you start getting into these marathon writing sessions where you're writing and writing and you're reviewing your old reports.

And then you submit this report.

It's somewhere between 10 and 25 pages, this opus.

You turn this in and how did I do that?

Boy, how did I figure that out?

Where did it all come from?

And the whole case goes away.

I write my report, and 10 days later, the case is gone.

Either it drops or they settle it.

Because once I write my report, well, the good guys and the bad guys all know who they are.

Everyone that did something wrong is all laid out.

It's laid out, a logical progression through the entire report.

And at the end, there's almost no point going to court because anything I put in the report is going to come out.

So the end of the day, it's actually more beneficial.

No matter if you're plaintiff or defence, it's more beneficial for these law lawyers, the law firms, to get with you as soon as possible to get this report done, because it can save them going to trial.

So.

So I had a case against the bedbug lawyer.

And he was.

His client was a retired policeman, and this was in Palm Springs, and he was staying at a hotel playing golf.

And then he sued the hotel for bedbugs.

And he had no pictures of bedbugs.

He had no medical reports.

He didn't complain while he was in the hotel.

He filed the lawsuit afterwards, notified them afterwards that he had bedbugs, and who knows what he's suing for?

And so he described his bites, where his bites were and everything.

And I. I carefully took note of all of his stuff.

And then I went the.

Often these cases are up for summary judgment.

So the plaintiffs make a little, this is my case.

The defense writes a little this is my case.

They give it to the judge, and the judge decides, is there a case?

Do we move forward, or do I throw this case out?

In this particular case, the guy talked about how he had all these bedbug bites on his belly and down here.

And he talked all.

And very carefully described all his bites because two years earlier, there was a singer, a famous singer who had stayed at the same hotel and got bit by bedbugs, and she got millions of dollars and cancel her whole tour.

And so this guy had bites that were exactly the same as this woman.

So I went to the attorney and I said, look, tell the judge that the only way this guy would have a bite pattern that looks like that is if he slept in a nightgown with elastic under his breast, because that's how you get that bite pattern.

So if the guy sleeping in a nightgown with elastic under his breast, okay, his story makes sense.

If he wasn't, the guy was lying.

He was just a copycat lawsuit.

The judge threw out the lawsuit.

Wow.

So you saved the lawyers.

You saved a lot of problems, and you were able to identify it.

And I do now I do.

Ironically, I do a lot of work for that.

That lawyer, that bedbug lawyer.

I can.

I can imagine.

Yeah, it would want you on the team.

Last June, we had a case in California, Southern California, where two guys that were working on.

On oil.

You know, the thing that goes like this, pumps the oil out of the ground.

So these two guys are working.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

They're staying at a hotel, and.

They.

Got bit by bedbugs.

And one guy, he got bit on his private parts.

All his private parts were all bit up by bedbugs.

So his wife wanted nothing to do with him.

His wife wouldn't come near him.

And those guys were awarded $2 million for one night staying in a hotel with bedbugs.

When they complained to the hotel, the hotel threw them out of the hotel, then called up their employer and said, these guys are banned.

They cannot come back.

They're disruptive, and you should fire them.

Wow.

And so that's crazy.

A hotel got fined, got an award of $2 million they had to pay to these guys.

That's crazy.

That honestly, that's wrong.

They were doing their own pest control.

They weren't hiring a company.

What they were doing was crazy.

It didn't make any sense.

So these guys.

Ladies and gentlemen, before you get back into the episode, I have a huge ask below.

There's going to be a link, and if you click that link, it's going to take you to a page.

And that page is about the Ryan Larkin Invitational Adventure Race.

It has been set up by a foundation, 62 Romeo Sleep foundation, and I have a colleague of mine that's taking part in this race.

It is a race that is going over 62 miles over three days in Colorado in June.

And we are raising funds to support this excellent cause.

We've lost many veterans to suicide.

Many.

The numbers are just astronomical.

One veteran to suicide is enough.

The numbers that we get on a daily basis is just.

Is exploding.

And so we have organizations like this that are now trying to combat veteran suicide, supporting veterans when they come back from duty and they fight an even greater war.

And the 62 Romeo project is run by a gentleman by the name of Rob Sweetman, and he is developed the Sleep 101 program for first responders and veterans, law enforcement.

And it's phenomenal.

And this Ryan Larkin Adventure Race is also in memory of Ryan Larkin, who was a Navy seal.

And so please support this organization, support this race, and especially support my friend in Team Relentless.

Team Relentless is the team that's going forward to the race.

It is a race, as I said, over three days, 62 miles.

And each team, there's 10 teams.

And each team will be taking part on tests, strategic tests that are.

That I don't even know what's going to happen over them.

But these are going to be military tests that they're going to do over this period of time, helping to test them to the resilience, their skills, their adaptability, and also their team resilience, the team building as well.

So please support this phenomenal cause, support Team Relentless by offering your donation today to support veterans.

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Let's get back to the show.

God bless.

So let me ask you this.

We had, I think it was last year or the year before one of our lawyers in our network got approached by someone who was suing a contractor because.

And also the pest control company, because they had termites that had damaged the home.

And people don't think that there's.

There's.

There's a big issue, not only just with kin of bedbugs, but termites.

Termite lawsuits are quite big as well, because.

But they're complicated, as far as I'm aware.

Yeah.

So.

So I've been on both sides of those, the plaintiff side and the defense side.

I get a lot of them in Florida now where the ceiling is collapsed.

So ceilings are collapsing from termites attacking.

So normally when a termite consumes wood, let's say it's the subterranean termite where you drill the ground and try and kill the termites.

Yeah.

Or drywood termites, the kind they have to put a tent over the house.

When the drywood termites eat the wood and the subterranean termites eat the wood, the wood gets lighter, it becomes less supportive.

There's less wood, so it weakens the.

But in Florida, they have a termite called the Formosan termite.

And the Formosin termite builds what they call cotton.

So if you ever got eggs and they came in that cardboard, the kind of crinkly cardboard that's kind of soft, not hard, well, that's cotton.

And these termites fill up the wall voids in between the studs, and the studs, they turn everything into cotton.

And that holds a lot of moisture.

And so what happens is when these termites eat a structure, it gets heavier because they're adding this cotton material.

So the wood gets weaker, but the damage gets heavier until it collapses.

And so get a lot of these collapsed ceilings.

Now, in other places, for me, because I'm also a real estate broker, there's the issue of disclosure, where somebody knew about.

I was going to ask you about that.

Yeah.

When somebody's selling a home, they knew.

About the spiders, they knew about the termites, they knew about the rats, they knew about the bird mites, knew about owls living in the attic or rats living.

These are all disclosure issues.

So I get these cases where I have one, where the pipe coming out of a dishwasher got chewed by rats on new construction, or the guy built a house and beetles started coming out of the floors and the Cabinets in his brand new house he couldn't move in.

So they had to tear all the wood, all the custom cabinets and put in new ones and fumigate the house because there were beetles in it.

So lots of these kinds of cases.

A house in California that had swallow nests on the outside and bird mites on the inside.

And the bird mites were eating the people and the people were selling their house and they didn't disclose that there were mites.

And the real estate agent didn't disclose there were mites.

And the buyers bought the house.

They were from a different part of the country.

And the agent's defense was she didn't know that swallows returned to Capistrano.

Everybody knows about the swallows in Capistrana.

So that's not a valid.

It's common knowledge.

I had one in New York.

The guy was unloading ships on the docks and he was bringing in deliveries of bananas.

And while he's carrying the bananas on his shoulder, carrying it, he gets bit by a giant spider.

Or the Brazilian, the Brazilian banana, Brazilian spider.

And the defense where his boss tried to use his defense is he didn't know that there were giant spiders in the bananas.

And everybody knows that the tarantulas.

Everybody knows that in the song, Harry Belafonte song.

Everybody knows I said, what, you never heard this?

Absolutely.

So sometimes they're funny, sometimes they're interesting, sometimes they're heart wrenching, sometimes they're terrible.

I had a case in Las Vegas where a pest control company did a service on a small apartment building.

And the unit that they serviced was the property on site, property manager of the apartment building.

And they had a brand new baby that was only a few days old.

Oh, no.

So the pest control company came by and did their service and that night the baby died.

Oh, my God.

Pest control company.

And I was on the defense side for the pest control company.

How did the baby die, Doug?

Well, technically, officially, they couldn't find the cause of death because the toxicology showed that the baby was not affected by the pesticides.

It did not have any pesticides because I do also pesticides.

So there were no pesticides in the body of the baby.

Now, do you want.

Do you work hand in hand, do you work hand in hand with toxicologists then?

Sometimes.

Sometimes there's a crew of six, seven different experts on a site.

I've done apartment buildings where there's seven or eight of us different experts all trying to file through a one bedroom apartment.

But with this case, with this other apartment complex, the backstory is this was their fifth child.

And the state had taken away all of the children of these guys.

These were not good guys, these property managers.

These were bad people.

And so what I suspect happened is they saw the pest control company and then they smothered the child so they thought they can get a payday.

And what happened is even though they were suing for millions, they settled for $35,000.

So they smothered, they literally killed the child so they could sue the pest control company.

That's my personal belief.

It may or may not be true,.

But this is your.

So anybody who is listening and for anybody that's going to be using Doug, we're talking about a dough burp challenge.

Please listen to the context.

Ten minutes before and ten minutes after,.

If you think your child was killed by somebody, you don't settle for $35,000.

No, you don't know.

Here's the thing as well.

Were they claiming that it was the pesticide or were they claiming that it was a rat bite or a spider or something?

Pesticide.

Now, now, like I said, I have to be an expert on everything.

So I have a case in New Jersey where a guy was living in city housing.

Here's another story.

The man was a construction worker in New Jersey, and he's working on his job site.

And as happens in New Jersey, a stray bullet from who knows where came through the air and hit him in his spine and turned the man into a paraplegic, minding his own business.

So this happens in New Jersey.

So this.

Yeah, it's not through the real, you know, it's not impossible that it happens here.

Coma because he was shot and his wife divorces him while he's in the coma.

So now guy's story gets sadder and sadder.

So now he has to live in city housing and he's unemployed, collecting disability.

But the good news is he means.

There's a massive, if I'm right as well, in New York, New Jersey.

In that area, there's massive rodent problems.

There's massive rodent problems, massive bullet problems.

But the guy found true love.

He found a woman that fell in love with him and was helping him and would take care of him, help him into his chair, help clean him, all this thing.

But he was complaining because there were rats and mice in his apartment and the apartment complex wouldn't do anything about it.

And one day his girlfriend, who has a key, comes in early, comes into his apartment and says, honey, I got to go to an appointment.

I'm not going to be Here until late this afternoon.

And when she comes in the apartment early in the morning, there are rats eating this man's legs.

Oh, my God.

In the bed with him.

Are you serious?

And he would wake up in the morning and his legs would be bleeding and have sores and open wounds, and he didn't know what was happening to him.

He had no idea that was Mother of mercy until his girlfriend walked in and saw the rats eating his legs.

I'm on the plaintiff's side on that case.

Is that case still going?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, you know, the city keeps kicking it down the road, getting extensions and what have you.

And this isn't the only lawsuit against the apartment complex.

But that's crazy.

What's the defense for that?

How can you defend.

They did go and they did fix his apartment up now so he doesn't have more rats coming in.

There's no doubt.

I can't put my finger on any particular defense against that because he would have evidence that it's happened to his leg.

He would have seen it.

There'd be evidence there as well.

They can't say that.

It's not.

There's medical records.

There's damage.

I wrote my report on the pest control situation in that complex.

I mean, I feel bad for this guy.

This is.

You know, this is.

Has there been any cases that you've been involved in that I know we have to be careful here, but that you are on maybe the plaintiff side, and it's against a pest control company and, you know, the pest control company has been negligent and caused a wrongful death or illness or something.

I do a lot of public speaking.

I do training for the pest control industry.

I've trained thousands of technicians.

I stand up in the front of the room at a convention or these days, I'm doing a video like this.

I don't know who's in the audience.

I don't know who's listening.

So it's a conflict of interest for me to go against a pest control company because they say, well, Mr.

Seaman trained me.

Mr.

Seaman told me this, and now I'm trying to take a case and testify against.

Oh, that must be.

Yeah, that must be quite difficult for you as well, with the position that you have in the legal position that you have, as well.

As a rule, I don't take cases against companies.

But that being said, with that background, I had a case again for this bedbug lawyer, and I had a case for him.

And a pregnant woman was living in a rented house.

And because of Being uncomfortable.

Anyone who's listening, who's pregnant, knows sometimes you're uncomfortable.

She sleeps on the sofa.

Right.

And the pest control company got hired to do a bedbug treatment on this house.

And so he sprayed the house.

And he came in on a weekly basis.

He was spraying the house, and he was spraying the entire sofa that this woman was sleeping on.

Oh, God.

Okay, now I know what's happened on the cushions.

And the baby.

The baby was born with serious health defects, serious birth defects.

And the baby lived in the hospital for nine months and never came home.

Died in the hospital.

Wow, that is so sad and shocking.

Against the renter, the landlord, and she also filed a lawsuit against the pest control company.

And so I agonized over whether or not I could take this case on her behalf.

When they told.

When the guy that manages the rentals called in the pest control company and told the technician, this is the trouble you made for me.

Look at what you did.

This is the trouble you made for me, Poisoning this lady's baby.

He went out to his car, got pesticide, said, this isn't dangerous, and he drank it.

He drank the pesticide to show how safe they are.

He died.

No.

Who knows what happened to him.

But I. I talk to some.

I have experts that I.

You know, people.

I talk to people that are my mentors, including Dr. Fishman.

And each.

Each of these guys agree.

This guy is so far outside of the industry and his behavior, what he does, that there's no conflict with me taking this case.

So I took the case against.

Oh, my God.

Because this guy.

Is that a case that you're still on now?

Sometimes you don't know.

Sometimes the cases quietly go off into the distance and you never hear.

Sometimes they're slapping you on the back as you walk out of the courtroom and they go, good job, Doug.

Good job.

If you're a lawyer, then I invite you to consider joining our exclusive legal network on Help Lawyer.

Just send me a message and we will book a time to have a private conversation together.

Doug, let me ask you.

Do you get a great deal of satisfaction in being an expert witness?

Being an expert that you are, do you get a great deal of satisfaction working with the lawyers and working in this to either on point or for defence?

I do.

The real stress comes from sometimes the deadlines.

So they'll call you up and say, oh, we thought we were going to settle this case, but we're not.

And we're going to court in three weeks.

Can you take this case?

And they talked.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

I know exactly the same, because there's a good friend of mine.

He's part of our initiative with experts.

Dr. Alex LeBeau, which I need to put you in touch with, is an expert toxicologist, and he's dealt with pesticides and things as well.

But he told me the same thing, Doug.

He said, you think it's done, or you think you're getting to the end?

And then they hit you with this deadline.

They've decided they're not moving forward.

Then something changes, and they're called up.

They go to deposition.

They're going to trial, and they don't give you the time that you need to get everything and your ducks in a row and your dominoes lined up.

Here's the difference between a forensic entomologist and a toxicologist.

So they say, okay, this thing's going to court in three weeks, and can you take this case?

Then the toxicologist gets the data, gets the medical reports.

It's a snapshot time.

Where he gets is a snapshot in time with me.

They go, doug, this thing's going to court.

Can you take it?

And then they give me two years worth of pest control records and 50 tenants, all of their complaints and all of the history, and he's changed hands three times, and there's gigabytes worth of material, and I got to figure out which landlord.

I have one landlord suing the other landlord suing the other landlord because each one's claiming it's the other guy's fault.

And then they bring me in, and I got to sort all this out.

I got to look through two years of records or three years of records, and I got to do this in three weeks.

Actually, two weeks.

Because before you go to trial, they want to depose you.

I know.

Yeah.

You get the deposition before the trial.

Five days.

Five days before the trial, you have the deposition.

So you really only have two weeks to look at all this material.

And you're looking through the material, and you're saying, okay, there's no way you can do it.

There's just no way.

So I. I find a paralegal that knows the material, and I say, what is the critical material I need to look at?

And I disclose this in my deposition.

I didn't look at this.

I would have.

They say, well, would you have liked to see all that?

But anything I say that might be disparaging on my client doesn't help my client's case.

I can't say, well, they gave me all this stuff at the last minute, right?

Yeah.

You can't see that.

I can't put anything in writing, I can't say anything in public that would be disparaging to my client.

I'm supposed to.

And you can't go through 4 gigabytes of stuff and all the data and write your report in two weeks when, how do you, I mean.

Well, I.

Can you get, can you get it postponed or anything like that?

Well, I have very little authority to get anything done.

I'm just a lowly entomologist.

But what I've done is I just hired another board certified entomologist and when I get the two years worth of, of pest control records, I give them to him and I say go through this, put this in a spreadsheet, give me the data from these, these things.

Because I don't have time to go through them all.

I want to find, look for this, I want to look for this, I want to look for this.

These two units are the important units.

I need to know anything for the units above, below, to the left, to the right, anything that might affect these units.

Now it's not as good as middle myself, but it's a way for me to get through all this stuff.

It's a way for you to cope with it.

I go through all the pleadings, I go through the depositions, you know, I can get through that, that stuff.

But, but I give a third of my material to my assistant.

I bill his time and I give a, you know, he doesn't, I don't bill his time like my time.

But at the same time he's learning, he's learning I'm getting what I need out of this stuff.

And, and the biggest problem I have now is AI.

So a lot of attorneys, they, they love this AI, they go, this is the greatest since I know.

And they, and they pull up the stuff and they give it to me and then I look at the source material and the source material is a pest control company's website and I go, but that's not, I can't use that as source material.

It's not a university, it's not a study.

That's the problem with AI is AI is just taking the data that humans have put in and it's just scraping that data.

It's not necessarily what's not online.

No.

Well, it's not prioritizing it properly.

It's not saying this comes from a university.

So this is this level and this comes from some woman's blog.

And so her blog is at this level and a pest control company is at this level, it doesn't do that.

It puts everything at the same.

It makes it more of a mess for you to cope with.

You know, they talk about flying spiders and someone's writing about flying spiders.

And so now AI says, oh, yeah, spiders are flying, they got wings, all this other stuff.

But it's crazy.

That's crazy.

Now, ironically, I did have a case with flying spiders, but that's a different story.

Did you really?

Let's, let's talk about that quickly before we finish.

We're coming up to time, but I want to hear about that.

I want to hear about the flying spiders.

Well, this was.

Most of my cases are in California because most of the laws in this country are in California.

So this was a very famous old hotel.

And they have restaurants in the hotel, like you get, like a resort hotel.

And.

Yeah, a hundred.

More than 100 years old.

And in the courtyard of the hotel, there's a restaurant.

And a woman went into this courtyard to have lunch with her friend, and she took off her sweater and put it on the back of a chair.

And there's trees and bushes and all kinds of stuff in this courtyard.

It's very beautiful.

And at the end of lunch, she put her sweater back on and she got bit by a brown widow spider.

And it didn't.

Not a brown recluse, a brown widow.

Right.

And she was a medical person and she lost the use of her left arm.

And the guy that was handling the case, the lawyer that was handling the case for her, had no experience with this kind of case.

Wow.

And here it is.

He's on his way to trial.

He's on his way to trial.

And less than a month before trial, maybe a few weeks before trial, he hires the bedbug lawyer to help him.

And the bedbug lawyer, a week later hires me.

So I have five days to fix this whole case, to figure out what happened.

And the hotel had a history of widow spiders.

History.

It's in their lungs.

So they had notification.

And the spiders, because this was a giant open air courtyard, and I talked about this in trial.

I said, if you ever saw Charlotte's web, the car does the moving and the baby spiders, when they want to leave, they throw web up in the air.

And then the wind catches.

Yeah, they carry on the, they carry on the web.

And the, the air current.

Yeah.

So they, they, they, they call that ballooning.

So spiders, baby spiders balloon and fly around.

Adult spiders don't balloon.

They're too heavy.

So this courtyard, this giant courtyard, acts like a filter filtering These baby spiders out of the air, and they all wind up in the.

And then they grow up in this garden courtyard, but they didn't have adequate control program for the courtyard to address the spiders that were growing up in the courtyard.

And so this lady got bit.

And that was another crazy, crazy story.

But I got to go to court.

And I got to court, and I had a vial about this big, and inside that vial, I had two egg sacks or three egg sacs of brown widow spiders.

And I'm sitting there and I'm saying, there's 150 spiders in this vial right now.

Brown widow spike, triple the woman.

That's how they get in.

That's how easy it is to get them.

So there has to be a.

And you won that case?

Yes and no.

Yeah.

I didn't get a chance to make a full argument.

Neither did this other lawyer.

But the jury went out, and they were deliberating a long time.

So when the jury's deliberating, the lawyers get nervous.

Yeah.

So the defense lawyer went to our lawyer and said, I'll make you a deal.

I'll give you what's called an over under.

So if your client wins.

If your client wins, I don't want to have to pay her more than $3 million.

That's the top.

But if she loses, we're going to give her, I think it was $800,000.

Even if she loses, if you accept this.

Because the other choice is, if we win, it could be millions and millions, and if we lose, it could be nothing.

So our attorney accepts.

Seems like actually a bit of a fair balance.

Well, we lost.

We lost.

And our client only got the 800,000,.

So it's better than nothing.

It's okay.

It covered all of her costs.

She made a little bit of money.

But, you know, I've had cases now.

I had a case, a bedbug case.

We won that case.

The guy.

The guy was.

He got bedbugs at a hotel here in Arizona.

He went to go see his father, who was in the VA hospital.

But the guy had bedbug welts all over his face, and he was bleeding, and the hospital wouldn't let him in.

So he saw his father one time, and then they wouldn't let him back in, and his father died.

And he never got to see his father again.

Sued the hotel, and it went to the jury, and the jury said, you win.

But they awarded Nothing.

They awarded $5,000 was the jury award, which didn't even cover my bill.

And the funny.

The funny thing is the attorney that I was working for was kept saying, what do you charge?

How much do you get paid?

You get paid win or lose, don't you?

I go, yeah, I'm supposed to get paid win or lose.

And I got paid.

But the lawyers didn't get paid.

Wow, that's crazy.

Case where we won, but we.

We got nothing.

And the reason is.

The reason is they didn't like the plaintiff.

The plaintiff was not a nice guy.

He didn't speak well.

He didn't come across well.

They liked what I said, so they didn't like him.

They already made a judgment on him.

But the award was a reflection of the plaintiff.

You never know how these things are going to go.

You never know.

Jeez, that's crazy.

You have to work with what you have to work with.

And you can listen.

It's been.

It's been an absolute pleasure having you on.

I've thoroughly enjoyed this.

The stories are absolutely amazing.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is just fascinating.

You know, if you're out there, if you're a lawyer and you have a case like this anywhere in the continental United States or in Hawaii, then Doug Seaman is your man.

You can get him on his website and you can get him on Help Lawyer because he's one of our.

He's our major only expert entomologist partner.

We may have other people on there, but he's our expert.

Is www.expert entomologist.com.

I said www.experentomologist.com.

Yep.

And this is fascinating.

The stories are amazing.

Doug is going to come back on.

Doug will be hopefully a regular guest with us here on Legal Oil, but also for you lawyers that are out there because of the way that we move forward with our new expert initiative, Doug is going to be teaching a master class for lawyers on expert entomology.

What to look for, how you can work with him.

That will be coming up very soon.

If you are a lawyer, you're part of our network, you're going to get access to that straight away.

If you're not and you're a law firm that wants to come and join us, then you can do that as well.

To get access to Doug, he's going to be doing masterclasses.

He's going to be back.

These stories are fascinating.

Doug, I want to thank you, my friend.

It's been phenomenal having you on.

The stories are amazing.

I can't wait to get the feedback on this.

Give everybody your website again and how they can contact you.

Yeah, you can.

My email is Doug Seaman S E E M A N N. It's on the bottom of the screen.

Dougseaman.comail.com and my website is expertentomologist.com and if you can't get my email there, there's another email.

You just click on that website site and let me know what's going on.

And all the links will be in the show Notes.

Ladies and gentlemen, for you lawyers out there, this is your expert.

Get in touch.

You can always reach me at this site, too.

Absolutely.

Doug, thank you for joining me on Legal Oil.

Can't wait to have you back.

The stories are fascinating.

Thank you once again.

And that web address, ladies and gentlemen, is expertentomologist.com or you just need to search on help lawyer for our expert entomologist partner, Doug Seaman.

God bless.

It's been fun.

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