“The Court agrees that [the experts’] testimonies based on their flawed methodologies should be excluded.” So wrote a federal judge in overturning the $4.7 billion verdict against the NFL in the Sunday Ticket antitrust case. Both experts are economists, and the written opinion goes into some detail about their methodologies.

Thrown for a loss: The judge wrote that one expert’s testimony “was not the product of sound economic methodology” and criticized the other expert’s “multiple distributor” models. “Without the testimonies of [the two experts], no reasonable jury could have found class-wide injury or damages,” the judge wrote. The judge did not order a new trial.

Unreliable testimony is the target of the recently revised Rule 702, the federal rule of evidence regarding testifying experts, which was changed to stress the court’s gatekeeping function. Under Daubert or similar standards, courts should disqualify testifying experts who are not competent or who can’t offer helpful evidence. But the courts were lax in this function and were going more to “weight than admissibility,” that is, just letting the experts testify and then the judge deciding on the weight to give that testimony or deferring that decision to the jury. The changes to Rule 702 became effective this past December. A recent case we covered here illustrates how more experts are being excluded from testifying under the revised rule.

Stay tuned for more commentary on this case, which is In re National Football League’s Sunday Ticket Antitrust Litigation , 2:15-ml-02668, U.S. District Court, Central District of California (Los Angeles), Aug. 1, 2024. The opinion, which just came out at the time of this writing, will appear on the BVLaw platform along with a case digest analysis.

Extra: Economists have the lowest exclusion rate (27%) of the three types of financial experts, according to the “2022 Daubert Study” from PwC. Appraisers had a 38% exclusion rate, and accountants had a 32% rate, the study found.